Before I started consulting full-time, I interviewed for a position. Part of the job: cleaning up the mess an outside vendor made. The vendor was tasked with building a database system. Which technically, they did.
But it was a bad system. The quality of the data was poor, filled with duplicates and convoluted arrangements that the vendors themselves seemed barely to understand. When requests were made to fix an issue, the bare minimum was done, often just a band-aid over a larger problem.
I would have assisted in developing an in-house database system that would eventually replace the vendor’s database at some indeterminate point in the future. At minimum, this process would have taken months, during which the actual objectives of the organization would not be met — instead, I would be simply bringing them back to the starting line they were supposed to be at when they purchased services from the vendor.
I’ve seen this multiple times. Outside vendors that do not solve their problems and instead make them worse. Not every outside vendor is like this — I’ve worked with some who do fabulous work. But there is a core, structural problem, which makes this more likely to happen with outside vendors.
The vendor is not embedded in the community. They do not have a vested interest in the mission of the client. The vendor might be a statewide, national, or international entity, of which the client is only one of many. And the people making the deals are rarely the ones implementing the solution — after the initial handshake, the client may never see the vendor again, and instead must interact with intermediaries with a fundamentally different relationship to the product than the salesmen or leaders of the vendor organization.
There is no personal relationship between vendor and client. The vendor does not look the client in the eye, does not run into them at a PTA meeting, does not see them as a whole person, much less the community they serve. The client is abstracted, and so the solution is abstracted in turn. The vendor faces no social repercussions for turning in a bad product
In some cases, a vendor can be rewarded for doing a poor job. If the system they create is so convoluted and mysterious that only they know how to use it, the client can’t switch to a new vendor without substantial pain, as in the case of the organization I interviewed for. Yet the poor functioning of the system might only be determined after months or even years of development, at which point the client has grown dependent on that system due to absence of an alternative.
Looking at it from the outside, and seeing only the money exchanging hands, it would appear to be a successful working relationship. But money is not the only currency that matters in a business relationship. Just as important, and often overlooked, is trust. We need to feel that the other party has our interests at heart, even when they are selling something to us. We need to believe that they believe their solution is better than the alternatives. We do not want to do business with someone who, whether through deceit, malpractice, or simple neglect, makes our lives harder. We need to believe that they have our interests beyond the scope of the transaction itself.
Yet if a vendor only interfaces with us through a contract, we don’t have that trust. And if we pursue that vendor due to a lack of viable alternatives, we too often see that lack of trust validated. Even if they deliver on-time and on-budget — and they often don’t — they only fulfill the letter of the contract, not the spirit of it. The result contains the apathy embedded in the working relationship. That’s what I saw in the database I was asked to help replace. It technically existed. It technically functioned. But it was built with the indifference of someone who would never have to use it.
This is not the only model for business.
The better model for business is, ironically, the primary model for most of human history — the embedded community relationship.
Once, if someone wanted a hammer made, they did not meet with a salesman from BlackSmith Incorporated, who then had a lawyer draft up a contract and a middle manager tasked with sending an order to a smith in a separate town with a verbal description of the hammer to be drawn.
Instead, you would simply go to the village blacksmith, ask for a hammer, and he would smith it. If you wanted it differently, you would tell him, and he would adjust. If you came back a second time, he would tailor his smithing to match what he knows about you. If he did a poor job, there were social consequences, not just economic consequences to that. The smith would develop a reputation as a poor worker, word would get around, and another, more enterprising blacksmith could take his place and be accepted by the community. The smith had multiple, interlocking incentives.
Ever since the steel industry migrated elsewhere, Pittsburgh does not employ many blacksmiths. But Pittsburgh still has local businesses and local vendors. People you can run into on the street and ask about their day. When you complain to them about the recent snowfall and how you had to dig your car out of twenty inches of snow, they understand, because they had to do it, too. Just as importantly, when you talk about how your organization impacts the community, that’s the same community they live in. A community that will know who did the work and who didn’t.
That is the model for a healthier community. Not a community in name only, a product merely of people living in the same residential block, whose paths never cross during the workday. A community where their problems are your problems, where their friends know your friends, and where what one of you does affects the community as a whole, and everyone knows it. It’s the difference between a brand you know of, and a person you know.
The solution goes beyond any single business, including my own. It is not something that can be done overnight, but for reasons I’ll discuss in later posts, I don’t think it’s as difficult as it’s necessarily made out to be.
There is a better way. We do not have to keep seeing our communities drifting further and further apart from each other. Nor do we have to resign ourselves to only using tools dredged from an ocean of emails, Zoom calls, and service tickets. They are not two separate problems. They are part of the same solution.
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