Truth

It might be an old copywriter thing, but I can spot a lie based on the length of the explanation. The shorter the headline, the stronger the story. Truth rarely needs explaining.

“Did you eat the last cupcake?” you ask.

“Yes,” replies Gary.

Truth.

“Did you eat the last cupcake?”

“Cupcake? We had cupcakes? Too bad. I would have liked anoth… I mean, a cupcake.”

Not telling the truth to a customer has usually been a sure-fire way to failure. Eventually. Happily, it is a kind of instant karma that has been made massively more instant over the past decade. Once, crappy products with good lies needed actual customer experience to be found out. Then came social media. Then came online influencers, YouTubers, bloggers, unpaid search, and so on to put reviews and opinions in front of customers before they bought. Now AI simply sorts all that on the customer’s behalf, and you’re dead before you can say “final clearance.”

But let’s put aside your relationship with your customer. And I don’t think you’re guilty of any of the above anyway. That said, the question isn’t, “Is my company telling the truth?” It is more so, “Are we promising the same thing we are delivering?”

This tends to ladder up to a more important and difficult discipline: telling yourself the truth.

And the really tough one: “What is the truth?”

Try this exercise. Ask yourself the real reason you are applying effort in an area. Say, a program to increase sales. Are you doing it to address a drop in business, or are you building on a win? If it’s the former, you could be bailing a leaky boat instead of finding the leak.

Leaks come in all shapes and sizes: demographic shifts, external conditions, training, culture, supplier changes, competitive disadvantages, stores that smell funny. That last one, in my humble opinion, is what happened to Starbucks. When they sold coffee and baked goods, they smelled delicious. Then came hot food. Then they smelled like a 7-Eleven. Then they started closing. Other coffee chains might not make better coffee. They just smell that way.

I’m not saying you need to be critical, or, for that matter, paranoid. Nothing ever thrives on fear. You just need to be curious. It’s a good time for truth because we have never lived in a time where there are better ways to generate insights into your markets, products, services, competitors, and a plethora of other truths that reveal leaks or opportunities. Use them. Let go of your ego, corporate, personal, or otherwise, and find your truths. Because they might not set you free, but they will set you back in the right direction.