In this live conference excerpt, Speaker A argues that advisors must have the courage, honesty, and clarity to withdraw from engagements that jeopardize their reputation and integrity, even at the cost of immediate revenue. He illustrates the point with examples: consultants who stayed with Nokia during its decline, and Eric Yuan’s departure from Webex to found Zoom after his idea was dismissed. The discussion emphasizes that refusing short‑term money can build lifelong client loyalty, signal ethical standards to the broader organization, and attract like‑minded talent. Speaker A also notes that such missionary‑driven category creation is rare because most people avoid constant truth‑telling, which can be uncomfortable. Speaker B interjects briefly, and the conversation ends with a light comment about friends who are overly truthful.
Chapters
However, if the CEO does not do it, you then have to draw a line. This is us as advisors having the courage, honesty, and clarity to say, 'You know what? It's going to cost me some money, but we can't work together because my reputation and integrity is on the line. I am here to serve you, to do the best interest of the company, and I'm going to fire myself and remove myself from the situation because I will not be party to the long line. Nokia had a long line of consultants that were there on their way down. And we have to have the same courage, honesty, and clarity to say, that's not going to be me. And sometimes when you do that, the CEO says, oh, timeout. Wait a minute, Francis, you believe this so strongly that you're going to reject and turn away money in your self-interest. For my sake, you've won a client for life. You know, the moment you ever turn down money from a client, they will always be loyal to you because they know that you have their back in a way that is not just about your own self-interest. And if they say, all right, I accept your, you know, I accept it, I'm bummed, I'm angry with you for bailing on me, but you go do your thing. That's okay too, because what's going to happen is you will save yourself some long-term heartache because you do not want to be part of a Titanic situation, number one. But number 2, the others in the organization are going to see the courageous, honest, clear stand that you took. And someone from that organization will come along, will leave the company and join you and say, let's do this together. Because when you think about all the great categories that have been created, most of them are by missionaries. You think about what we're doing now. I know we're on Airmeet, but you think about Eric Yuan's story at Zoom.. He was the top engineer at Webex, had the idea for Zoom, brought it to them, and they said, 'Eh, I don't think that's really important. I don't think that's a big thing.' What did he do? He left and started it on his own, right? And became, you know, one of the most important people, especially during the pandemic, in terms of impact on the world. And so, it's really this whole kind of courage, honesty, and clarity. It's in short supply. In business in general. Like, people don't like to, you know, like, if everybody went around telling the truth all the time, it would be an unpleasant world. I readily admit that, right?
A little awkward.
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And, you know, we all have friends and family members who, you know, a little bit too much truth too much of the time, right? Yeah.
Can you imagine, uh, Eddie, just to add to that, us walking in the airport 5 years after Nokia. So, let's say we took the bait and we led their strategic planning retreat the way they wanted it. And I know many consultants who tell me, I know my CEOs need game-changing long-term strategy. But they just didn't ask for it. They wanted 2 to 3 years. Can you imagine walking through the airport and you run into that CEO from Nokia and he catches you up and he says, hold on, Francis, didn't you facilitate our retreat 5 years ago? And you say, yeah, yeah, you guys, you only wanted 2, 3 years. And he said, but didn't you know about category design? Couldn't you have helped us? Because now we're in— we have no hope of catching up Apple and the iPhone. We're going out of business. Didn't— couldn't you have taken us through a process to redesign our category? Why didn't you? And inside, do we really want to tell ourselves, well, it's because I lacked courage, honesty, and clarity?
