#tdc10: Jonathan Drori: 23 Ways To Completely Screw Up A Relationship With An Investor or Commissioner

As a small organisation you can screw up the relationship in many ways.
23. Go all the way on the first date. When they first hear about you, ask for money.
22. Only engage at the highest levels. Only take executives to meet important people. Minimise links lower down the organisation.
21. Cloak your pitches in buzzwords, jargon and boss-speak. Use words like "notion(s)" (e.g. "we're exploring notions of the self"), "synergies", "solution provider", "appropriate"
20. Don't support the commissioner's aims and, if you do, avoid convincing evidence. Forget Public Service Agreements that all government departments have and don't ever talk about return on capital investment.
19. Don't ask for anything specific, give long menus of things you could do for them and if you do, avoid reasoned arguments.
18. Be sure to include minute detail. Make sure that the first 20-25 minutes of a 30 minute meeting to go into all the detail. Don't talk about the big picture.
17. Confuse useful challenge with being lippy.
16. Never give contacts some tools to persuade others. Avoid practical examples they can understand and easily share with others.

As a large organisation you can also botch the relationship with smaller suppliers
15. Design pilots to test the easy things: scalable, sustainable, replicable are not vital.
14. Develop a handy one-size-fits-all procurement process that works as badly for purchasing a £1.50 bucket or a £1.5m stretch of motorway. Process is what matters, after all. Better still, get a large consultancy to devise the procurement rules. They'll be impartial.
13. Stubbornly misinterpret EU procurement law. Make sure that buying a media service is the same as procuring a bridge.
12. A tender should come as a nice surprise to anyone who might apply. March 24th is a good date to throw up a tender (a week before the end of the financial year) and the second half of August.
11. Frequently introduce surprising new rules, which are tricky to understand.
10. Keep 'em keen - make people jump through as many hoops to make it hard to do business with you. Make sure that preconditions are hard to find, that dresscode is changed on presentation day.
9. Call distant meetings at short notice when working with small companies.
8. Government lawyers always know best. Civil servants are rarely fired for not doing something.

It's also possible to botch both ways
7. Specify everything you're going to do first then get the technologists in. Be smug about your ignorance of everything technology and media. The technology will always work out in the end anyway,
8. Choose bad measures to measure success.
5b. Confuse project-management with editorial vision. Don't take lessons from the media world where an Executive Producer type understands the creative bent and takes the final call when things are a bit crap.
5a. Never do a storyboard together, picture diagrams of who does what when.
4. Never confuse a neat idea with strategy. A strategy in public service world is "I want to build a pyramid". A strategy in the private world is "I want to build a pyramid whose opportunity cost will be x and costs of supply will be y..."

Understanding and communication: no-one understands me
3. Reinforce prejudices - it's reassuring. Act the way people expect you to act.
2. Misjudge the knowledge of your audience. Patrionise, lecture and confuse people at the same time.
1. Try to avoid understanding who your audience is and what it is they really want. Don't try to work out the difference between what they say they want and what they really really want (credit, personal profile, money, power). Ignore how those people work - don't bother finding out about how they live and work.