Client Service And David Whyte

In 1994, David Whyte published a book titled The Heart Aroused, Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. I happened to pull it off my bookshelf for the first time in years, and I found a passage that serves as a nice follow up to yesterday's post Client Service And Conversation. Let me just say it's far more poetic and poignant than anything I could write:

"Other people's words may raise from our throats at the drop of a hat...excellence...total quality management...number one...but we struggle to remember the simple character of our own voice. It takes only a modicum of psychological savvy to admit that a corporate culture that constantly repeats the word excellence to itself must still have endless reservoirs of mediocrity on which to draw, and is deathly afraid of facing up to this fact. We open our mouths and too often utter the same phrases and opinions that might be said by a thousand other toilers in a thousand other companies."

Sound familiar? Next time you're wondering why clients/prospects say that all the agency presentations sound the same, think about this quote and find the "simple character of your own voice."