I’ve been in professional services for… a long time. It’s been 15 years. And for much of that time, I’d say for the first 12 years or so, “services” wasn’t inspiring. In fact, it was just the opposite. It was deadening.
Speaking for myself and those that I’ve had direct contact with in the professional services industry, “deadening” is a typical experience of the professional services industry. Many of us go home on a Monday evening, almost too tired to do anything else. Then by Friday evening, we’re for sure too tired to do anything but sit on a couch or go to sleep. And so to say that work for us wasn’t inspiring is an understatement.
It wasn’t because of the work itself was boring, simple or just not exciting. I’ve worked on the best of the best. I’ve worked for the best consultancies in town on the most high-profile and coveted projects. The teams I’ve worked with were the best in the industry. The clients themselves were also top notch. So it wasn’t the work. It wasn’t the people. But it was the inherent point of view of services that kills. And that point of view is “get it done on time,” “get it done under budget,” “do more,” “make the client happy,” “just get it done” and most importantly, “make it more profitable!” How inspiring is that? Well for some it may be inspiring but for most is wasn’t. What it felt like is… running on a hamster wheel. Faster, faster, faster. More, more, more.
Now here’s the ironic thing. The industry is called Professional Services. And so we’re supposed to be professionals in providing service. But the point of view I just described produced everything BUT true service or Being of Service.
What I’ve written here is not news to anyone within the industry. But this may be- if you actually be of service, it can be inspiring. Let me give you an example.
This past week, I offered our services to a trusted and valued client (that could no longer afford to pay for our services) for free. Actually, within the past 2 weeks, I’ve done this 3 times. You may be asking “why?” Or in the words of one of the clients that got this offer, “Thanks for the offer – out of curiosity, what’s the rationale?” Well, like I told this client, it was because I still see the opportunity to still be of help (service) and I wasn’t going to let the fact that they didn’t have money to pay us stand in the way. It’s funny. This economic downturn has created an opening, an opportunity to truly be of service. It awakened me to what’s really inspiring about this industry- which is being of help to others. And I’m grateful that the economic downturn reminded me of this. And I’m grateful that our services have been so beneficial to our clients- so much so that I’m willing to continue working for those clients that have been so good to us during the good times whether or not they can pay for us in the bad times.
This model of free services isn’t scalable or sustainable but I’ll do it as long as we can and as long as it continues to inspire us.
March 16th, 2009
I attended a CEOFlow/Nitro.la CEO gathering last Friday at Fina Ventures in Santa Monica, CA. During our conversation, several CEO’s expressed interest in my personal life mission and how I created my company around that mission. So I just emailed them several docs which included My Personal Life Mission. Since they were interested in reading it, I thought others might be interested too. So here it is:
Like everyone I want my life to count. I want my life to be useful. I want my life to have purpose.
Somewhere through my career working on large, high-profile, Fortune 100 software projects, I realized that my work wasn’t contributing to other people’s lives. It wasn’t useful and it definitely didn’t provide me a sense of purpose in life. And so like everyone else, I began my search for “what I wanted to do with my life.”
Luckily, I soon found an answer. Not just any answer but an answer that had longevity; an answer that I was sure was the answer. Through years of asking the question, “What do I want to do with my life?” and getting the same answer back, I made a life commitment. I took a stand for what I was going to do with my life. I made a commitment to Create a World
that Works.
From there, I set out to structure all aspects of my life around this mission. For American men, one of the most critical aspects of our lives is our work (because we typically connect our identity and even our value as a human to our work). So I made sure my job reflected this. And for me, the best way to do this was to create my own company around my mission. My company mission reads, “Lead the industry with project management systems that produce extraordinary teams that produce extraordinary results.” It’s from here that my company
was created.
For us, it’s about transforming how people and teams work together. By transforming the way they do business and how they interact with each other, we see that we can ultimately change how we interact with each other in all areas of our lives. We see the possibility of a world that works. A world where people simply keep their agreements, take responsibility for their own actions and are accountable to each other. Can you imagine a world like that? It may not be world peace, but it’d be damn close. It’d be… wow, just extraordinary.
We can see that this can all work. We can achieve great things if we all work together and believe it can be done. We can do this effortlessly without the back stabbing, politics, second-guessing, domination, manipulation. It can be joyful, effortless and ultimately fulfilling in knowing that you are creating a new reality – a reality where the world fulfills its potential to be fully functioning, people working together to achieve extraordinary things. A World that Works- the way we always knew it could.
And so this is worth it to me. This is worth dedicating my life doing.
A client of ours put it best when she said,
“The principles and philosophies Digital Onion imbues are unique. They definitely like to remember that life is to be enjoyed. They want to make project management better to make
March 16th, 2009
