Is Your Coffee Cold?

There's a rite of passage following the inciting incident of all the classic movie capers where the eager recruits meet each other for the first time. (Think meeting the crew of The Italian Job.) Since, depending on which side of the ledger you find yourself, the consulting experience—or even just writing about it—can feel a little like a heist, I'll begin this caper with a real-life gathering of partners in what some might consider white-collar pseudo-crime.

It was late 2004, and the American Red Cross, still reeling from its decision to divert 9-11 donations to a series of unrelated catastrophes, was seeking partial redemption in the form of an outside perspective . Compounding their troubles, the blood-making organization was still in the penalty box for mislabeling a batch of life-saving viles for which it had been slapped with a Consent Decree by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Not a happy time.

Our entire consultancy, my partner Bart Perkins and myself, were about to be trebled by a gang of experts soon to be charged with looking around the organization and afterward saying clever stuff about what they observed. Bart and I had formed our practice only days before 9-11, and three lean years later, still relied for bursts on a handful of stringers to show up on demand, not unlike the way Hollywood descends on a new film oppo . From our collective network, Bruce J Rogow , Sheila Cox , Daniel Romney , Jim Mortensen, and a young intern, Timothy Knell (my eldest), would eventually drift in and out of what eventually turned into a year-long gig.

Among Bart's trusted, and seeing him for the first time, I immediately liked Bruce Rogow. He flew down from Marblehead for the kick-off ritual wearing a Red Sox cap, looking to my literary imagination like George Smiley's non-lugubrious younger brother: subtly happy to be in the room, appearing not fully briefed on what he'd signed up for and not caring a fig. In that iconic first gathering, after taking in some of the particulars, Bruce shared his reason for coming, a cryptic logic that, twenty years later, I recall more vividly than the engagement itself.

"My daughter's an engineer—Onsite Coordinator for EPA Emergeny Response," he began evenly. "Knowing that she rubs shoulders with Red Cross disater relier, I called her last night to say I was thinking of coming down here. I got on the plane this morning on the strength of her three-word answer:

'Their coffee's cold.'"

Bruce went on to explain how essential it was to his daughter that any organization she worked with get the important things right. Telling her dad the coffee at Red Cross was not to her standards was code for while every organization gets some things wrong, the ultimate proof of worth is whether they consistently get the right ones right.

Is your coffee cold?

Scott Knell is an innovator and change collector fascinated by individuals and institutions in transition. For his take on personal and professional transformation, visit HumanChanging.com .