[This is the story of the start-up and app Purposely™. Each week I’ll chat about its purpose, progress, and possibilities. Let’s consider this the memoir of an app <smile>. If you’d like to be in touch, please drop me a line to [email protected]. And please take a peek at my latest book, Choose Your Life Purposes, which spells out the principles upon which Purposely is built.]
Is this idiocy?
Or does it perhaps reflect a beautiful, old-fashioned honor system way of doing business that can and maybe does still work?
I suspect that if you’ve gotten burned once or twice, you would probably join the ranks of the “let’s make it legal and let’s get it in writing.” Certainly, none of the publishers who publish my books would dream of skipping the multi-page contract that outlines every contractual nicety. But I wish it were otherwise. I wish we could do business just by saying, “Are we agreed? Then we’re agreed.”
For many of my collaborations, that’s exactly the way we operate. I’ve had the CEO of a large coaching business say to me, “My lawyers will hate me for doing this, but let’s just get the details down in an email and be done with it.” That’s like music and sunshine!
I’m not advocating skipping the contracts. That sounds dangerous and foolhardy. What I’m musing on is how lovely it is when you encounter someone who is trustworthy and the two of you simply trust one another. And things work out. That feels not only old-fashioned but from a different vocabulary.
Nowadays, I’m likely to be confronted by a three-page document that I’m to execute just to appear as a guest on a podcast. What are such coarse interactions doing to us? Is every three-page agreement and seven-page contract and ten-thousand-word user agreement making us lonelier? More guarded? Less loving? All of the above?
There is a famous quote from the Native American leader Chief Joseph: “It does not require many words to speak the truth.” Maybe a corollary is that thousands of words of contract language only ensures litigation, not cooperation. Cooperation comes from another place, from decent people acting decently. That may be rare, but not quite as rare as unicorns.
I suppose that my partner and I will have to execute a real agreement soon. I suppose that sad day is coming. I will not feel safer or better on that day. I will not say to myself, “Great, now I’m protected!” All I will feel is another dart of late-stage capitalism shot my way, making for another small wound. Good will rather than contracts? Maybe in paradise.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
