How Clients Buy

Chapter 16A Chain Is as Strong as Its Weakest LinkUsing the Seven Elements as a Diagnostic Tool

Tom used to bake bread when he was at Great Harvest. He remembers there was something simultaneously loose and tight about a recipe. With bread, you can add cranberries and walnuts, or cracked pepper and parmesan cheese. You can swap out whole wheat flour for rye, and you can substitute molasses for honey. The variations are endless.

At the same time, you need to follow a recipe closely, or you'll end up with a gummy, tasteless mess on your hands. Turns out that while they are platforms for creativity, recipes describe what's both necessary and sufficient to make bread and are, as such, unforgiving. They do four things. They tell the baker which ingredients must be put in the bowl to produce bread. They speak to the order in which those ingredients must be combined, they tell the baker how much of each ingredient to use, and finally they describe the processes—stirring, kneading, proofing, and baking—that must be performed.

Bread, in its simplest form, is made up of five ingredients: flour, yeast, salt, water, and something sweet. This is what business school–types call a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) list of ingredients—each are separate from the other and together they are both complete and necessary. There is no vagueness or overlap between the ingredients. Nothing essential has been left out.

We set out in this book to share the seven elements of how clients ...