"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." — Upton Sinclair
I was in a meeting once, in a company that had its mission statement on the wall behind the reception desk. Printed large, in a clean font. Something about building organisations people actually want to work in. I had believed it when I read it. It was part of why I had said yes.
The room held about eight people. A founder. A couple of investors who had started asking harder questions. A commercial director who had been in the role long enough to look tired. They had brought me in to help them think about growth. That is what they said. Growth.
The mood was the particular kind of optimism that covers a quiet fear. Everyone knew the numbers. Nobody wanted to be the first to say it plainly.
The meeting was about why people were not staying.
Specifically: customers were leaving after about eighteen months. Consistently. They would arrive with a problem, work with the product, and then cancel. Not because the product had failed. Because it had worked.
The question on the table was not: how do we help more people get to that point faster?
The question was: how do we extend the time between arrival and exit?
The more they talked, the clearer it became. Growth was the word on the invitation. The meeting was about something else.
Nobody mentioned the wall.
I have thought about that meeting many times since. Not because it was unusual. Because it was completely ordinary. Everyone in the room was intelligent and working hard toward a goal that was the structural opposite of the one on the wall.
Nobody had decided to betray the mission. The mission had just become irrelevant to what was actually being measured.
This is what I think of as the great misalignment.
Not fraud. Not cynicism. Something quieter and more structural than either of those things.
It goes like this. You build something to solve a problem. The solution works. People pay for it, feel better, and move on.
This turns out to be a poor business model.
So without quite deciding to, you start optimising for keeping people rather than helping them finish. The algorithm that was supposed to get you somewhere gets quietly retuned. Not to move the destination further away. That would be obvious. Instead, it makes you feel perpetually close. Close enough that you have come too far to stop now. Close enough that stopping would mean all of that was for nothing. The gap between where you are and where you want to be never quite closes. It simply moves.
At some point, without anyone quite deciding, the experts brought in to help customers solve their problems are replaced by experts brought in to make sure customers do not stop before they do.
I have been one of those experts. There are projects I could have handed back in six months. I structured them to last a year. The client was not harmed. But the relationship outlasted the need — and I knew it, and I kept sending the invoice.
The honest version of most business models is shorter than the one in the brochure.
We make more money if you do not fully succeed.
Not because we want you to fail. But because your full success, taken to its conclusion, ends the relationship. And the relationship is what we are actually selling.
The gym that is financially dependent on members who do not come. The professional service that could hand the work back in six months, but structures engagements to make that feel premature.
There are projects I could have moved faster. Relationships I extended beyond the point where the client needed me, into the comfortable territory where they simply expected me. The invoice kept coming. The work kept being useful. And somewhere in there, useful and necessary had quietly become the same word.
They are not the same word.
I am not arguing against growth. Most of my work is helping companies and teams grow. I understand quarterly numbers and investor expectations and the weight of a payroll. Growth is not the enemy of integrity. The question is only how you grow.
The client whose problem you have fully solved is not a lost customer. They are standing at the door of the next one. Scale to more people with the same problem, better and faster. Build what people need after the first problem is solved. Go wider into the market, or go deeper into the relationship. Follow the real problem rather than manufacture a dependency around the original one.
There is always a next chapter. The only model that does not work long-term is the one that needs the problem to stay unsolved.
Every pitch I have ever heard starts the same way. Here is the problem. Here is how serious it is. Here is why it has to be solved.
It is worth noticing, then, the small shifts in what the room is actually talking about. The first shift is from the customer's problem to our retention rate and the bonuses tied to it. The second is quieter: from what the customer needs to what the investors need to hear. By the time both have happened, an alarm should be going off somewhere in the building. Something has changed. And it is usually not the product.
Mission statements do not change organisations.
Business models do.
What would happen to Tinder's stock price if all their users found the love of their life?
Further reading:
- This is Marketing — Seth Godin. Godin's argument is simple: the best marketing serves people rather than extracts from them. Not manufactured need. Not manipulation. Genuine service to a real problem. He has been making that case for thirty years. The companies that listened are still here.
- The Infinite Game — Simon Sinek. About the difference between building for the next quarter and building for something that outlasts it. Sinek argues that the companies willing to play the long game do not just last longer. They build differently from the start.