On listening, before counsel.

A young advisor arrives with frameworks. He has read the books, learned the models, prepared the analyses. He is expected to add value in the first meeting. The fastest path to that expectation is to recommend. The fastest path is also the surest way to recommend the wrong thing.

I learned this from a founder in Lisbon in 2004. He had brought me in to validate a restructuring he had already decided upon. I wrote no recommendations for three weeks. I attended every operations meeting, read every contract from the previous five years, and asked one question of each member of the leadership team: what this company was actually built to do. The answers were not the ones the founder expected.

The deliverable, in the end, was three pages. The conclusion was simple: the restructuring as proposed would separate the company from its real purpose; a narrower and simpler restructuring would not. The founder accepted it. Two years later, the company had grown and the leadership team was still together.

What I learned in those early years was not a framework. It was a discipline. The discipline of withholding the obvious recommendation until the unobvious one becomes available. Of allowing the company to tell you what it is, rather than imposing what it should become.

Twenty years on, the practice continues. The frameworks have grown. The discipline has not changed.

Counsel begins where listening ends.

Carlos Magalhães