CM: David, it's been a while since we caught up with you. What have you been up to these past few years? Maister: After a three-year period when I was a little bit out of action due to some problems with sleep apnea, I finally got treated for that medical condition — I have the energy of a teenager now — and decided to reinvigorate my career. Having "been there, done that" on the world travel, my wife and I decided that we'd cut back on the face-to-face consulting work to about a third of what I used to do. I still do enough of it to give me my fulfillment as a performer and as a consultant. But what I decided to do too is that I could try to make my contribution to the world by putting out a lot of my material on the Web and interacting with the world.
What people will see, if they go to my Web site now, is what I hope will be considered at least one of the Web sites near the frontier, with blogs, podcasts, articles, and videos. I'm now writing — here is a promise to myself — a blog a day, a podcast a week, and an article every month. Failing frequently, but trying to keep producing ideas for people to think about.
CM: So has the consulting world beaten a path to Davidmaister.com?Maister: One of the virtues of the Web is that you can put very good tracking on it. The simple truth is that high-level executives do not go to the Web. So, I am not getting managing partners, I am not getting CEOs of corporate companies — I am getting all the junior people inside those companies. So, even though I might try to counter it, there's actually a lot of gossip on the Web around "let's tell you all the things that we hate about our bosses," which I try to work against, but the truth is that most of what's out there is people who are disillusioned and skeptical about even the most eminent firms.
A recent blog of mine, for example, is called, "When did you lose your innocence?" It asks, "When did you discover that the world is not run to quite the standards that your firm would like you to believe?" This became a very vigorous blog, with people telling some scary stories about the fact that most professional businesses nowadays are run in such a way that they beat the idealism out of their people very quickly. I think that this is a missed economic opportunity.
The campaign I'm on is the following analytical conclusion: If everyone coming to work thinks that what we're doing is a scam — that we're basically trying to run up the bills as high as we can, we don't really care about quality, you know, don't tell the client the truth because the client might find out — then my proposition is that you'll get away with that, but it doesn't appear clear to me that this is profit-maximizing behavior. And I still may be one of the idealists who say that in the long run, the people who make the most money are the people with the highest quality. Yet all the response to my blogs and my materials is people saying, "Yeah, we agree with you in principle, but that is not what's happening here."
CM: Is the Web one way of cracking the publishing models?
Maister: Oh, yes. I have now firmly concluded that I will never publish a book again. I consider a book to be a 15th-century to 20th-century artifact. If I were a consultant trying to build a reputation, putting out a book is kind of like swinging for the fences. Furthermore, the average client, the average businessperson, does not read books. We're all too busy to read books. We may buy them, but we don't read them.If you really want to get the attention of an audience, what you do — what I believe I've been trying to do — is that you write an article a month with astounding regularity. You put out an article and you say, Does anybody think this one's interesting? Half of them are not, but you get the audience used to the idea that every single month, there's another set of ideas coming from you or your firm. And then, eventually, they begin to recognize you as someone who is a reliable source of ideas.
CM: When it comes to the Web, what advice do you have for trusted advisers?Maister: One of the most fundamental lessons that I've relearned on the Web is one that my wife taught me, which is that people will find you a lot more interesting and be more willing to help you if you ask for their advice rather than try to help them all the time. So if you really want to build relationships, people do respond to requests for advice.
On my blog, I occasionally put out not blogs where I'm trying to give the world advice, but I ask my audience, "How should I be doing my marketing?" "What strategies should I be pursuing?" And those blogs have the largest numbers of respondents. People really jump in, giving me fabulous guidance about how to build my business. I think that this is a general lesson, by the way, to all consultants out there. When was the last time you asked your clients to tell you how to build your business?
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