Intellectual Superiority
The ultimate status symbol.
When the Budget finally moves into the rear view mirror, we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief as this “Twilight Zone” of seemingly endless speculation will finally be behind us.
Join me on Thursday 31st October at 1pm to celebrate. I’ll be covering the main fallout, and making suggestions as to what steps can be taken off the back of any big changes.
The link to register is here (it’s BYOB).
“It is better to remain silent and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt”.
My Granda1
I was back home last week for a couple of, very pleasant, reasons.
These reasons included watching Our Wee Country thrash that notorious footballing powerhouse Bulgaria 5-0 last Tuesday.
Sadly, flights from Belfast to New York don’t seem to be available yet for Summer 2026…
Before the game I met up with an old mate of mine who is a lawyer2. Because we are now middle aged and wear quarter zip jumpers, talk over a couple of pints turned to work and “what clients actually want”.
A key part of our jobs, as he saw it, was to distil all of the professional knowledge that we have down into the absolute minimum in terms of output - a solution to the client’s problem and nothing else.
Put another way, customers just want a shelf hung up on the wall. They don’t care what drill you use for the job.
But when you are in the business of selling the “invisible”3 (experience and trusted counsel) it can be incredibly tempting to try and show as much tangible work as possible to demonstrate “value for money”.
My mate reckoned that you could see this in the work that more junior solicitors produce for “bigger ticket” clients. More detailed, verbose and arguably all the worse off for it.
By contrast, communicating with a ruthless clarity can feel professionally frightening. After all, it doesn’t look like much effort has gone into writing a one line e-mail.
But time is the most precious commodity that we all have, and communicating succinctly shows a certain respect for the recipient’s time.
Rather than read a sixty page report that exists purely to stroke my own intellectual ego, they want to know what action to take, why, the potential downsides and what it is going to cost them.
This conversation struck a chord with me because I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about the best way of communicating with the folks that I help.
We’ve done a lot of work in changing the reports that we produce to try and show all that we want to show, while clinging religiously to our guiding principle of simplicity.
And yet I sense that there is some way to go. This will come as no surprise if you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, but I can be known to go on a bit.
Large organisations have some advantages versus smaller ones. The obsession with “decision by committee” is not one of them.
The big wealth management firms all have a great number of objectively intelligent people on the books.
However, a decent proportion of these people have egos the size of a small planet. They are also all susceptible to exactly the same behavioural biases that you and I are.
That means that when they all gather to make decisions, the process can become a competition for airtime for each to show how clever they are.
When you already have a Rolex on your wrist and a Range Rover in the garage, the only status symbol becomes the deference of your colleagues. “Bow down to my intellectual might!”
It will probably be no surprise to hear, but this kind of one upmanship won’t often lead to the greatest decision making.
So rather than large organisations becoming more than the sum of their parts, what you end up with (as one of my other mates says) are “diseconomies of scale”.
For the management of these businesses, organising such strongly held views and egos into a coherent direction can be akin to herding cats. Quite often, what the client actually wants is lost in the noise.
Whether I am buying a pair of jeans, hiring a plumber or engaging a lawyer I want a) a good product; b) a reliable service; and c) to pay a fair and clear price.
Do correct me if I’m wrong, but I am guessing that it is exactly the same for people engaging with financial advisers/planners/whatever we are calling ourselves this week.
Delivering on the service promised is the one and only thing that matters. Everything else is just noise. If the customer doesn’t care, neither should I.
Have a great weekend.
A man of few words. He would have loved Tuesday night.
He’s very good too, but don’t tell him I told you that.