A week ago, one of the neighbor’s two athletic pit bulls bounded over the three-and-half foot fence in our backyard.

I was on my computer in our dining room facing the window to the backyard. I heard some commotion.

I looked up to see the pit bull with its jaws around the throat of our Golden Retriever. I screamed something forgettable as I darted for the back door, looking for something to club the pit bull. I meant to kill the dog. I grabbed a folder chair sitting against the wall in the kitchen and headed out the door. Our dog Zoey would have been dead in minutes.

Fortunately, just as I bolted through the door, the pit bull’s owner grabbed the collar of her dog. The owner also had hopped the fence in pursuit of her wayward dog.

Then, I realized that our three-and-half-year-old daughter was also in the back yard. She was safe.

I can’t remember another time in my recent past when I’ve been so amped up. Blood from our dog’s lip, eye, and ear streaked her coat and stained our hands.

I stormed back into the house and called 911. The neighbor was fined $25, but the police said, essentially, that unless the pit bull draws blood from a human, not much would happen.

The incident led me to confront the veterinarian who had cared for one of our other dogs, which had died about a year and a half earlier.

Like a Really Bad Habit

By noon of the next day, Zoey’s eye was draining and started to swell. The eye was infected. The pit-bull attack had punctured her left eyelid.  I also realized that I had let Zoey’s rabies and distemper shots lapse.

The reason was because I had been so angry with the veterinarian clinic to which we had taken our dogs for almost 14 years. I had not been to the (or any) clinic since.

When our other golden (Cassidy) died, the doctors did the unforgivable: Instead of telling us the truth (that our dog needed to be put down), they took our money.

The vet recommended keeping Cassidy on IVs in the animal hospital for three days. I picked up the dog at 4, and she died two hours later at 6. The bill was about $650.

I was done with the clinic.

But here I was. I needed a vet to examine Zoey. I had not researched another clinic, and now I was in crisis mode.

Like the compulsion that makes me reach for a second bowl of ice cream, I picked up the phone and made the appointment. To the same veterinarian clinic.

What Telling the Truth Will Get You

On the drive over, I justified to myself why I was off the wagon. I steeled myself, determined I would tell the truth to one of the veterinarians. I’d tell him or her my reason for not being a customer for a year and half.

So, after the vet looked over Zoey, I said, “We haven’t brought Zoey back since Cassidy died.”

No comment. Nothing. Silence. I expected, “Really? Why’s that?”

So I proceeded.

“We brought Cassidy in right before she died,” I said. “You put her on IVs for several days, but when I took her home, we had to call a visiting veterinarian to our house to put her down. I wished you had been more honest with us, instead of taking our money.”

Again, only silence. This time, it was an awkward silence.

The next thing I know, the vet says, “Zoey looks good. You can pick her up in a couple hours.”

That was it.

I took away three principles from that conversation:

1) You can run a business for a long time and not really listen to your clients/customers. And get away with it, contrary to conventional “the customer is always right” wisdom.

2) A long-term customer will often give you several chances to make amends. All you have to do is listen. (And maybe grunt even once to acknowledge the frustration.)

3) I am a slug. Though I would never refer the clinic, I may stay simply because I am a lazy.

(By the way, we now have a baseball bat sitting in the corner by our back door.)

I am a sucker for the referred fly.

That’s fly as in “fly fishing.”

I just returned from my annual fly fishing trip with a friend of more than 30 years. We fished the Lower and Upper Madison, the Missouri, and the Gallatin rivers near Bozeman, Montana.

Every year, I swear that I will not buy any more flies. Of course, the typical fly fisher has hundreds (thousands?)  in his or her vest. At $2 a fly, the excess inventory adds up.

Truth be told, when nymphing (fishing wet flies on the bottom of the river), I rotate between five to 10 flies. Period. Maybe that accounts for my (lack of) success.

Yet, every time I walk into a fly shop, I am suckered by the kid at the counter, usually in his mid-twenties, who recommends a new fly, whether a nymph, streamer or dry.

The conversation goes something like this:

“What are they hitting on?”

“Well, what really works for me is this yak-bug  You can use it as your top fly and dead drift it or strip it across the river.”

A few minutes later, I walk out with two or three yak bugs, plus a couple more flies just for good measure.

I try the new fly. It never really works, and then I switch back to what I know.  The asset also known as my fly vest grows in value. I wonder if Lloyd’s of London would insure it!

The engine of new business

Cold-calling and its first cousin, direct mail, have their hallowed place in the world of marketing, as, now, does social (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc).

But in a world of a million imitations and possibilities, and inane status updates, “What really works for me …” will always be priceless.

It will always make me buy another fly.

Every organization has at least two stories playing out on different planes.

The first is the daily story of landing new customers or clients, and keeping the promises made in the sales process.

It’s a somewhat mundane story. Simple blocking and tackling. Make promises. Deliver.

I liken it to the predictability of TV crime shows. The first movement of every episode begins with a murder. The second movement parades the list of possible suspects. And the one who always looks the most suspicious in this movement is never the criminal.

The third movement is the set of circumstances that lead to solving the crime. Voila!

The Other Narrative

Often, though, there is a larger story, played out on a meta-level. And it’s this narrative that can disrupt the other story.

In both Person of Interest and The Mentalist on CBS, for example, there is not merely one storyline: preventing a murder or solving a murder.

There are two.

The local narrative always is the trouble at hand – solving the crime.

The other, larger narrative creates ongoing tension, which is not fully resolved in individual episodes. The meta-tension ebbs and flows throughout the season.

For example, in The Mentalist, the larger narrative is the ongoing duel between the serial killer Red John, and the main character of the show, Patrick Jane. He is an independent consultant for a fictionalized version of the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Years earlier, Red John allegedly murdered Patrick Jane’s wife and daughter, and Patrick’s work with the CBI is in part a way to work out his grief while also being able to pursue Red John.

The tension is heightened in some episodes when Red John kills again and paints a smiley face in blood at the scene, taunting Patrick.

Red John is the greater evil that drives Patrick to do what he does – and ties together the episodes, even if Red John is not mentioned in an episode.

Red John is invisible. Never seen. And creates another layer of tension to the episodes.

What’s Your Larger Narrative?

For some organizations, the larger narrative creates the wrong kind of tension, disrupting the so-called smaller story.

In fact, the smaller story should be the driving narrative – the customer narrative.

Many of the problems in the customer narrative are solvable with a modicum of strategy and execution.

But when the larger organizational story makes executing on the other story impossible, then most efforts to grow, to stop the bleeding, or to move in a new direction fail.

I suppose the wrong kind of tension is always created when the leader fails to lead in one way or another, and tolerates a culture of fear or sinecure to flourish. That is classic.

But I’ve been wondering about the good kind of tension, which helps to move along the customer narrative. What is that?

You’d have to be Rip Van Winkle not to know that social is changing the cultural river bed in which we boat.

Facebook, Pinterest, Yelp, etc – they are not merely digital platforms where people can express more of their inner selves.

They may symbolize a tectonic shift about how a culture holds a conversation about what it values.

But for many organizations, the takeaways are still mixed. In short, so what?

In recent months, several articles have highlighted the conundrum that many organizations face as they navigate the maturing world of social marketing.

Here is a quick snapshot:

1. Social is not going away. Duh! Do we need yet another article on the strategic importance of social?

2. Social is miserably hard to measure. Double Duh!

HBR Blog Network: http://tinyurl.com/6w7cdtf

3. The big brands are spending big bucks on social yet have little to show for it. No surprise here. They have scale and thus line items for investment in social marketing.

Ad Age: http://tinyurl.com/74opqpj

4. B2C (business to consumer) firms tend to find more immediate success than B2B companies such as professional services. If you’re schlepping pizzas, you’ll have an easier time of it than if you are selling accounting services to CFOs at manufacturing firms.

You really can’t tweet a $3,500 off coupon for tax consulting. Then again …

Wall Street Journal: http://tinyurl.com/6w3whdr

5. Success with social, depending on what is being measured, is also patchy among nonprofits. Every nonprofit wants to unleash the “viral video” (read: Invisible Children).

Good luck with that.

So What?
Much of the work of social is paying attention. That requires paying someone to pay attention, whether you outsource it or staff the position internally.

If you have a CEO who tweets deep thoughts, or has an outsized personality like the founder of, say, Zappos.com, then you can more lightly step into the stream of social culture.

According to the troops on the front lines, though, some currently find the investment not worth the return. And others find that much of social (especially on the dependent web platforms) is simply inappropriate or ineffective, given their customer.

Yet, many see social as mission-critical. Certainly that’s true for Jon Bon Jovi and Lady Gaga. Perhaps for coffee shops and retail outlets. And politicos.

For now, though, one of the primary social metrics is the wires hitting the banks of Facebook and Yelp founders.

Hostile Dependence

In the short story, The Short Happy Life, Ernest Hemingway writes a dark ditty about a wealthy man and his beautiful wife on safari in Africa:

“They had a sound basis for union,” writes Hemingway. “Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for her ever to leave him.”

Not a happy marriage by any stretch. Margot ends up shooting Macomber in the head as he is about to be trampled by an enraged, charging buffalo. Hemingway leaves the reader wondering whether the gunshot was accidental as she was trying to protect her husband from the buffalo. Or on purpose.

The marriage may be a metaphor for how many executives feel about social.

Multifactorial.

It’s an ugly, six syllable word. It does not roll off the tongue. It contorts the mouth even to say it.

Its definition is intuitively obvious: of or pertaining to, or arising through the action of many factors.

In plain English: “It’s more complicated than originally thought.”

Pharmacogenetics for Cro-Magnons

I heard my younger brother Matt, a research oncologist, use the word in a sentence to explain to me why cancer research is so complex. He specializes in pharmacogenetics.

(Which, to my Cro-Magnon brain, sounds awfully close to the word Walgreens, where I pick up my family’s medications. But I digress.)

In genetics, multifactorial refers to the many factors that cause a disease, including the interaction of genes as well as environmental factors.

One of the assumptions of early cancer research was that, ultimately, a single cure (read: drug) would be found. I don’t know that any scientist believes that anymore. Instead, there eventually may be as many drug variations as there are humans. Each human is unique and seems to respond to the toxicity or efficacy of drugs uniquely. There’s no one drug for everyone. It may end up that everyone with cancer needs a Drug for One.

Silver bullet myth

The word is also relevant when thinking about growth.

Just recently, my firm completed a project for a client with the goal of creating a plan to increase attendance at one of its conferences by 20 percent. We looked at retention data for the previous 10 years, conducted an online study of constituents, and then interviewed both recent and long-term attenders. We even located some retention data from a competitor conference.

The results of the research confirmed once again the deep truth that rarely is there “one thing,”  especially for an already successful conference. There was no silver bullet.

Instead, there were several reasons why growth had plateaued. Multifactorial.

Thus, what creates new branches of growth is almost always more complicated than originally thought. It’s a snap if there is only one obvious lever to pull.

But multiple levers create complexity. And a 20 percent increase is a big number.

Generally, marketing can contribute only a little to that big of a bump in growth. Something needs to change fundamentally within the organization for a 20 percent rise in attendance.

Multifactorial.

A few of my friends now have grandchildren. My wife and I have a 3-year-old foster child.

She is in addition to three children of our own, two of them teenagers. We’re exhausted. All the time.

Our foster daughter (I’ll call her “Rose”) has been with us a year and a half. We’d love for Rose to be with us forever. Well, not forever. We’d like her to go to college some day.

But right now, she remains our foster daughter. While the case plays out in the court system.

In the past year and a half, my wife and I have been to court three times. The reason is to assess whether Rose’s mom has made any progress.

Has she taken enough steps in the previous six months to get her children back?

The family story is classic (and tragic) – and  too sordid to detail here.

At least iron your shirt

For the last hearing, our foster care agency prepared a 25-page brief with DCFS (Department of Child and Family Services), which recommended a change in goal:  from “return home” to “permanency.”

That was bad for the mom (and good for us). If the judge approved the change in goal, the case would move towards termination of the mother’s rights.

My sense is that only the mom’s attorney, the public defender, read the brief before walking into the courtroom. Most everyone else seemed to wing it. Or skimmed the brief while waiting for the hearing to start.

Rose’s “guardian ad litem” – the attorney assigned to Rose by the state to act on her behalf – looked as if he had just rolled in from an all-night bender.

Unshaven. Wrinkled shirt and suit. Hole in his suit pants. Rosy cheeks.

“You’re the foster parents of who?” he asked when we walked into the building. He asks the same question every time we see him.

He is a caricature of a lawyer in the social welfare system.

One bright light

My wife and I wished that the public defender for the mom had been Rose’s guardian ad litem.

The public defender had a strategy: He called our agency’s case worker to the stand. He tried to show that she was preventing the mother from success. He then put his client, the mom, on the stand, so she could testify to the agency’s wrongs against her.

Neither the state’s attorney or the guardian ad litem said much during the hearing.  The guardian ad litem made a snide comment about the mom when the judge asked him if he wanted to cross-examine her. He said he didn’t, because the more she opened her mouth, the more he didn’t believe her.

It was a nice touch. As if the mom needed more humiliation.

Dignifying the moment

While I was annoyed with the argument of the public defender during the hearing, I admired that he just didn’t show up. He certainly could have. I suppose you could argue, cynically, it is in his best interest to prolong the case. But at least he was on point.

I can’t remember who said that 80 or 90 percent of life is just showing up. Probably Yogi Berra.

There is something wonderfully ennobling, though, about preparation, even if it is for a losing cause. Even if your client isn’t paying the bill. Even if you graduated at the bottom of your law class.

It’s always a bit tempting to rest on experience. To wing it. But every meeting or opportunity demands at least a modicum of  forethought. Perhaps that’s the only real difference between the top of the class and the bottom.

In spite of Rose’s guardian, the judge changed the goal to permanency.

I have been a fly fisherman for 30-plus years. Even lived in Montana for a couple years and in Colorado for several more.

Yet, I’m still breathlessly average in every aspect of the craft.

As part of my mid-life journey, I’m currently reading Gary Borgor’s, Fishing the Film. I can do better than a C minus, right?

The film is the few molecules of skin that constitute the surface of the stream or body of water.

In general, trout feed on nymphs bouncing along the the bottom of the river. And on emerging insects a few inches below, in, or on the film:  the water’s surface.

Thus, the importance of the film for fly-fishers.

Insects start out as eggs at river’s bottom. As they mature,  they rise to the surface, eventually pushing their way through the film and becoming a full adult that sits on the surface and eventually flies away, if not eaten or crippled. To live for a few hours to mate. And then to die.

A short (unhappy?) life.

Predator’s advantage

Borgor says that the #1 job of a fly-fisher to think like a predator. In the animal kingdom, for example, lions become experts in their prey by watching their movements.

In contrast,  humans read, take a class, gape at a computer screen for a webinar. That’s helpful. But not nearly enough.

The most productive activity is to observe your prey. And thus the problem:  “Unfortunately, humans almost never want to spend time observing,” writes Borgor.

That requires patience. And a genuine interest in the subject.

What a prospect cares about

Borgor’s comment made me think of prospects. The application is not that prospects are prey. They are not. And if you think they are, you have bigger problems.

The takeaway is the importance of more deeply understanding the people who you want to join your cause or service. They don’t think like you. Nor are they thinking about how smart you are. Or that you “deliver results.” Or that your organization is “global.”

After years of meetings, proposals, and presentations, I have concluded that prospects are not thinking of me or my firm at all (at least not in the way I obsess about me!).

They think about themselves. Period.

And the more questions I ask, the more I am able to “observe” them.

A prospect recently paid me an off-handed compliment as we stood up to leave after lunch: “Normally I’m the one doing all the listening,”  he said. “Thanks for letting me talk today.”

Observing can lead to trust.

What would motivate an athlete to commit to your football program?

The son of a friend vacillated between two great choices: a Division 1AA university and small Division 3 college.

The 6′ 5″ high school senior liked the idea of playing for the small college, which recruited him hard. The campus was only an hour away from home, and has a strong academic reputation.

But there are no athletic scholarships at a D3 school. The NCAA prohibits them. And the school gives no quarter. You’re pretty much on the hook for the entire $40K per year, if accepted. That is no small number.

After being courted by several schools, the athlete’s final decision came down to the wire. He chose the larger university, with almost a full ride.

What was your name?

I’m not sure the decision came down to money, however.

When the student visited the D3 school, as part of the recruitment activities, the head football coach met with the athlete and his mom. The coach made an emotional, 20-minute pitch to recruit the player.

The coach recounted his own decision to attend the very same college, some thirty years earlier, relaying his ACT score (really?). The coach trumpeted what a great athlete he (the coach) was in the day. The coach was all about the coach. The rah-rah lost some air when the coach paused during one of his motivational rants and said, “Ryan, right? That’s your name, right? Ryan?”

Apparently, the small college wasn’t a place where everyone knows your name. Ryan’s mom was not impressed.

Size with values

A few weeks later, the family (Dad, Mom, and the player) visited the program at the larger university, which is at least four times bigger than the smaller college.

When the father and mom walked into the athletic facility on campus, without their son in tow (he was at a meeting with the head coach), one of the assistant coaches said, “Oh, there are the Johnson’s. How are you doing?” The assistant greeted both the father and the mother by their first name.

Not only did the coaches know who Ryan was, they immediately recognized the parents and greeted them by name.

I doubt that was by accident. Someone (probably the head coach) had championed the value of community, and the assistant coaches probably spent some time going over photos, learning the faces and names of the parents and their athlete. Their job one was making sure Ryan’s family knew they were part of the Family.

The scholarship no doubt had some bearing on the athlete’s decision, but after listening to his parents, I wonder just how much.

Big isn’t necessarily impersonal, and small isn’t always intimate. It’s always about the values, and the small things that communicate those truths.

How do prospects come to trust a person, product, or firm?

Prospects make what appear to be snap judgments that are not based, necessarily, on the best rational choice for them. It’s more akin to the alchemy of love than to the step-by-step process of solving an algebraic problem. Crassly, it can be likened to how men in a crowded bar crank their heads when a beautiful woman sashays in. There’s a nanosecond of appraisal and then judgment: smokin’ hot!

The emotion is primitive, visceral, and, of course, in this instance, quite shallow—but the impression is often permanent.

Trust is not lust, of course. So the bar analogy may be more provocative than it is instructive. But whatever the science behind the emotion, trust is not purely rational, at least not initially. That is, chemistry precedes performance. Prospects must trust that you deliver results before they’ve experienced it. “The door to trust is opened emotionally and instinctually,” says Bruce Philp, coauthor of The Orange Code. “Only after that is it about performance.” No doubt you have to deliver on what you promise (back to reality), but not initially.

That’s why to prospects, the language of chest-thump-ese is gibberish.

Prospects and existing customers simply don’t think like folks trying to market to them.

I just returned from a trip out West, and of the four legs of the flight there and back, three were delayed. One was due to weather, the other two because of “mechanical failure.”

I wondered if the pilot shared too much information with us when he said, “The motor that runs the flaps is not working properly.” He then explained that generally the motor runs in two speeds, slow and fast, and that the fast was broken. Too much information, I thought. I wanted a new plane.

But soon we were off.

Not minutes after I arrived home, I downloaded my email and got this message from Delta about the delay on the outbound portion of the trip:

“We are very sorry that your flight was delayed on January 23, 2012. Your feedback on this experience is important to us. We ask that you please provide feedback on your experience while at Chicago-O’Hare Intl Airport using the survey at the link below. The survey is between 4 and 12 questions, targeting your specific circumstances, and should only take a couple of minutes to complete. We thank you in advance for your feedback and again offer our deepest apologies for this inconvenience.”

Really? Now I should be inconvenienced to take a survey after I was inconvenienced by the delay?

What will they really learn from survey results? That I was annoyed? That I exhibited the emotion of impatience, then resignation? Despair? What?

What if I were serene? Detached from the inconvenience?

Maybe the airline should just give us all a voucher for our next flight (or simply for our next drink) and call it good. No questions asked. Warm feelings all around.

That’s what a customer thinks.