Impartiality in VIEW is the difference between driving to work at a specific time on a specific route (highly partial) and taking an old-fashioned Sunday drive where you follow what feels right and don’t care where you end up (impartial). It’s asymptotic — every sentence has some agenda, so you can never be 100% impartial — but the orientation matters enormously.
This is the hardest component of VIEW for people to grasp, especially in business. The assumption is that you need partiality to succeed. Joe distinguishes: you need a clear goal, but being partial about how you get there slows you down. There might be ten better or quicker paths that you can’t see when you’re fixed on one route. The basketball analogy clarifies this — you have a clear goal (ball in hoop) but if you’re partial to a specific planned pass and someone’s already blocking it, you’ll fail. Impartiality means reading the river of what customers want, what employees want, and flowing with it rather than building canals against it.
“Everyone thinks that you need to be highly partial to be good at business. You do have to have a clear intention, you do have to have a clear goal… how you get there, if you’re really highly partial, it’s going to slow you down.”
People resist telling a two-year-old what to do. Adults resist the same way when they sense an agenda. The best salespeople are those who genuinely care about their customer rather than pushing for a close.
Related Concepts
- Detachment from outcomes enables better outcomes
- Alignment beats effort
- Sales is connecting not convincing