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Gun control? Yes.

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(Warning: This is long. And I’m sure I’m going to make myself unpopular with this one.)

I favor gun control. Here’s why: guns kill people. “But wait,” you law abiding gun owners cry, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people!”

Denial is More than Just a River in Egypt

Part of why I find the pro-gun arguments so unpersuasive is that many times, the person spouting them is in obvious denial. They argue about the need to protect themselves, but they’ve never been attacked, and crime stats show they are much safer now than 20 years ago. They say they need the guns for protection against wild animals. That makes sense for those who live in rural areas, but the logic falls down when they “need” dozens of guns or assault rifles. You can only fire one gun at a time to protect yourself against animals. Then they talk about the second amendment. See below for a discussion of that argument. They also say that “if we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.” I say GOOD! See below for why.

But what don’t they say? They never say:

  • I like to pretend I’m Rambo. The fantasy of killing things gives me a rush.
  • I like the feeling of power over other people that my gun gives me.
  • I like the idea I can kill people who disagree with me.

When you have motives that you aren’t willing to say out loud, that’s a good sign that you know those motives aren’t defensible. And while talk of overthrowing a tyrannical government sounds vaguely noble (never mind that the intention of the 2nd amendment was to fight the British when we used militias to fight), motives of liking power and violence are anything but noble.

The discussion I’m happy to have:

I feel powerless and weak, and I’m irrationally scared of everything around me, despite living in the safest time period in human history. I want to be able to kill things in order to feel powerful and safe.”

Great! Let’s talk about that. We might be able to come up with some solutions. But arguments that try to come up with weak, intellectual-sounding arguments without addressing the powerful emotional argument strike me as a near admission that the real reason is too shameful to be legitimate.

(It’s like drug education classes that refuse to discuss the fact that drugs feel good and help people escape from lives they hate. As long as those two very real facts remain unaddressed, users will keep using.)

Guns Are For Defense

The one argument that sounds most persuasive is:

I feel powerless to defend myself, and in my fantasies, owning a gun keeps me safe.

If it weren’t for the statistical observation that guns around the house for self-defense more often end up used for suicide, accidental killings, or murders in a moment of rage, this would be persuasive. The fact is that owning a gun makes you less safe on average. Yes, there are a few exceptional, rare, non-representative cases where a gun is successfully used for defense, but those are dwarfed by the cases where guns do the wrong thing. In most cases, the fantasy that a gun will keep you safe just doesn’t jive with reality.

Even if guns purchased for defense could magically never be used by accident, it still doesn’t justify the need to stockpile guns or buy assault rifles. The chances you’ll be holed up in your house and need a dozen AK-47s to defend yourself seem pretty small.

“Guns Don’t Kill People?” Not according to statistics.

Actually, violent people with guns kill people. If you remove the people from the equation, the chances of death fall tremendously. If you remove the guns from the equation, the chances of death fall tremendously (the Chinese attacker whose attack mirrored the CT attack was armed only with a knife and didn’t manage to kill anyone).

Most gun deaths occur from law-abiding, gun-owning citizens acting in a moment of passion against friends and family. It’s actually THAT group that we have to watch out for. But why would that be true?

The answer involves a slightly obscure kind of statistics called Bayesian statistics. While only a tiny fraction of law-abiding citizens commit murder, there are so many more law-abiding citizens than criminals (yay!) that that tiny fraction outnumbers the criminals using guns.

Here’s a simple example. Assume there are 500,000 law-abiding citizens with guns, and 1% of them commit murder (accidentally or in a crime of passion). Assume there are 20,000 criminals with guns, and 20% of them commit murder.

The murders from law-abiding citizens are 5,000. The murders from criminals are 4,000.

Total murders: 9,000
Percentage caused by law-abiding gun owners: 5/9 = ~ 56%
Percentage cause by criminals: 4/9 = ~44%
The majority of killings come from the law-abiding citizens.

But What About the 2nd Amendment?

I think Lt. Junior Grade Josh Foot responded best to this one. I’m reposting a letter by him I read on Facebook.

From Lieutenant Junior Grade Josh Foot who is currently serving as an Antisubmarine Warfare Officer on USS John S. McCain, DDG-56, :

“My news feed is flooded with people making all kinds of comments about this school shooting. Many are just expressions of sympathy, but there are a lot that fall into one of two other categories, both of which I initially tried to just ignore. So many people are saying these things, though, that I have to say something in response.

The first is the comment, whether said independently or in response to anyone’s attempt to point out the need for legal change regarding gun laws, that “it’s too soon”, or “it’s poor taste to talk politics right now” and “today is about the victims, we can debate later”. If today is too soon, than when, people? This is the same thing everyone said after Columbine, the same thing people said after Virginia Tech, and the same thing people said after the movie theater. When is it not going to be too soon? How about after the next one? In the interest of protecting the future victims, we need to have this conversation now, and if I was a family member of a victim, I would think I’d want some change affected due to these deaths, so that maybe at least somebody else’s life could be saved by this tragedy, instead of just doing nothing to change things and letting it happen again.

The second comment is the tired old rhetoric that the only thing keeping Americans free from government tyranny is our guns, the argument that somehow it’s the knowledge that the Average Joe out there has a rifle in his garage that keeps congress and the president from turning into evil dictators. The first problem with that is that the Second Amendment was written with the idea of using the people to support and defend the government against outside invasion; that’s why it starts with the militia clause.

The second, bigger problem with that argument is that the Second Amendment was written at a time when there was only a tiny gap between military weapons technology and personal weapons used for hunting. I hate to shatter the illusion, people, but your guns won’t protect you from the government anymore. The United States government has the best tanks ever built, the most powerful precision-guided bombs and missiles, jet fighters, aircraft carriers, attack helicopters, warships that could single-handedly conquer small countries. We live in an age where the government has a monopoly on military weapons technology and an overwhelming advantage in terms of monetary resources. Unlike the 18th century when that gap didn’t exist, if the military might of the US government is ever turned against the people nowadays, your guns wouldn’t protect you from anything.

One poster actually brought up Japanese internment camps in WWII and asked what would have happened if every Japanese-American person had had a gun and stood up to the government. Here’s what would have happened: they would have been labeled as traitors and it would have looked like the government was right to put them away, because it would have appeared that they were fighting for Japan, even though that wasn’t the case. In the end we’d have had a bunch of dead Japanese-Americans.

What keeps us free from tyranny in America is the structure of our government and its continued commitment to that founding ideal of freedom. You can’t have a tyranny without an undue amount of power resting in the hands of a single person or very small, united group. The difficulties encountered over every single issue in the past four years ought to make everybody rest assured that Congress is not a small or united group and the President is in no danger of having too much power. The government’s very design protects us from it; that’s the brilliant move that the founding fathers made to protect us from internal tyranny. The reason they gave us guns was to protect us from an outside invader bringing tyranny to our shores. Now that we have a professional, standing military to do that, guns are making no meaningful contribution to the protection of our freedom.

As a member of that military, willing to give my life if necessary to protect that freedom and protect American lives from the wolves outside the gates, it breaks my heart to see the people inside the gates continually killing each other and doing nothing to stop it, because it’s always “too soon to talk about politics”.

In Summary

In short, I support gun control. I won’t go into details about when I think guns are permissible and useful. Those are details that can be hashed out. But until the pro-gun lobby confronts the facts, it’s hard for me to understand why their opinion should be given much weight (other than because they have lots of money). Guns kill people. Most gun violence is committed by the law-abiding portion of gun owners. Basic, animal, fear-driven urges drive gun ownership as much as (or more than) carefully-considered, data-supported logic. A refusal to discuss those facts shows that someone is arguing from a place of irrational, knee-jerk, emotion-filled, fear-driven responses. And when I think about who we should entrust with guns, irrational, knee-jerk, emotion-filled, fear-driven people are not high on the list.

An apology: 8 Secrets of Success

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In my post about Richard St. John’s TED talk, I critiqued his research methodology and spent the entire post pointing out flaws. I was wrong. He has since contacted me and pointed out that my assumptions about his research were incorrect. Indeed, he did his research correctly. I did not do mine correctly.

If you check out the post on Eight Secrets of Success, my points still hold for a significant amount of the success literature out there in the world. But not Richard’s. His research was solid and I apologize sincerely for assuming otherwise.

Perhaps we’ve found a ninth law of success: research!

Business, Finance, and Jobs

The economy looms large in this year’s Presidential race. Romney is portraying himself as a Harvard MBA businessman who can bring fiscal responsibility to the nation and restart the ecomony.

There are three concepts that most people don’t seem to understand. I’m hoping this will clarify them.

Business

Business is the activity of developing a product, finding a market, and bringing that product to that market. If a business can sell the product for more than it costs to manufacture and deliver the product, the business makes a profit. If a business spends more than it can make on a product, it loses money and eventually goes bankrupt.

Finance

Finance is the activity of buying and selling money. Banks are financial institutions. Creating loans, packaging the loans into (ironically named) securities that can be bought and sold, and redirecting the flow of money are all finance activities.

Finance does not produce anything directly. Indeed, finance deals in a commodity product (cash). Financial firms are paid by facilitating the exchange of money between two other parties, and being paid as a percentage of the transaction.

After a financial transaction, money that was previous available to produce goods, employ workers, and create tangible products and services is no longer available to the businesses that do those thing. It’s been taken out of the system into the coffers of the financial firm in the form of transaction costs.

(And indeed, there are some actual costs associated with paying the salaries of the bankers who do due diligence, who structure the deals, and who fill out all the necessary paperwork. The percentage-of-transaction-based compensation provides them rewards proportional to the value others have created, not proportional to the work they’ve actually done.)

Business Doesn’t Create Jobs

The misconception everyone seems to have is that businesses create jobs. That’s true in the sense that business provides the mechanism for people to contribute to making goods and services. But businesses don’t create jobs.

A good businessperson tries to reduce costs and run as efficiently as possible. That’s why automation so revolutionized the world—we could do more work with far fewer people. That’s why businesses pursue productivity, so they can scale up their production faster than they need to scale up their headcount.

Any businessperson who is acting in the interest of the bottom line should be trying to slow job growth or actively shed jobs within their company.

Jobs are created when a business experiences so much demand that it has no choice except to hire more people to cope with the demand. The demand drives the business to create more jobs.

Someone with the business experience of presiding over a growing business does not know how to create jobs; they know how to create demand for their specific products and services. This is a great skill for growing an individual business.

Growing a business isn’t the same as growing an economy. As Apple grows demand for its products, it grows demand in no small part by taking business away from its competitors. Apple does well, but Microsoft does less well that it otherwise would. Getting one business to do better is not the same thing at all as growing an overall economy so everyone does better.

Finance Isn’t The Same as Business

Finance skills have to do with sales and deal structure, not with making the people, process, logistics, and marketing decisions that build a business capable of mass production of goods or services. In fact, since financial firms are rewarded as a percentage of other people’s value, the best-run firms from a business perspective can increase their profits by simply seeking out higher-value transaction that require the same amount of work to carry out as lower-value transactions.

The skills needed to put together a money-capturing financial transaction that buys and sells businesses simply have very little to do with the skills needed to build and run the businesses being bought and sold.

It’s possible that in a large-enough financial services firm, the managers must develop business skill with respect to managing the analysts and bankers who put together the transactions.

We Want Jobs!

What most Americans are worried about is job creation. They’re asking “will I be able to make a living and get paid a fair and decent wage?”

That depends on the ability to build the economy overall. To return to the Apple/Microsoft example, what’s needed is for both Apple and Microsoft to grow (along with gazillions of small entrepreneurial businesses, which is where most new jobs get added to the economy).

Stimulating an overall economy is an enormously complicated task. It involves establishing the rules and regulations of business to create a playing field for businesses to compete. Urban planning, architecture, public works projects, and so on, are the province of economic development.

Even if you have the right infrastructure and resources all lined up, you need to get consumers to demand products. Once they demand enough products, businesses will have to hire to meet demand, and the economy revs back up to life. You need both the infrastructure and the demand to get the economy moving.

There are different economic theories on how to kick start consumer demand. It’s way beyond the scope of this article to discuss them. Suffice to say that there are many factors that may be keeping people from spending money: too much personal debt, insecurity about the future, limited earning potential caused by lack of marketable skills, etc. As such, stimulating demand may require approaches that address all of these things.

Neither Candidate Knowns How to Create Jobs

Which candidate will be able to create conditions that create jobs? I have no idea.

What I can say is that neither candidate has experience that inspires confidence in me.

Romney? I’m Not Confident.

Romney earned his money in finance, not in business. He bought and sold businesses, using fancy borrowing techniques to get his money out while saddling the businesses with vast amounts of debt. That isn’t a recipe for job creation.

To the extent that he has direct business experience, he hired and managed people at Bain Capital. But growing a single business isn’t the same as creating conditions for businesses across the board to do better. And if once considers the collateral damage of the debt Bain Capital imposed on the companies it bought and sold, it’s not at all clear that the company is successful from a societal point of view (which is the point of view a President needs to take).

Furthermore, the statements he’s made about reducing taxes, raising military spending, etc., simply don’t add up math-wise.

Romney’s time as Governor in Massachusetts may provide clues to his ability to stimulate an economy, except (a) it’s unclear that a Governor actually does much to influence a State’s economy, and (b) under Romney, Massachusetts did reasonably well in absolute terms, but quite poorly relative to the rest of the country. (In other words, the overall economy seemed to be improving, but Massachusetts improved less than other states. If we do decide that a Governor makes a difference, Romney significantly underperformed other Governors.)

Obama? I’m Not Confident.

Obama’s experience has been in community organizing, not economic development. He is a smart man, and may have a grasp of economic principles that doesn’t come through when he is speaking to a national audience. I’ve been singularly unimpressed with his choice of advisors and equally unimpressed with his reaction to the 2008 crash, which has been to change nothing structurally to insure that it doesn’t happen again.

Congress Won’t Do it

Even if the President has a wonderful plan, remember that it’s Congress that has to adopt the plan. Given the current state of the legislature, it’s hard to imagine enough bipartisan sentiment to pass even the most perfect economic recovery plan.

In summary:

  • Business, finance, and economic development are different. Expertise in one doesn’t translate to the others.
  • Romney’s experience is in finance. Obama’s is in community organizing and law. Neither has much experience in business, and even if they did, it’s not clear business experience is relevant to overall job creation.
  • Romney’s economic track record in Massachusetts was underwhelming, but since Governors have little effect on a state’s economy, that may mean nothing.
  • The economy has improved under Obama by many measures, though I don’t get the impression he really has much of a theory as to how to really get things moving again.

Customer acquisition via poor service

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I’m curious. I’ve noticed some web sites, stores, etc. try to gain or retain customers by providing bad service. They hide their prices so you have to start the purchase process to discover pricing (just try finding out how much it costs to make 10 color copies at Fedex/Kinkos. I dare you.). Some web sites don’t have a cancel-my-membership button that’s easy to find and don’t give a customer service number. I’ve had magazines ask that I cancel my subscription in writing.

Do these tactics work? Hiding prices makes me less likely to use a site. Making membership hard to cancel doesn’t stop me from canceling, but it DOES convince me never to come back if I was canceling for a reason that might have been temporary.

How about you? Do you find these things actually work on you, or do you rebel against them? Or do you not even notice?

Venture Moments of Truth

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As ventures grow and develop, the challenges they present change. Often change is sudden rather than gradual. These sudden changes require a shift in the way the company and/or the top managers do business. These are times when coaching can be most valuable.

The one-room shop. In a one-room company, even if the room is a 60-person room, communication is informal and universal. Roles can be amorphous, with anyone pitching in to help with whatever needs doing.

The first hire. With your first employee, you become a manager. Decisions must now be made taking the employee into account. Confidentiality and access to information get raised as issues. Delegation, clear communication, evaluating, and motivating your employee become necessary skills.

The first firing. It happens. And it isn’t pleasant. It also sends a strong message to everyone who is left. With the first firing, everyone will realize—really realize—that you are the boss. Handling the dismissal, handling your reactions to the dismissal, and managing perceptions of the remaining employees become the challenges.

The first customer. The market is now aware of you. You have your first chance to collect real customer feedback. The length and cost of the sales cycle becomes apparent. Your cash flow requirements become more knowable, and the strategy/tactics need to respond. And for the first time, you have to deliver on your promises.

The first lost sale. You have to grapple with whether your product should be changed to meet the market, or whether you just had a bad fit between your product and that one prospect. You may find yourself dealing with how to react appropriately, and how not to take this personally.

The two-room shop. Communication that happened through proximity and casual conversation suddenly stops happening. For the first time, you must explicitly identify communication paths and determine how they will operate. Things that have always worked in the past may not work any longer. You’ll grapple with identifying solutions and separating accountability of the system from accountability of the people.

The first fight. There comes a time when, despite the best of intentions, the founders disagree. Really disagree. This is a time to examine the relationship, and make sure you have a structure for working through conflict.

Money runs out. When the money almost runs out, the venture capitalists and other funding sources may hold your feet to the fire, just because they can. You will encounter issues around negotiating, personal balance, and separating your identity from the business to create as objective an action plan as possible.

Cash flow positive. Survival no longer depends on every cash decision! You can invest surplus in longer term projects. Cultures which have been compromised to save money now have the option of improving their business practices. “Spend as little as possible” was your old imperative. Now, you need a way to decide how to use the surplus cash. Culturally, you have an opportunity to increase integrity in how business is conducted.

Once you have cash, how you pick and choose opportunities to pursue becomes less dependent on pleasing outsiders. You are self-funding and have the option of slowing growth to avoid the need for new outside capital.

The Chaos Point. When the company gets too big for one person to keep on top of everything, chaos can ensue. Organization structure becomes necessary, and managers must shift from getting things done to creating an organization in which others can get things done. Delegation, willingness to give up control, learning to guide and create culture, setting compensation systems, building meaningful feedback systems, and hiring all become critical capabilities.

Outside money. With outside money, you are truly accountable to others. Board meetings take preparation, and the outside money may bring restrictions and new constraints. The personal challenges include balancing your own vision and plans with those of the outsiders. Changes in strategic direction may become dependent on outside approval.

The second Chaos Point. Somewhere between 70 and 100 employees, real business systems become necessary. The numbers just get too big: too many job applicants in the pipeline, too many projects to track, too many purchasing requests, etc. Few employees have the business process analysis skills to put systems in place. Those few who have the skills become overwhelmed as everything important is given to them: “Just this once? You’re the only person who gets things done around here.” Building business systems and training underlings in building systems becomes imperative.

Multiple product lines. Once you move to multiple product lines, issues start to arise around your company’s identity: what do you stand for? Who do you serve? If one line is more profitable than the other, are the managers or salespeople paid differently? Are you a single brand? Multiple brands? Issues of focus, resource allocation, balancing the culture, and accountability become important.

Acquisition. When you’re acquired, the challenges revolve around keeping good people, merging your identity, culture, and product lines with your new parent, and defining roles and career paths that work in the new entity.

IPO: the finish line? As rumors of an IPO begin to spread, comparisons start. Who has how much? Whose options are worth what? Will we be as rich as our friends at e-commerce.com? Suddenly, you are legally required to keep a lot confidential from your employees. Issues of fairness, ethics, trust, and reporting requirements arise within the company. The issues are huge: six-figure tax planning, psychological preparations to become rich (it’s not as easy a transition as most people think), learning to make decisions from a large asset base, examining how priorities change, understanding how to manage friends and family, dealing with the public speaking and stress of a road show, and keeping the company together while all this is happening.

Life goes on…publicly. Whoops. The company iPod and you just realized an IPO is just the beginning, not the end. Early employees, who hold much of the company’s intelligence in their heads, become rich enough to leave. The motivation of “someday we’ll be public” is no longer available. Outside pressure to “manage for quarterly results” begins. Preserving the knowledge and skill base of the company while achieving the forecast numbers become two of the biggest challenges. On a personal level, growth opportunities include learning to manage increased analyst scrutiny and formulating your next set of goals and aspirations.

An executive coach can help during many of the “moments of truth.” When growth is happening so quickly, employees (including founders!) may not have the time to grow into their roles; their roles are changing too fast, and they’re too busy building the business. When roles shift, or unquestioned assumptions and rules suddenly stop working, an executive or advisor can help you through what’s needed structurally, motivationally, or personally-to bring things back on track.

The Truth Can Be a Good Thing, Even in Marketing

I recently finished reading “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty” by Dan Ariely. It’s a fascinating peek into how pervasive dishonesty is in our culture. Dan was looking largely at cheating, but I’m far more concerned about dishonesty in business. Economies only work when people can enter into agreements and trust the other party will deliver. In countries where the trust doesn’t exist, economies don’t flourish. And it’s quite common in corporate life to lie to customers.

Once upon a time, I worked with a rental service that rented widgets to customers. The going rental price for a widget was $10/month. The rental service advertised $3/month rental, far and wide. There was a mandatory $7 “processing fee” with every payment, however. At the end of the day, they were charging $10, just like everybody else. They were just calling 70% of it a “processing fee” instead of “rent.”

My bank used to charge 18% yearly interest for an accidental overdraft on my checking account. Then they started calling it an “overdraft fee,” and hiked it to $35-per-incident. In interest rate terms, for a $20 overdraft that I pay back a month later, this is equivalent to a yearly overdraft loan rate of 2,100%. Yes, that’s two thousand, one hundred percent. If they stated it like that, they would be lynched. But they’ve managed to reword loan interest (which is money you pay for the privilege of borrowing money) as a “fee” instead, thus allowing them to charge unbelievably high interest rates.

And just this week, I ordered a custom birthday present for a friend. I wanted it by Saturday, but the soonest the website said they could get it to me was by next Tuesday, for a $18 expedited shipping fee. Well, it turns out that the Tuesday before, they helpfully sent me the tracking number so I can watch my package travel by ground service to arrive at my doorstep next Tuesday. They produced it in two days, and sent it regular ground shipping. If they’d actually applied the $18 to shipping, the package could have been here overnight by US Express Mail or a Fedex overnight envelope. But they charged me for the overnight shipping and pocketed the difference.

I’m still getting my package on the date I agreed to, so I can’t complain. But the paper trail left by the tracking and order status information makes it clear they were simply padding the calendar time so they could charge me a lot more for shipping, ship it regular mail, and boost their profits.

When you do stuff like this and a customer finds out, they typically do not think, “well, they have to do it because it’s the only way they can have a competitive business model.” Being a very generous man who likes to think the best of people, *I* think that, of course, but my emotions don’t. They say, “I’m never going to trust these people again because they’re trying to rip me off.” Next time I’m deciding who to buy from, guess which reaction will win out?

Don’t be these losers. If you say “I’m not lying exactly. It really is a processing fee,” that’s how you know you’re lying. Denial is the tool you use to do what’s dishonest and feel good about yourself anyway.

Once upon a time, you could get away with pulling the wool over your customers’ eyes. But in these days of greater transparency, and paper trails that reveal how you work, your customers can find out what’s really going on. And when you lie, it’s very hard to regain trust. So think hard before you lie. If you get caught, it can totally backfire. And besides, I was raised to believe that lying was wrong. If you can only succeed by lowering your moral and ethical standards, that sounds like a very narrow definition of success.

Tell your customers the truth. They may surprise you. And if you’re in a business where the truth drives them away, maybe you should find another line of work.

Want to Change a Habit? Enlist People!

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As much as you can adopt systems to help point your life and job in the direction you want, systems fail if you don’t use them. And if you’re like me, that promise to work out 3 days a week has a way of taking back seat to dinner invitations, long hours at work, and dessert-eating contests. Good intentions aren’t enough.

The only thing I have found that consistently helps me change behavior is to set up accountability structures that involve other people. As much as I’m sacrifice my promises to myself on an altar of Oreo ice cream cake, I am much better at keeping promises to others.

Right now I am helping a client make daily progress on an important project just by calling daily to hear one to-do item a day. He feels compelled to choose an item that he can tell me, and our talk is the trigger to get him to take the action.

Do-It-Days are another example–they use group accountability every hour to keep you moving on a single productive day.

If you want to change a behavior, develop a skill, or change a habit, enlist someone else–a co-worker, family member, or friend–to be your accountability partner. Share your goals and progress with them, and have established regular contact around your goals. You’ll find that, in the words of the Beatles, you’ll get by with a little help from your friends.

In Business and Life, Understand *Their* Needs

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I ordered a book from Amazon, gift wrapped for a friend’s birthday. It arrived complete with the little card that had my special message in it. And … Amazon’s logo on the outside. Really? Amazon feels the need to piggyback their branding on my gift? If they offer the service of gift-wrapping, that’s great. That’s wonderful. I even paid $4 for that! But if they want me to provide them with free advertising, piggy-backing on the emotional warmth of my relationship with my friend, they should be paying me. A lot. Because there are some things in life that just aren’t meant to be a business opportunity.

What Amazon is missing here is understanding my needs. I want to create a special, two-way emotional connection between me and a friend. They help by providing the book I’m buying, and wrapping it beautifully. And that’s where their involvement should end. Then when I think of Amazon, I think of them as facilitating what’s really important to me—that connection.

Consider Their Needs, not Yours

When you’re doing something nice for someone, be it providing a solution to a customer, a favor to a friend, or a surprise to a loved one, take a few moments to consider their needs. What do they want in the moment? If your goal is to strengthen your relationship with them, put their needs first. If you’re going to surprise your partner for Valentine’s Day, ask what they would consider romantic. Not what you consider romantic. My idea of romantic music is Blink-182. But if the person I’m romancing prefers a Wagnerian opera, that’s what will be romantic.

Just as considering their needs will create the tighter relationship, ignoring their needs can destroy it. A client wanted to acknowledge a summer intern for a job well done. The intern simply wanted to be in the team photo that was going out to clients at the end of the month. The boss thought an intern didn’t belong in a company photo, and instead gave a beautiful Thank You card. Unfortunately, to the intern, inclusion in the picture meant appreciation. Without that inclusion, the Thank You came across as an empty gesture. Rewarding someone means choosing a reward that they value.

Take a moment now to think about the important people in your work and life. What kind of relationship do you want with them? How do you want them to feel about you? What have you done to engender those feelings? Satisfy their needs and you’re on your way to a long, loyal relationship.