Estimated reading time: 3 mins : 50 secs
…So a patron of the arts walks into Picasso’s studio and requests a painting of a chicken. The patron and the master artist come to an agreement and the patron leaves. A month later, on the agreed date of completion, the patron returns only to find that the painting hasn’t even been started. Concerned, the patron asks the artist why the painting isn’t finished, at which point Picasso picks up a brush, dips it into the paints on his palette and quickly but intentionally brushes several strokes onto a blank canvas that form the image of a chicken. Picasso proudly hands the painting to the bewildered patron.
As the expression on the patron’s face turns from surprise to disappointment, Picasso opens a door to a back room and invites the patron in. Once inside the room the patron finds himself amongst live chickens, dead chickens, whole chickens, parts of chickens, chicken legs hanging from the ceiling, chicken feet dissected on the countertop, every practical dissection and measurement of a chicken revealed before the patrons eyes. Picasso folds his arms and focuses on the painting with admiration.
The patron has his epiphany and with a renewed sense of confidence he leaves with his painting and new perspective on the creation of art.
From the excellent BLDG BLOG, The Indispensable Importance of Experience
There’s a whole canon of these stories. Another one is of the customer who complains when he receives a bill for $100 from a carpenter who has stopped a floorboard from squeaking by hammering in a single nail. The carpenter is the latest, and most expensive, in a succession of carpenters who have all failed to cure the grating noise. So he resubmits the bill:
- $1 for hammering the nail
- $99 for knowing where to hammer it
I prefer the dead chickens, to be honest.
Seth Godin spends good chunks of time on retelling this story in different ways:
You should pay people by the hour when there are available substitutes. When you rely on freelancers you can put a value on their time based on what the market is paying. If there are six podiatrists in town, and all can heal your foot, the going rate is based on their time and effort, not on the lifetime use of your foot . . .
I had a college professor who did engineering consulting. A brand new office tower in Boston had a serious problem–there was a brown stain coming through the drywall, (all of the drywall) no matter how much stain killer they used. In a forty story building, if you have to rip out all the drywall, this is a multi-million dollar disaster. They had exhausted all possibilities and were a day away from tearing out everything and taking a loss. They hired Henry in a last-ditch effort to solve the problem. He looked at the walls and said, “I think I can work out a solution, but it will cost you $45,000 if I succeed.” They instantly signed on, because if he succeeded, the project would be saved.
Henry asked for a pencil and paper and wrote the name of a common hardware store chemical and handed it to them. “Here, this will work.” And then he billed them $45,000. That’s quite an hourly wage. It’s also quite a bargain.
And again:
Where do you find repeat business or even new business? How do you make a sale (to another business or to a consumer) when you cost more?
The answer, of course, is the intangibles. The things that have no price. Things that customers value more than it costs you to provide them.
If you don’t have that, all you can do is beg. And begging is not a scalable strategy.
If you find yourself saying, “the boss won’t let me lower the price,” or “we’re more expensive, but that’s because our cost structure is higher,” then you’re selling the intangibles too short. The stuff people can’t buy at any price, from anyone else, but that they really value…
One of my half-hearted conversational beliefs is that we’d pretty much decided on all the major moral issues by about the time of George Eliot. Middlemarch is my arbitrary marker for when we showed moral maturity, as a civilisation. And this means that all of our moral progress since 1874 has been about price discovery. I don’t get that excited about the inequality and the unfairness of the banking crisis and the econopalypse.
But I do worry that we’ve forgotten where we buried the chickens.
- Chicken cartoon from Savage Chickens
- Design Pricing Formula from David Airey
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