LEADERSHIP IN ACTION
Closing the Promise Gap
By Larry Hochman

Shakespeare, in Act 3 Scene 2 of his play Corialanus, famously has the character Volumnia say: ‘Action Is Eloquence’. It is often thought the three words ‘I Love You’ are the most profound in the English language. For a leader, whether in a commercial enterprise or indeed in government, Shakespeare’s three words from Corialanus have a much more compelling significance.


We live at a time when people in fact are sick of words, when they are sick of rhetoric, when they are sick of PR spin, when they are sick of purposely contrary ‘talking-head’ instant responses, and when they are especially sick and deeply cynical of promises made and not kept by business leaders and politicians alike. The ever ubiquitous expression ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’ seems to be used now in every country I visit, regardless of the language people speak! This cannot be a positive development in the evolution of communication on the planet.


Wherever we live, we are craving for leaders to stop the flow of words, and to simply deliver. We want the ‘Kabuki’ play-acting to stop. In an age where so much information is meant to be available to leaders about our individual needs, desires, demands and hopes (CRM for heaven’ sake!), why is it that most people believe no one is actually paying attention to what really matters to them?


Nothing threatens the longevity of a relationship more than broken promises, except, of course, lies. Broken promises betray trust; lies multiply the rot. Customers and citizens both now equate broken promises with lies having been told to them. This is a very dangerous development. The ‘Promise Gap’ is widening and is a direct threat to every commercial enterprise and every government. The ‘Promise Gap’ is simply the difference between what leaders say they will do and what actually is done; the difference between action and words. You do not need a complicated business model of any kind (or an MBA) to explain this, nor to understand the impact today of getting this wrong.


Our collective cynicism about business and government is made manifest by this ‘Promise Gap’. The recession has made our cynicism go ‘nuclear’, with a critical-mass of explosive anger and rage at the incompetence and the lies as the global financial system approached meltdown. The capacity of both customers and citizens to punish is now unlimited, and their willingness to do so needs no encouragement. No one reading this article needs any prodding to understand how quickly and to how many people just one of your broken promises can be communicated.



Vigilance over this ‘Promise Gap’ demands that you, as a leader, now become obsessed with under-promising and over-delivering, and that you as a leader also now become obsessed with understanding that you will be judged by your actions not just by your words. You have nowhere to hide. You will be found out and exposed. In my book ‘The Relationship Revolution’ (published by Wiley on April 5th, 2010), I suggest the most successful leaders are not those who simply have the ‘vision thing’. People who read every article in this issue of the magazine can have a ‘rush-of-blood-to-the-head’ feeling of emboldened vision. Unless that is coupled with the ‘courage to take action’, their ‘sugar-like vision high’ will have been truly evanescent. Vision without courage is meaningless.


I have often thought the most important case studies to learn from are those where genius entrepreneurs have boldly taken action to build tangible platforms upon which ongoing success has been constructed. These platforms often fundamentally support a core principle of a specific business model. Durability and longevity are rare commodities in today’s throw-away society. Attention therefore should be paid to the cumulative power of repetitive actions that yield undeniable growth and profit, in particular in industries under threat and wrongly thought to be close to extinction.


Many people thought that the business model of travel agents acting as a third-party distributor of travel product would be soon dead, buried by do-it-yourself on line travel sites, the names of which you will be very familiar with. A less familiar name is a company called Virtuoso, based in Ft. Worth, Texas that has debunked that notion completely. The Virtuoso network is the United State’s largest seller of luxury travel, with annual sales of more than $5.2 billion dollars. It is a network of travel agencies (350 world-wide employing 6,000 travel advisors), supported by 1,600 global travel suppliers. Its ‘Unique Value’ is substantively based on the quality of relationships built between the travel advisors and the travel suppliers that work together in the Virtuoso network.


For the past two decades the leaders of Virtuoso have understood that a strategy based on action, and not on hope, was necessary to continue to build and grow these relationships, at a time when customer demands and expectations about booking travel were undergoing a profound metamorphosis. A yearly event called ‘Travel Mart’ was initiated, that would bring together travel advisors and suppliers for a series of one-to-one meetings. This year, at The Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, 3,500 people from 65 different countries attended ‘Travel Mart’. During this four- day event held in August, 312,000 four-minute appointments were conducted. The commitment to attend this event (in August, and in Las Vegas where it was 106 degrees!) and the remarkable quantitative impact achieved during this event, are tangible examples of ‘Leadership in Action’ and concrete examples of how ‘Value For Life’ is created, value not only for each of the businesses represented, but also for the customers of those businesses. Their businesses are built on the quality of personal relationships, as is every commercial enterprise, everywhere. What actions are you initiating, as a leader, to grow and build relationships on an ongoing basis that is in any way comparable to this exercise? Quoting Virtuoso’s legendary CEO Matthew Upchurch about ‘Travel Mart’: “We come together with a common purpose; to create unique travel experiences for clients, who count on us to manage their most precious and non-renewable asset, their free leisure time”.

In an era when loyalty programmes have become a commodity, in an era when trust and confidence in leaders has collapsed, in an era where there are few monopolies, in an era where customer choice is rampant, it is your actions, and not your words, that will determine your fate. I repeat, people are sick of words. How ironic that is in the so called ‘Information Age’. What we are really sick of are promises made and not kept. The urgency of the economic moment is clear, and no one alone has all the answers. There is, however, one commercial fact-of-life that none of you can deny: your ability to build and maintain successful relationships during and after the recession will be the key to your survival as a leader and the survival of your business. Four hundred year’s later Shakespeare’s words are brilliantly relevant: “Action Is Eloquence”. Indeed.



Larry Hochman is the author of ‘The Relationship Revolution’ (Wiley). Visit www.larryhochman.com  


ACTION: Under-Promise and Over-Deliver