Your Gain is My Gain

I remember once being asked to interview a candidate for the consulting company where I was working. Seemed like a nice enough person for most of the interview until he made a comment that I nearly choked on. He said that he disliked his current engagement because the client forced him to reveal his knowledge about the software system. He would rather keep it a secret, evidently, because the fewer people who knew how to configure the software and navigate it complexities the greater his market worth and career opportunities.

I was reminded of this story today when I read a good post by Rich Karlgaard about Zero-Sum thinking and its current popularity in some quarters. It really exists everywhere and all of us suffer from some form of the disease, mild or extreme. It is the result or our human condition I suppose; the world does not have the capacity to meet all of our expectations so we sometimes believe that we don't have what we want because someone else has taken some. The poor guy above thought that there was a limited world of opportunity so in order to protect himself he had to hoard his knowledge. The only limits to opportunity are the ones he created himself.

In software implementation, training, consulting the most important thing is to spread the knowledge. The more others learn during the implementation the greater the benefit and the greater the relationship ongoing. I have been in implementations, NetSuite or Oracle or some other package, and have started to learn from my client at some point. This is not a failure, but a success. It means that you have imparted enough knowledge and problem solving skills to the client that they can now turn around and teach you something new. No more zero-sum thinking, please!