When you ask practitioners why they retain you, I’ll bet sooner or later they’ll say something like “He/she has such expertise.” It seems to be a normal enough compliment at a glance, right? But let’s be honest here. In the landscape of professional service firms, expertise is such a given. It’s not a benefit. It’s an expectation. And firms that tout their expertise are essentially saying, “Trust us. We can actually perform these services because we’ve been around long enough

Have you ever had a barber or hairstylist you could always count on to do an excellent job and then, one day, you learned that this very person left their barbershop or salon? At that moment, which would you be more likely to do – follow the person who cut your hair to their new place of business or try someone new at the shop you have been using? All things being equal (i.e. the professional isn’t moving on to somewhere completely inconvenient or more expensive), many of us

​ When I was working at SC Johnson, one of my managers had a marvelous way of making hard decisions seem easy. I didn’t always agree with those decisions, but I had to respect her ability to make them consistently and with confidence. One day, I asked her if there was anything special she did in order to work through her toughest decisions. She said that she always asked herself the following four questions: Is it the “right thing” to do for the person / am I being fair to th