A consultant shares two stories of turning rejected projects into major wins by persisting and rescheduling. In one 1993 Chicago case, he chose family over a rushed meeting, rescheduled with the company president, and landed a sizable engagement by proving credibility.
Chapters
First principle here is persist through failure. Persist through failure. You've got to believe. You know, I could have given up on the Valley of Despair and said, well, it doesn't work, let me move on to the next thing. Remember, I just said 35 years I've been working on this story, so I didn't give up on the story. The thing exists. This— that exists. So persist Through failure. Um, and you just brought up, you know, uh, Seinfeld. Comedians fall flat, and, and so they get up and try again. So, so here's the thing: don't blame the story. Is that another tip? Nope, that's still persist through failure. Don't blame— okay, all right. Um, now what happened with that is that 6 months after I rolled off that project and we pitched the work to do org design on the Valley of Despair, they said no. 6 months later, they called back and they said, we want Mosher and 2 other guys to come back, blank check, private jet to drive, to fly to the client site to implement the work because they implemented, and it was in the valley of despair. And they said, we need these guys back to do this. And we said no, because we were all staffed on other projects by then, you know, and, and we were consultants at the time, or managers, and, you know, pulling us off those projects. I, I was actually a consultant, and it's like, so, so the answer was no, blank check, no. So it was a loss, But there was hope. So then the next story that goes down that line is I was on a project in Chicago. This is 1993, 2 years later. Now I'm telling you these sporadic stories throughout, but I'm telling the story throughout these, but these are the cornerstones, the milestones of this thing. So I was on a project in New York, in Chicago. In Chicago, 1993. I was a new manager. It was my first change manager role. So I was— I had a change team. And then on Friday afternoon, the, uh, client partner comes to me and says, we have a meeting scheduled with the president of the company on Monday to talk about change management. And it was like Friday at 3 o'clock. And you guys know a little bit of my story. That was a weekend I was going to go see my kids. I was divorced and I was going to see my kids that weekend. And they knew that. And so I said, well, we have a choice. I either go in cold or we ask to reschedule the meeting. Okay, you guys know I'm a manager. That's not what a manager negotiates with a partner saying we have a president, the president of the company is going to talk about the thing you've been banging the drum for all this time, and you're going to say reschedule the meeting? But it was my kids. And I said no. So that was a non-negotiable. So they asked the president. He said, sure, we can do Tuesday. One of those moments in your career, right? If you just ask, things can move. How often have we not done that and we just like did, you know, somersaults to make something work and we didn't need to? So we rescheduled it to Tuesday lunch. Now rescheduling it to Tuesday lunch reduced the time from 60 minutes to 45 because, you know, you eat and stuff like that. And then it's more informal, so it's not a presentation. You can't have materials at lunch as much, right? You know, so it made it more difficult. We had the meeting. And I did the Valley of Despair with him. At the end of the meeting, he asked, what size of a team do you need? Kind of a blank check kind of thing. How big do you need? What do you, what do you need now? You know, when you build that credibility, it wasn't, you know, and you guys know, and you guys are this way too. It wasn't like, let me roll on 30 change people. You know, there, there, it was like he knew it would be measured. He knew it would be, cuz I, he could trust me. Yeah, so I won that one. That's, that's a decision that was made off of the Valley of Despair. So now it's the right story at the right time. But I remember walking out of that meeting and I remember thinking, can I deliver this story in half the time? I literally remember saying, can I do this in 20 minutes? I did it in 45. Can I do it in 20?
