Overwhelmed by Bulls*!t - What a Waste?

1^st Apr 2007

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by bulls*!t?

I have been feeling overwhelmed by bulls*!t in general for some time now. But rather than rant about the entire panoply of bulls*!t which besets us all in modern society, I thought I would focus on one specific manifestation: 'the bullshinstitute'.

There is a reason for this specific focus.

I have just been 'told' that I am required to join an institute. Those of you who know me well, will know that my being 'told' to do anything is liable to provoke a rant, so if you are pressed for time and want to go to the useful bit, just scroll down to the Michael Neill extract below.

The institute is a remarkably powerful concept in our society. For example, I was once locked out of my hotel during a training course which I was attending in Exeter. It was more of a pub than a hotel really and I did admittedly return quite late in the night, somewhat dishevelled. After several vain and increasingly dangerous attempts to gain entry, I wandered around Exeter all night encountering a variety of unusual people and phenomena, not least striking of which was the 23 old (male) bricklayer who offered to pay me for what I can only describe as the kind of intimate act that is liable to get oneself thrown out of any serious professional institute.

On arriving at my course the following morning, and upon hearing what had transpired, my tutor drove me straight back to the pub and remonstrated with the manager. She was getting nowhere until she announced, 'I run an institute......'

The manager scurried off and came back clutching a fistful of twenty pound notes - substantially more than I had paid for the room - and thrust them into my hands. I was impressed. Institutes are obviously something people take seriously. I even made a half-hearted attempt, thereafter, to set up my own institute. But I was never quite sure what an institute was and so it foundered.

Subsequently, my experience of institutes has been less positive. In fact I was planning to start a campaign against what I call 'bullshinstitutes' when I realised that I would have to ask interested parties to join an 'Institute Against the Propagation of Bulls*!t', or something, and that we would need bucket loads of professional indemnity insurance to protect ourselves in the highly likely event that we upset someone else's institute. I also realised that having to join things is a big part of the more general bulls*!t problem.

Now I have been told that I have to join the Institute of Business Advisers by 'another professional body' of which I am currently a member. I have no doubt that the IBA is an excellent organisation, but I don't like being 'told' to do anything. I am not sure if this other 'professional body' is itself an institute or a bullshinstitute but it does seem to fit my criteria for the latter: it produces vast quantities of paper and e mail communications; it has a labyrinthine code of conduct; it charges me for membership; it regularly threatens to defrock me if I don't do something that I am obliged to do and if I do do something that I am not supposed to do; it seems to act as some kind of guarantor for my professional competence without actually having much idea about what I am capable of; it seems to be in league with several other institutes which appear to do the same, or similar things; it operates restrictive practices.

In all honesty though, I am really not quite sure what you have to do to call yourself an institute.

I mean, is it like being a prostitute? Something where you have to offer up inviolable parts of your body and/or soul in return for financial gain? Surely not!

By the way, there is no truth in the rumour which I am about to spread, that the collective noun for a group of institutes is a 'brothel'.

Quite the contrary, in fact: the Institute of Business Advisers has TWO codes of conduct, so that MUST mean they are respectable.

One of these codes of conduct is for people who have joined and paid their money but who do not practise as business advisers.

Sorry, I'll read you that again: you pay money to join an institute that in some way represents people who provide business advice which in your case, you do not.

Am I missing something? Maybe there are people who love following codes of conduct so much that they will pay money for the privilege.

If you know where these people live and work please can you send me their details because I am thinking of setting up an Institute for People Who Follow Codes of Conduct. It will be extremely expensive, but I am only interested in recruiting the highest calibre of 'Codes of Conduct Followers'.

What I haven't quite worked out yet is whether the 'Institute of Business Advisers' is the same as the 'Institute of Business Consultants', (who apparently used to be called the 'New Institute', presumably because there was an old institute called something else), who are also referred to in the 27 pages of documents I have just received from my 'other professional body', who may or may not, themselves, be an institute, or a 'bullshinstitute.

Of course, the one thing you can guarantee is that the more institutes you get involved with, the more destitute you will become. In addition to being told to join the Institute of Business Advisers, this 'other professional body' also expect me to go on paying them a significant amount of money.

Obviously I could decline.

But not if I want to remain 'accredited'.

'Accreditation' is something that bullshinstitutes have created to give themselves something to do. In the case of my 'professional body' it also seems to mean that I 'may' be referred work. I thought, originally, that it meant checking out whether I am any good at what I am doing, but it seems I am wrong. If I pay up and stick to the code of conduct, which incidentally precludes me from bringing certain standards into 'disrepute', then I might be given some crumbs from the table, although my 'professional body will obviously take around a third of any income generated as their fee for referring me such crumbs in the first place.

Well. I suppose they have to eat too.

The cynic in me suspects that 'bringing the standard into disrepute' means that I am not allowed to ask questions like, 'what do I get out of all this?' or 'what exactly are YOUR credentials for checking my credentials?'

Working with businesses I have developed a pretty strong sense of 'the market'. The concept of 'the marketplace' rarely, if ever coincides with the outlook of the average bullshinstitute. In some cases institutes are clearly quite commercially aware (the admirable Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply comes to mind).

It seems to me that a bullsinstitute, by comparison, is something that gets in the way of accessing the marketplace in order to create a new marketplace for the bullshinstitute in question; a bit like the bully at my old school who used to stand in front of the tuck shop and demand our tuck money before allowing us access to the tuck shop.

Maybe an 'institute' is what, in the good old days of head-banging union bureaucracy, used to be called a 'closed shop'. You know: 'if you want to work, you have to be in my gang'.

In fact, in one of the many documents I was sent by my own 'professional body' this week, it says quite clearly that if I don't want to be a member of 'the Professional Body' then I cannot continue to work as an accredited adviser.

I doubt the legality of this assertion and I will be continuing to work as whatever I want to work as, in the sure and certain knowledge that if the market is happy with the service I provide, it will continue to provide me with work, and if it is not, it won't.

The only 'body' I want to be in is my own, and I only share it with people for whom I hold a deeply intimate regard and concern (which does not include 23 year old, male bricklayers in Exeter or anything I am 'told' to join).

In the 60's and 70's, the more members you had in your union, the more money union bureaucrats could pay themselves and the more power they wielded. (I know, I worked for a union's national headquarters between 1979 and 1982). Of course there were a lot of well meaning and genuine people in unions even then, both amongst the paid officials and the members. But the 'closed shop' system led to a lot of 'fat cats' and abuses of power as well.

Unions themselves these days are much more market-oriented. They compete for members through the quality of services they offer them in terms of education, professional advocacy and intelligent collaboration with employers on the basis of mutual interest and commercial realism, rather than on the basis of political polarisation and corruption.

In the end, they had 'no alternative', to quote their nemesis. 'Closed shops' became illegal.

But has anyone told the bullshinstitutes this?!?

There are undoubtedly many benefits to all of us in having 'institutes' and 'professional bodies', but I think they would all do well to remember that they are there to serve their membership and clients, not to coerce, constrain and exploit them for their own aggrandisement (something most politicians need to learn as well).

There are undoubtedly some well run professional bodies, but when organisations begin to fix the rules to shore up their own institutional needs and aspirations at the expense of their members and stakeholders they bring themselves into disrepute

Every year since I set up my own training consultancy I have been told I have to be a member of this or that.

Every year there is some new 'accreditation' process which will create 'national consistency' and 'professional credibility'.

Worse: these so called 'accreditation processes' all too often seem to be significant 'income-streams' for the bullshinstitutes themselves.

EVEN worse: the 'accreditors' are often of dubious provenance themselves. I was once 'shadowed' by someone who was allegedly my 'mentor', who turned out never to have worked in business and who spent the entire day pumping me for information about how to set up her own business.

The reality is, most people who join, put up with bullshinstitutes, not because they believe in them but because they want to 'network' and meet the 'movers and shakers', or because they don't want to miss the next government funded gravy train. I should not complain really. I have done quite well out of it. I have played the game. But I like to think I have also added value to my clients in the process.

Now, I have decided there are better ways of meeting people. I have also decided that government subsidies (i.e. your taxes), whilst they are a great way to meet willing and warm clients, eventually come with the poisoned chalice of dull-witted bureaucracy, and increasingly desperate attempts at market manipulation centred around a kind of pathetic self-preservation.

I prefer the approach Michael Neill suggests in his excellent newsletter this week. I am taking the liberty of copying this to you, with his obligatory copyright notice.

I don't know for sure, but I doubt if Michael Neill is a member of a bullshinstitute and I am quite sure he has never been dependent on a government subsidy in his entire life. I have decided to whole-heartedly adopt his approach to marketing, rather than creeping around the margins of what is left of government funded business support, like some increasingly institutionalised drug addict.

I hesitated for a while, because his newsletters are so much more succinct and incisive, but this is too good not to share and I am comfortable enough with my own strengths to defer to a greater exponent of such topics:

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MARKETING EXCELLENCE

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"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A client of mine once asked me how I thought she should best spend her marketing budget to get her business to the next level. She had read about numerous programs with marketing and PR gurus who promised to "reveal the secrets" of creating instant results" and "dramatic increases in business" for "special offer" prices ranging from $50 up to $50,000.

After a brief conversation discussing the relative merits and ethics of some of these approaches, I asked her if she offered a great service - if she thought it was a 9 or 10 on a scale from

1 - 10. When she hesitated for as long as she did, I read her the following story from Steve Chandler's wonderful book "The Story of You" (reprinted here with permission):

"How do I promote my book?" a client named Dillon asked me.

"Go write it again," I said.

"How do you mean?"

"Go through your book, sentence by sentence, and write each sentence over again."

"You must be kidding."

"I will tell you the quote from Robert Frost that I have up in my office to remind me to go back and do all my writing over again, once more with feeling."

"What is the quote?"

"Frost said, 'No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.'"

"I have to cry?"

"It would help."

"How?"

"You have put your head into your book, but not your heart. You have not only put your head in it, but you have put your fast-forward, greed-head into it. You are racing forward to the future sales of the book with no care for the poor reader.

There is no gift for the reader if you do this so fast, as part of your rush-rush life of multi-tasking and enforced busy-ness and a longing to live in your own future."

Dillon thought for a moment and then said to me, "Write the whole thing over?"

"At least once," I said.

"Do you have any idea how hard that would be?"

"I do."

In our next session, she told me she had decided to spend a chunk of her marketing budget to do some additional training in her field. She also had generated a list of a dozen or so things she could begin doing immediately to increase the value and quality of her service.

Here's the point:

*In my experience, the key to marketing excellence is less to do with marketing than it is to do with excellence.*

It's not that marketing is completely unnecessary - it's just that when you take the time to do what you do extraordinarily well, a little bit of marketing will go a very long way.

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Today's Experiment:

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1. How good is your product or service on a scale from 1 - 10?

If you're not yet at a 10, what would a 9 look like? What additional skills or services would take you to an 8? 7? 6?

2. Take the next month off from marketing and focus on getting your number up by at least one. You can still tell people about what you have to offer - just take the money, mental energy and creativity you would have been spending on marketing your business and for the next month, pour it into making the business excellent.

3. Find a copy of the children's story "Good Lemonade" and read it. Amazon has some used copies, but you may well be able to find it at your local library.

Have fun, learn heaps, and enjoy developing your mousetrap!

With love,

Michael

PS - If you could identify with the writer in today's tip, please consider joining bestselling author Jennifer Louden and me for a 3-day writer's intensive in the US Virgin Islands this seminar.

For more information, go to:

http://www.writingnaked.org

To find out more about Michael Neill go to http://www.geniuscatalyst.com

I am off for a walk on the beach, before someone turns up to have me committed to an institution. There I will ponder upon how I can improve my products and services to a 9 or 10. Any suggestions would be welcome.

I leave you with the immortal words of Ian Drury:

"I could be the catalyst that sparks the revolution, I could be an inmate in a long term institution....what waste."

Until next week........

A NOTE ABOUT COPYRIGHT:

Basically, I work on 'abundance mentality'. The more I share, the more comes back to me. There a couple of rules I would like you to observe.

You can use the content of these newsletters in any context as long as you display the following statement in the quotes below:

"This material was created and is owned by Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Ltd, except where otherwise indicated. It may be used in any context for any life enhancing purpose provided this message is clearly displayed.

Where the use of this material generates a financial profit for the person or legal entity using it, these persons or legal entities will be responsible for informing Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Limited and will be required to share a reasonable portion of this profit with Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) limited in proportion to the profit generated by the use of the said materials. "