I ran across an article on the Business Week website titled “Should You Manage Your Marriage Like a Business?” which was written by Louis Upkins Jr. and dated December 29, 2009.
He points to the usual dire statistics regarding marriage failure, proposes five business strategies of the sort that you would be likely to find in a textbook for a university business class and then fleshes out how each might be adapted to the marital arena.
The five strategies which Mr. Upkins mentions are:
1. Know your customer.
2. Earn their business every day.
3. Don’t make excuses.
4. Plan for win-win success.
5. Mix business with pleasure.
If you were a business major in college, you’ll recognize those maxims. And even if you had majored in something else, the strategies all have a “common sense” sound to them.
But once you get into the business world – and especially if you become a manager or an executive – you’ll learn that the real world is nowhere near as idealized as this list would make it seem. In other words, they’re usually good ideas if you have the time, budget and support to follow them. But it’s not often these days that you’ll be given sufficient time, budget and support.
“Do more with less!”
Nope, the mantra these days is to “Do more with less!” It’s a catchy slogan, but like most of the other “something for nothing” schemes it’s usually unrealistic. As a result, you are more likely to be having to figure out “What is the least that I can do for this customer, without losing their business altogether?” rather than “How can I do even more for this customer?”
You’ll cut corners because you have to.
For example, if you have twenty accounts and your employer downsizes your group by firing two of your co-workers (and giving their forty accounts to you to manage as well), you couldn’t possibly give sixty accounts the same amount of attention per account as you had been able to do when you had twenty accounts to manage.
“… you’ll juggle them as best you can …”
And so you’ll juggle them as best you can. You’ll pay more attention to the biggest (and prickliest) accounts, of course, but in time you’ll work out how much you can minimize your efforts on each account but still (you hope) keep them as an customer.
It won’t be because you have a poor work ethic. It will be because there will be no other way to make the math work: if you give some accounts extensive and attentive service, there won’t be enough time to give any service at all to some of the others.
“… there aren’t enough hours in the day …”
There simply aren’t enough hours in the day.
Something similar happens in marriage. The amount of time, attention, energy and resources it would take you to do a bang-up job of catering consistently, proactively and fully to all of your wife’s wants and needs is sufficiently large that most guys couldn’t even come close to doing it well without putting their employment in serious jeopardy.
If your employer expects you to “give 110%” and your wife expects you to “give 110%” to her as well, you simply won’t be able to do it.
“… whom do you blow off? …”
If you have a planned activity with your wife tonight but a problem arises at work (and your boss tells you to stay late that evening and resolve the problem), whom do you blow off? Your boss? Your wife? Either way, someone will be disappointed.
So … would your wife rather that you lose your job (by blowing off your boss)? Or would she prefer that the money keep on coming in and instead she can just “rip you a new one” verbally for being such an uncaring jerk?
Oddly enough, I’ve seen more women prefer the second alternative. If you’re earning a hefty paycheck (which she then gets to “help” you spend), that will offset a lot of the neglect which may sometimes result. She’ll still hold it against you (and bring it up every time you and she fight), of course, but despite their crisp invective most women readily grasp the desirability of her man bringing money home every month.
She’ll grumble … but she would have liked the alternative (you being there for her all the time because you lost your job and the paycheck that accompanies it) even less.
“… but this isn’t an ideal world …”
So, like it or not, you’re more likely to end up trying to figure out “what’s the least I can do?” rather than “how can I do even more?” at home, just as you had to at the office. In an ideal world, that wouldn’t be the case … but this isn’t an ideal world.
“Managing customer expectations”
How do most businesses these days handle this real-world dilemma? They do it by what is nowadays referred to as “managing customer expectations”.
After all, “disappointment” represents the gap between what they had expected to get and what they actually end up getting. And therefore, there are two possible ways to narrow that gap: to raise your performance or to lower their expectations. And as you might imagine, businesses are increasingly attracted to the latter technique, as that is the cheaper alternative.
The same realities come into play within marriage. Marital disappointment also reflects the gap between what the partner had expected to get and what that partner actually ended up getting. So, perhaps not surprisingly, a British study a few years back found that the most important factor in predicting marital longevity was that the two parties each had low expectations going into the marriage.
“… the dating process is designed to do the opposite …”
Unfortunately, the whole dating process is designed to do just the opposite.
We’re on our best behavior, we try to impress our dates (by spending money on them at levels which we could not sustain over the longer term) and we hang on their every word. And this sets up the woman’s future expectations of how we will behave once we’re married.
But we’ll not be able to maintain that level of performance over the long term and that is likely to cause much disappointment in her. It makes a lot more sense to manage expectations right from the start of dating. And because many women equate “trying too hard” with desperation (a real turnoff for many women when seen in a man), you’ll often do better anyway when dating if you set the bar lower rather than higher.
“Vexatious client”
There’s another concept which they didn’t cover in business school but which is seen at times in professional firms (such as Big Four accounting firms): vexatious client. That’s an eloquent phrase but all it really means is that some clients are far more trouble than they’re worth.
If a client is breaking laws, falsifying their financial records, abusing your staff members or is otherwise just being a real pain in the butt, it isn’t unusual for a big professional firm to “fire” that client (by resigning from the consulting or audit engagement).
It surprised me a bit the first time I saw the Big Four firm where I was working at the time drop a client for being vexatious, as it seemed odd that a firm would “leave money on the table”. After all, firms are in business to make money and they make great efforts to gain customers.
“… I saw the wisdom of this strategy …”
But after seeing it happen a few times (and seeing just what a pain some clients really were!), I saw the wisdom of this strategy.
I believe that the same logic applies to marriages. Some marriages can’t be saved and more than a few really aren’t worth saving. If your wife really is more trouble than she’s worth (in terms of whatever good times you have together), perhaps it makes more sense to “resign the engagement” there as well?
Stay tuned,
Mack Doppler
