Author: Peter Block

A Short Version of My Misunderstanding of Gestalt

Posted on by Peter Block

In October 2019, Designed Learning marked the 40th anniversary of its founding with a webinar where Peter shared some thoughts on the origins of the company. It all began with a workshop, he said, that was grounded in a simple belief: relationships are decisive. What hasn’t changed over the years is this basic belief that relationships are decisive, not convenient, not rewarded, not comforting. And so it turns out that your ability to engage in honest, authentic relationships has everything to do with business performance.

In this blog post, Peter reflects farther back, into the origins of that simple belief that gave Designed Learning its footing.

My affection for Gestalt began sixty years ago. It took me to a weekend workshop in a barn in New Hope, Pennsylvania. It took me to Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California. Of all the different therapies I explored, it was the most efficient. Brutal, to the point, and absent of analyzing the world, one of my continuing resistances to living.

So it began as a long and personal journey to make sense of my life.

Then it became the foundation of my consulting work in organization development. Whenever I was lost and had no idea what was happening, I would go around the room and ask, “How do you feel? What do you want?” I did it often enough that I wrote a book on consulting that was mostly organized around these questions.

I once told a friend that I felt guilty making a living off of two questions. He said, “What else is there?”

The value of the questions is their power to value experience over intellect. The argument between science and religion is incomplete. What completes the conversation is experience. The existence of God, the empiricism of Science: interesting but inconclusive. What is interesting and conclusive is that if you aspire to act on what you know, this can be found in your own body. This is the ultimate challenge of any therapy, intervention, strategic planning: will you act on what you know? Gestalt is unrelenting on this question.

This is the essence of freedom, of relationship, of a fully lived life. These are central to changing organizational culture. The dominant narrative of system living is that predictability, consistency, and control produce high performance. A childish myth. Mostly they produce fear, isolation, and compliance.

Asking how you feel and what you want, collectively, in a context of support, is the essence of transformation. We learn and shift our thinking and our relationships with others at the citadel of our own experience, put into words in the presence of others.

If you care about transformation, or learning, or creating an organization that delivers on its promise, put best practices aside. Pay no attention to learning from history. Pay no attention to learning from your elders. Or what your precious children taught you. Pay no attention to what gives you bliss, or joy, or letting the ocean remind you of what a small and lucky being you are. These are fine comforts. So are a pillow and socks that fit.

This is not cynicism. It is the expression of faith. Existential faith.

Gestalt for me is an unsentimental version of a life. It demands we accept our own human landscape. That freedom occurs when you understand that no one is watching. That understanding and judgment are the booby prizes. It ends the need for violence in its more subtle forms of self-improvement and trying hard.

Two years ago, at the end of a workshop that I ran which went well, I declared to a participant that this experience was so different, more powerful, than other groups I had led in the company. I said that I wondered why. He said, “Peter, can’t you just enjoy this experience, and stop trying to analyze everything?”

Evidently not.

 

Excerpt by Peter Block from Gestalt Practice: Living and Working in Pursuit of wHolism,” Mary Ann Rainey and Brenda B. Jones, eds. (Faringdon, UK: Libri Publishing, 2019).

Peter Block is an author, consultant and citizen of Cincinnati, Ohio. His work is about empowerment, stewardship, chosen accountability and the reconciliation of community.

Consulting Complexities: Final Thoughts on What to Do

Posted on by Peter Block

The promise of consulting is a commitment to care and to serve. We promise to act in the interest of another, the client. This series of blog posts explored some of the complexities consultants face that interfere with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. With this post, we wind the series up with a few more thoughts on what to do.

Show How Everybody Counts

The whole system is your client. All parts of it need to be supported to learn and to be fully informed. Ensure that the client manager making the decision to hire you is as vulnerable to the effects of the change effort as those at other levels of the organization. If a project begins as a way to control or change others, it will be very difficult to leave this intention behind, regardless of how inclusive and participative the process. Real change has to be chosen; it is a voluntary act. If we are in the business of joining with the top to change others, we have become an agent of top management—and a part of the problem. We have become a stealth operation that will eventually undermine trust and make it harder the next time around.
Ask whether you would be willing for all members of the client organization to be witnesses to the selling and planning conversations you have with the client—a fresh-air test to the promises we make and the plans we develop. Meeting this test would change many conversations. Plus, it would be harder to blame people not in the room and harder to plan for the transformation of others.

Leave It All Behind

Commit yourself to the concept of building capacity. Clients have the capacity to learn and create for themselves the future they thought they needed a consultant to provide. Your job is fundamentally to be an educator, not a problem solver.

You may have to solve problems in the short run, but over time you need to develop ways for people to learn about your expertise. Be a support system for your clients’ self-sufficiency.

And Finally, Forgive

In thinking about these conflicts and paradoxes, forgiveness is required. No one can fully live according to his or her beliefs. That is why we are called humans. In fact that is why, in the first consulting act, God suggested to the serpent that he chat with Eve. By eating the apple, she and Adam lost their paradise and gained their humanity and all the freedom and flaws that go with it.

What we can do with our freedom is tell the truth, at least to ourselves, about the choices we make. If we take business because we need the money, so be it. If we over-promise because that is the only way things will move forward, if we seek too much approval from the top, if we are swept along with a fad and find ourselves mimicking the language of others—all of these are forgivable.

What is hard to forgive is self-delusion and positioning ourselves as a cut above our clients and others who do our work. This is pride and hubris, and it seems to come with our working papers. It is our own awareness and courage to see who we are that enables us to offer the service and care that is the best of the profession.

Consulting Complexities: Some Thoughts on What to Do

Posted on by Peter Block

The promise of consulting is a commitment to care and to serve. We promise to act in the interest of another, the client. This series of blog posts explored some of the complexities consultants face that interfere with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. In this post, we begin to wind up with some thoughts on what to do.

We enter our profession because consulting is the work we want to do. As we succeed, whether as internal or external consultants, the pressure to get ahead pushes our attention from how to deliver quality service to how to build a successful practice. The tension between the two is inevitable. It is a paradox that has no simple answer.

Consulting also carries with it the possibility that customers will project qualities on you that you do not possess. In a sense, the client looks for hope where little exists. Seeking a consultant has an element of seeking a super-someone, be it man or woman. So there is a willingness from the client to demand and expect more than we may be able to offer.

In the face of these complexities, and all those explored earlier, there are some steps, or at least ways of thinking, that will at a minimum raise our consciousness about our contribution to the cynicism and doubt that infect the consulting industry. At best, we may find a way of working where the longing that brought us into the work can be realized.

Say No As Often As You Say Yes

Consultants should make their own decisions on which projects to accept. We should say no to projects as often as we say yes. There are many reasons to back away from business. Clients often want us to treat a symptom. They think training or restructuring will solve their problem, when it will only postpone resolution. Say no when the chemistry between you and the client is not good. Be careful when the client has expectations of you that you cannot fulfill. Say no to a five-dollar solution for a fifty-dollar problem.

Stay True to Your Worth

Stop measuring the success of your internal staff consulting work by the size of your staff, the volume of work you can generate, or the approval rating of top management. If you are an external consultant, don’t judge your practice by the sales volume of your business, return on equity, or margins. Setting high growth targets for your business will force you and others to take marginal business. It will push new services into the marketplace before they are fully developed. Your ambition will also be sensed by the client, and although they might say yes today, they will feel used over time.

Start measuring your work by the optimism and self-sufficiency you leave behind.

Consulting is fundamentally an educational and capacity-building function. You need to be economically self-sufficient, true, but that is not the point. You are successful when the clients feel more accountable for their own system, more able to learn by themselves in the future, more confident and powerful in creating an organization they believe in. These are qualitative measures, but they are knowable if we pay attention.

Grow on Your Own Terms

Accept the fact that the work you have chosen will most likely and appropriately remain a boutique business. Professional practice is the point, not the size of the practice. For external consultants, decide how much money you need to live on and how many days you are willing to work, peg your rates to that equation, and avoid conversations with other consultants in which they will ask how busy and successful you are.

If there is more demand for your services than you can handle, give the business away. Build a network of people who do what you do and whom you respect, and send the business to them. Don’t take a finder’s fee, or talk about mergers and partnerships that are driven by economic opportunity. If this seems bizarre and counter-cultural to you, it means you are on the right track.

Consulting Complexities: Promising Magic

Posted on by Peter Block

This post on how giving our clients what’s popular instead of what works ultimately undermines consulting effectiveness continues our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks to both internal and external consultants––and to their clients––about the tensions between doing what is fashionable and providing genuine service.

Remember reengineering? It is a good example of an idea that became the rage and consultants that made promises to the point they were unsustainable. After a good run, the work fell of its own weight. We might say that the clients did not adequately implement what the consultants recommended, but that argument is too one-sided.

The idea that organizations should be structured according to a customer-driven work process rather than by discipline-driven vertical silos makes sense. It is a way to break up the bureaucracies that made organizations unable to give customers a unique, quick, anytime-anywhere response. As the methodology became more and more popular, it reached a point where whatever change we had in mind was called reengineering. Every department thought it was reengineering itself. I even heard individuals say they were in the process of reengineering themselves. The energy was more about becoming part of a movement than about becoming better. Reengineering became synonymous with restructuring and was sold by the large accounting and consulting firms with promises of a 30 to 50 percent return on the investment.

The bloom was soon off the rose. A large fashion company spent $600 million in consulting fees alone to restructure itself and bring up-to-date information technology to its business. After years of investment, a leader of this company acknowledged publicly that the effort had not been successful and eventually 2,500 employees were reassigned, retired, or laid off to help, in effect, finance the venture.

The dark side of reengineering threatened our whole profession because the promises made to sell the work either were never fulfilled or could finally be achieved only by eliminating jobs on a wide scale. In fact, many of the clients of reengineering projects soon began undoing their efforts because they found the concept unworkable. Some even sued to get their money back.

Reengineering is a good example of two complexities consultants still face: how we take advantage of what is in vogue and how we pursue covert purposes. When an idea is fashionable it becomes, almost by definition, a cosmetic solution. When consultants offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care. If we were strictly a business you would say, “What’s the problem? Customer is always right. We only gave them what they asked for.” Being also a service function, though, means that something more is due to the client.

Clients have a right to expect the consultant to decide whether what the client is willing to buy will deliver what the client really needs. If the client manager asks for a service that will not help, or may even be harmful, then when does the consultant say no and turn away the work? It is a tough thing to do, especially for internal consultants.

The other complexity that doing what is in vogue brings to mind is that consulting risks becoming a form of double-dealing––for example, when force reductions are packaged as organization improvement. In the case of reengineering, who could argue with restructuring for the sake of the customer? Organizations went through a long process of interviews, redesign teams, and extensive selling and training for the new system, when the real net result of the effort was the elimination of jobs with little real change in culture or function.

When I reflect on the complexities consultants face, the most surprising one is the willingness of line managers to follow the fashions and buy what is popular.

Whether it’s core competence, embracing mistakes, Six Sigma or whatever, many of the largest consulting efforts never deliver on their promise. Once the fashion parade begins, though, there is no stopping it, and we consultants participate and profit from it.

Consultants make a living by giving legitimacy to a manager’s efforts to sell an idea internally. Or to play the bad cop in pushing unpopular decisions, rationalizing cutbacks, implementing get-tough, back-to-basics strategies. It is the timidity of our captains of industry that drives these uses of consultants, but we need to own the nature of our participation.

Consulting Complexities: Performance Management… Let Me Do It for You

Posted on by Peter Block

This post on how the lure to set up programs to manage performance improvement ultimately undermines consulting effectiveness continues our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks to both internal and external consultants experiencing the tensions between doing what is popular and providing genuine service to a client.

In a culture in which profitability and efficiency are the priority, accountability becomes everyone’s favorite word. We think that there is a relationship between holding ourselves and others more accountable and increasing performance. If we can just tighten our accountability grip, the organization would deliver more. This illusion creates a market for methodologies and consultant services that promise better gripping power.

There are consulting firms that guarantee concrete results in return for a fee. If you don’t see the results, you don’t pay the fee. This is the ultimate in performance consulting. How could a consultant make this kind of guarantee? Simple. Take over that segment of the business that you promise to improve. The consultant becomes a surrogate manager, and the line management clears the way and effectively steps aside. The people in the unit live under the power of the consultant, and generally the consultant delivers on the “performance improvement” by instituting closer controls and having fewer people doing more jobs.

This is not really consulting. It is something we might call “in-sourcing”: bringing into the organization, on a temporary basis, surrogate managers who are willing to take a difficult stand, reduce head count, confront people in a way that the permanent, resident management is unwilling to do.

Even if the job needed to be done, the use of consultants in this way undermines the legitimacy of the consultant role. Consulting is no longer educational, advisory, or capacity building. Line managers cast the consultant in the role of the Serpent in order to protect their own good image with their own people. When we go along with this, it may be good for our business, but hard on the service dimension of the profession.

There are milder forms of performance consulting, the main problems of which have more to do with taking measurements than with taking charge. There is a widespread belief that anything you cannot measure does not exist. And internal staff groups are under more and more pressure to be more business oriented and return-on-investment–minded than in the past. Hard to argue with in theory.

The risk is that staff groups will no longer be in the business of cultural change or confronting the culture with its own blindness. Performance consulting will drive staff groups to be more like the culture that surrounds them. This will reinforce services that treat only symptoms and seek acceptance at the cost of some greater impact than the consultant or staff group has the potential to make.

There is great pressure for this, especially in the human resource area. The HR function comes under siege because much of its value is hard to quantify. In periods when people concerns are in remission, the push to “rationalize” HR almost leads to its elimination. There has to be a way for qualitative services to demonstrate their value without sacrificing the power of their unique perspective.

CONSULTING COMPLEXITIES: Our Love of Leadership

Posted on by Peter Block

This post on how our love for leadership ultimately undermines consulting effectiveness continues our series looking at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks to the industry as a whole, though both internal and external consultants will recognize the tensions between doing what is popular and providing genuine service to a client.

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We have been in search of leaders since the late seventies. Before that, we were in search of managers. We now have a leadership development industry fueled more by training and presentation than by consulting. The industry is led by authors and ex-chief executive officers who, in many cases, have found more meaning teaching leadership than providing it. The headliners come not only from private industry, but also from politics, sports, and the government.

The high end of the leadership industry is really a seminar and workshop business. At the top, the pay is good, the hours are reasonable, and the expectations are pretty low. No one asks about the financial return to the organization as the result of a celebrity presentation. They just wish the celebrity could have stayed around longer.

The number of leadership sessions offered within companies and as public conferences keeps growing. I have even been the beneficiary of this trend.

One large company required a week of training for the top two thousand executives. Forty sessions ran for fifty executives at a time. Monday was globalization, Tuesday was finance, Thursday was product innovation, and Friday was a talk with the top. Wednesday was a day on empowerment, and I had written a book on the subject. So I showed up as the centerfold of the week and talked about creating an empowered workforce, a subject of greatest interest only to myself and those sitting in the back of the room who sponsored the program. The empowerment interest has now been converted to agility, innovation, and thinness.

Though some of the participants seemed somewhat engaged in what they were learning, most were going through the motions—there only to get their ticket punched. When I finally withdrew from the program, I received from the support staff a special goodbye present: a t-shirt with a slightly cynical message on it about the true impact of the effort.

The consulting complexities built into working with clients on leadership development is that the effort holds on to the belief that organizations are the creation of those who run them. Training the organization’s leaders becomes the centerpiece strategy for improving it. In fact, there is little evidence that training leaders has any impact on organizational change, and there is little accountability for the investment made in leader training.

This is in sharp contrast to the way training at lower levels is scrutinized. Train supervisors for two hours a week for six weeks and we are asked to defend the investment. Send the top management team to a university for four weeks, and the question of value received is limited to asking the participating managers whether they liked the program. Four weeks in Cambridge, Charlottesville, Evanston, Palo Alto—what’s not to like?

The ethical challenge for internal and external consultants alike is how best to serve the client without colluding in what is essentially a form of elitism, perpetuating the notion that organizations will forever live in the shadow of its leaders.

Consulting Complexities: How Intention Gets Undermined in Change Management

Posted on by Peter Block

This post on the complexities in change management work is the fourth in our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks to the industry as a whole, though both internal and external consultants will recognize the tensions between doing what top management asks for and providing genuine service to a client. Future posts will get into other complexities that undermine our best efforts. Winding up the series will be some thoughts on what to do.

Some time ago, when pressures for better quality and sharper customer focus added to the traditional pressures for cost reduction and accountability, organizations decided that what was needed was a change in culture. We needed workplaces in which people acted as owners, employees felt empowered and involved, change was welcomed, and patriarchal management practices were driven out.

To achieve these goals, managers brought in consultants and charged internal change agents to end command-and-control and bring in more participation. Bosses were to become coaches, employees would now be called associates. All were to work in teams, even across functions. It reached the point where employees were to evaluate their bosses, just as college students had been evaluating their teachers.

All of this was a large undertaking, which created a logical need for consultation.  The ethical question arose from the disparity between the claims and the reality. That consulting complexity still exists today.

The promise of culture change was essentially that a shift in power would take place: Teams close to the work would more control over how the work was done and how money was spent. Much of the consulting work done to this end, however, was done in a way that undermined a true resurgence of worker power and choice. Change management became and becomes a colonial venture.

To begin with, the profession approached the work from the belief that the workers were incapable of exercising more choice without intensive training. They had to be given certain tools. They had to be taught to work in teams. They had to be persuaded that they should act in ways that served the well-being of the business. And it was the consulting companies and training departments that owned these tools and methods of persuasion, which they sold through a series of training programs to the employees.

The change management tools were not limited to training products. There were major projects to define the new competencies that would be required in the new culture. There were new assessment and measurement products that would help gauge the progress of the change effort. There were major communications programs to publicize and explain this new world both to employees and to the outside world.

The consulting complexities I want to point out about these efforts are not really about their effectiveness. The issues are about the story about them. The reports are mixed on how much any given culture actually changed, depending on who you talk to. If you talk to the top management who sponsored the effort or the internal and external consultants who implemented it, you would hear that the effort was very successful and the culture had indeed shifted.

But if you talk to employees in most companies that made the investment, you generally would find that there was not much change in their daily work lives: They might work in teams, but individualism is still the dominant mode of operation; and while they may have more budget and spending authority than before, top management is still very much in control and patriarchy is alive and well.

Besides the story, what is more disturbing is the way that consultants and managers approach the task of making organizational changes. Whenever the change effort becomes a top-down, cascading program, it serves to build the business of the service provider, and  serves to simply reinforce the existing organizational culture and belief systems about control and power, then the work is open to question.

The first order of business for consultants––internal and external––entering into any change management effort is to challenge the assumptions that the top is an appropriate driver, that experts know best what is needed, and that employees lack tools and capacities.   

Consulting Complexities: How Growth Undermines Service

Posted on by Peter Block

This post on how growth undermines service is the third in our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks to the industry as a whole, though both internal and external consultants will recognize the tensions between doing what is popular out of the words of top management and providing genuine service to a client. Future posts will get into other complexities that undermine our best efforts. Winding up the series will be some thoughts on what to do.

The growing marketplace for consulting services intensifies the complexities around the commercialization of our profession. For example, in the large accounting firms, consulting services used to be a second cousin—something done because the client demanded it or the consultants themselves got restless doing the more routine financial work they had been doing too long. The large consulting companies were primarily experts in a particular aspect of business, such as marketing, regulatory requirements, or technical innovation. Services aimed at and changing organization culture were not really on their radar screen.

Much of the growth of consulting has been riding the wave of the technology explosion combined with the trend toward downsizing. Most large organizations have found it more profitable to shrink and merge and outsource jobs. This creates the challenge of having fewer people doing more work, and the consulting industry has been the beneficiary of this movement.

The demand for consulting services has also grown because of the interest in quality improvement, better customer service, and changing cultures toward more engaged workplaces. All of these goals are worthy, but what I want to explore is how the commercialization of our services ended up subverting their intent.

Reengineering is a good example of an area of practice that had power and relevance. Its intent was inarguable but something shifted when the idea became commercialized and popular. Reengineering became the rage and consulting firms began to make promises that were unsustainable. After a good run, the work fell of its own weight.

The reengineering craze reached a point where whatever change we had in mind was called reengineering. Every department thought it was reengineering itself. The energy was more about becoming modern than becoming better. Reengineering became synonymous with restructuring and was sold by the large accounting and consulting firms with promises of a 30 to 50 percent return on the investment.

The dark side of reengineering, which threatened the whole profession, is that the promises made to sell the work either were never fulfilled or could finally be achieved only by eliminating jobs on a wide scale. The goal of restructuring the work process for the sake of the customer was more often than not unrealized. In fact, many of the users of reengineering began to reverse their efforts because they found the concept unworkable.

Reengineering,  like the more current desire to be lean and agile,  is a good example of two larger consulting complexities: how consultants take advantage of what is in vogue and how we pursue covert purposes.

When an idea is fashionable it becomes, almost by definition, a cosmetic solution. When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care. If we were strictly a business you might say, What’s the problem? The customer is always right. We only gave them what they asked for. Being also a service function, though, means that something more is due to the client.

When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care.

The other consulting complexity exemplified by reengineering is a form of double-dealing––for example when force reductions are packaged as organization improvement. Who could argue with restructuring for the sake of the customer? Organizations went through a long process of interviews, redesign teams, and extensive selling and training for the new system when the real net result of the effort was the elimination of jobs with little real change in function or culture.

Clients have a right to expect us to decide whether what the client is willing to buy will deliver what the client really needs. If the client asks for a service that will not help, or may even be harmful, then when do we say no and turn away the work? It is a tough thing to do, especially for internal consultants. Clients also have a right to expect us to speak and act authentically. If our work is packaged and sold as something it is not, we betray trust and set the client on a path to harmful results.

Consulting Complexities: The Commercialization of Service

Posted on by Peter Block

This post on the tension between doing our work and managing our businesses is the second in our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks mostly to external consultants though internal consultants experience similar tensions between service to a client unit and the pressure to implement the wishes of top management. Future posts will get into other complexities that undermine service. Winding up the series will be some thoughts on what to do.

When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care.

One factor making consulting work complex is the tension between delivering service and attending to the business of the consulting unit. When consulting becomes a business first and a service second, something fundamental about the work is changed. Most of us began our consulting work because we were attracted to a set of ideas and trained in a set of skills. We also wanted to make a living. It wasn’t until we became successful that we got caught between commerce and care.

There is an inherent strain between the economic demands of a consulting practice and the care we wish to offer to the client. Care comes when we can customize our service for each client, when something new is created with each client. The consultant’s promise is most accurately fulfilled when the person selling the work is the person doing the work. This way the client knows exactly who will be doing the work after making the decision to proceed. Care is delivered when we foster the client’s capacity to design their own changes and when the client is not dependent on us. In a practice based on care, each client becomes important, and the marketing strategy is basically to do good work.

Consulting becomes commercialized when the service gets standardized and becomes a product to be marketed. The economics of a service business drive you in the direction of standardized or packaged service. Salaries are the major cost item, and one way to reduce labor costs is to make the service uniform and predictable. It takes a very experienced, and therefore high-cost, consultant or staff person to be able to create a strategy and service for each particular client. It takes a lot of experience for one person to be able to conceptualize the project, sell the project, manage the project, and do the work. One way to solve this dilemma is to, in effect, package the service so lower-cost, less experienced people can do the work and manage the project. Then you only need highly experienced people in the front end of the project, doing the selling.

Many consulting firms and internal staff groups divide themselves into those who sell the work, those who manage the work, and those who do the work. As the overhead costs of the consulting unit come under increasing pressure, the drive to build sales and make repeat sales within each client organization becomes intense. At some point, the success of the practice gets measured by standard business criteria—annual growth, margin, earnings, return on capital. At this point, commerce has become dominant over care.

The shift from care to commerce can occur in any size firm or staff unit. It often just happens, rather than being something we anticipated. It happens when what we do works, and it happens in many professions. Physicians, architects, and lawyers, for example, often find themselves driven more by the economics than the professional objectives of their practice.

The inherent pressure is to make a business out of a profession. We worry about how to create growth opportunities so we can keep good people. We believe we need a large group to offer a full range of services and to take on really big change efforts, and it takes money to support more services. Plus the culture places a high premium on economic success.

But the commercialization of our profession is more a mind-set than a requirement of growth. It is a question of purpose and focus, and that is why it becomes an ethical obligation to settle the tension between commerce and care in favor of the best interests of the client.