It's not business, it's personal.

Somebody once told me

Anything that matters is always personal. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life picking yourself up off the floor and wondering how you got there, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

The older I became, the sager this advice got. The more I looked at the fortunate and unfortunate things that happened to me privately and professionally the more this theorem proved itself.

Last week, I was asked to justify injecting "the personal" into business. (Naturally, the request came with the usual pessimistic grin that accompanies the anticipation of a coming belly flop.)

It's really a good question. My answer was essentially, because we only do well that which we care about. And we don't care about that which does not affect us. But as workers and providers of benefit to our companies and consumers, we only loan out our Caring. So caring is ours to give or withhold as we choose. And employees and customers do choose. And sometimes it's not Company XYZ. Your company.

And here is where it seems to me companies get it wrong: People care about ideals, not companies or their brands. People care about themselves first. Organizations are just vessels that can embody the good stuff. But organizations, as paper entities, don't acknowledge that in which they can't participate. And for our purposes here, that thing is human emotion.

As to the "belly flop" element of the above answer, well, they didn't throw us out. We'll see if we get their business. We'd like the challenge.

Can you guess it's not a new question around here? Oyy. Of course not. And the ask-and-answer has turned into a pretty interesting library of stories in and of themselves. Bankers play steely-eyed warriors for 15 minutes, then unload like post-traumatic stress survivors. People in the Arts sometimes start out wildly enthusiastic, then realize the conversation maybe isn't gonna be about poking fun at those "corporate drones" but rather, the meaning behind what they, the the cultured, the artistes, do. Ooops. Political groups? For them, we bring tranquilizer guns, and a bat, just in case. C-suiters? One and two at a time, amazingly refreshing. A gaggle of them? Like the focus group from Hell.

Either way, arms stay crossed. Or they uncross. And then someone tells us a story about how customers don't trust them. Or how the field offices seem to affiliate more with clients than HQ and "what's up with that?" Or how the new Blackberried, teched-out-the-wazoo sales force is churning more bodies than before we upgraded them.

At this point, your limb-crossing status is usually an indicator of whom your wry smile is aimed at.

"Okay, maybe you have a point. Now what?"

Simple.

Shift. Or keep on keeping on. As to those two, I don't have an answer to that one. That's one's own job: A real answer for a change, not a sidestep. Can't do that simple, yet hard for some, first step. I can help refine the primary question. And relate it to your business plan. And execute operationally in all kinds of ways once you give an answer, but only once someone has faced up to the choice that drills or fills parallel holes in their ambition and balance sheets. And yes, you CAN quanitfy your yes or no with a choice of metrics - compound annual growth rate, cashflow, or how many more bodies you see in the office after 5:01. But those are surface symptoms of the personal choices management and staff proxies made 3 quarters ago. As are the changed tenor of customer service requests or their downward trend, or the churn of, at least, more interesting and valuable bodies through an office for a change. Each of these are personal, individual benchmarks, I have found, of decision-makers who are trying to say: "We're doing something right."

And it's funny how often "right" seems wrong when measured against the collective standards of our industries; measured against what's done by everybody else. When we follow, and hope, trust maybe, that someone will confuse it for leading. Strangely, this average usually adds up to an insult by our own personal standards of trade: if my tailor or grocer treated me the way our employee just treated that customer in the call I just listened in on--giving me no REAL answers, making me do all the WORK, offering me NO inititative or EMPATHY--I'd change tailors and storm out of the supermarket yesterday.

For a customer, it's always personal, eh? Then they bump into a robot called a business person with comparable Emotional Intellligence to theirs, perhaps more, but with the rudimentary AI endowed by the employee manual and a corporate narrative. It's often an abrupt collision. Soft and hard things doing that are invaribly quite messy and disturbing to the softer participants in the equation. It's why we invented seat belts and air bags. Notice, in that case, the automotive one, that we made the car change, rather than wait for people to evolve their own air bags. In this way, companies are way more adaptible than people. They can change overnight. But not for practical reasons. People, however, are stuck with hard-wired instinct, emotion, DNA and stuff they've been lugging around for millennia. And yet, we are surprised when then don't readily adapt en-masse--change directions, snap!, like pigeons or a shcool of fish--

But what happens when you're your own customer? Consuming your own leadership of your self as well as others? Doouble-ooops.

No, the personal is a key to something bigger: real purpose. That thing between and above the false choice of "people or profit."

The trap comes when entities travel that flat, narrow continuum--a line between points--of profit or people. In that setup, somebody's gotta lose. Or, at least, sombody's going to get less of what they want. Sure, the pendulum swings, but when you're left to those few options what you have are people enduring their particular caring or ideal being out of favor. And people are nothing if not impatient. So the more assertive amongst us will do everything possible to yank that pendulum back their way--the techincal phrase for this is chopping off someone else's legs to make ourselves seem taller.

What a waste of time and energy. The obvious solution, if "yours" or "mine" don't satisfy, is "Ours."

But perhaps that's just another can of worms? If I really care about manufacturing quality, and somebody else really cares about weighted average cost of capital, and our customer really cares about, say, getting healthy food in their baby, that's a whole lot of care flying in a lot of different directions. How do you cobble together an "Ours" out of that?

Find the personal in each and marry them. It is there. The union, I mean. It is always there. If it holds a place in a human world, it belongs there or Darwin would get rid of it. In this way, our psyches and drives, needs and urges are supremely efficient: they serve purposes, there is no waste. Just lack of context, or unwillingness to provide it, to join them. The problems we create for ourselves come when we don't know and look for our "why" or don't know which end to grab on to and tug.

Finding the personal. For business purposes, this is relatively simple, but it requires two admissions that make some people nervous.

1. We are put here on this earth to do "Good." (Ask your Scout Leader or Grandmother if you don't buy that coming from me.)

2. Good is latent in everything, as is "Bad".

Following on the idea that people are loyal to Ideals, the second step is to narrow your library of ideals to a manageable set. In this case, and in my experience, this group numbers about 30 or so character traits or valuations. Short, sweet; remember, the purpose of this is to engender agreement on unifying and ambitious goals. For people. Social animals. Others have lists also...

A Social Manifesto for Social Animals

Chris Carfi at Social Customer Manifesto has an ideal...

THE SOCIAL CUSTOMER MANIFESTO

* I want to have a say.

* I don't want to do business with idiots.

* I want to know when something is wrong, and what you're going to do to fix it.

* I want to help shape things that I'll find useful.

* I want to connect with others who are working on similar problems.

*I don't want to be called by another salesperson. Ever. (Unless they have something useful. Then I want it yesterday.)

* I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours. I don't care if it's the end of your quarter.

* I want to know your selling process.

* I want to tell you when you're screwing up. Conversely, I'm happy to tell you the things that you are doing well. I may even tell you what your competitors are doing.

* I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.

* I want to know what's next. We're in partnership…where should we go?

Very nice. Very. I like that because, well, naturally because it reminded me (especially the last point) of why and what I wrote when asked to describe "What is is a brand..." in the always artificial and soul-crushing way of business "...in 25 words or less."

"What is your definition of a Brand? 25 words or less."

Okay, here's a stab:

Ideals --> Bonds --> Communities. Another word for community is Brand.

[9 words, 2 arrows.]

A brand's job is mobilizing affinity, and assuming leadership of that community--sometimes benignly, sometimes forcefully, but always in service of the shared ideals of the group--company and consumer.

[30 more words.]

In this way, the most effective brands have an almost visionary quality about them. They mirror back to consumers and employees and even competitors an imagined ideal future they often can't enunciate themselves. They guide. They imprint. And that's gold.

[41 more words.]

80 words and 2 arrows. One hopes the first 9 give me permission to offer the next thirty. And then, those 39 have opened the gate to 41 more. If I do the rest right, I may have just found a new friend. Another relationship based on shared ideals—a brand—may have begun.

Now, I have to grow both of us.

Reach out and touch someone. And grow each other.

Last March, about when the above was written (Here or Here), the discussion of Brand in the blogosphere was undergoing what the "meaning of blogging" is today. Words like conversation and authenticity and questions like "what is a conversation?" have arisen since then. If you buy the above selections by Chris or me, the answers to both are very simple: Blogs and (evolving) Brands appeal to the one thing that seems to be in short supply these days: Connection. More precisely, a sort of bio-feedback. A knowledge that "eureka!" somebody thinks like me, or knows my sensibilities, desires and pressure points. They touch a nerve.

So? Well, to use the "bio-feedback" example, when a nerve is struck what's the normal reaction? Depends whether we're talking pleasure or pain, doesn't it? I think so.

The lack of bio-feedback is a synonym for "isolation." For impersonality. In a practical and a metaphorical sense. When I have a good feeling, I want to run to it often, to relate my thanks, tell my friends, or get some more. When I have a bad sensation, pain say, I want to run away from it, to ease it, to name its cause as a warnng to self and others. Well, so far all that action really still only includes me. But as humans, we need to share. Our anger, our joy, our shouts, our accusations, our discoveries. Our feelings. Remember "if a tree fall in the woods?" There you go.

Blogs are a way for individuals to share what they think and know in much the same way that oral stories, Cuneiform type, smoke signals, Gutenberg's press, the pony express, the telegraph, telephone and email all did, each time with incremental benefits approaching the ideal: Free flow of information. Of feeling. But most importantly, that thing caled Moore's Law can be compared to this growth in exponential benefit: Look what bloggers are falling in love with next––Podcasting, via Skype.

Triangulating with blogs, two daughter technologies of the internet that do two things: Take word and thought and turn them into spoken, and therefore, more naturaly self-evolving, feeling dialogue, not the stacatto monologue of blogging. Skype makes real-time shared affinity, shared feeling, the ultimate intent of blogs we'd all agree, possible: Podcasting makes it portable, on demand. It takes the digital personal content and intent of blogs, and makes it practically personal. It's makes it assymetric. It makes it analog. Human.

Goodness me. We're back to where we started with this new-fangled tele-thingy: "Watson! Come in here!" Talking. Sometimes ot learn, sometimes just to be heard, sometimes cause we're lonely or have an idea. To say, "I'm here."

It's always personal. Otherwise, how do I know it's real? That I'm real? That I'm here.