If you have employees who make unreasonable demands I want you to stop being insulted by that because really, an unreasonable demand is like a needle in a haystack. When you find out what somebody really wants, that's like finding a needle in a haystack. Economists call this Unique Value Proposition. When something matters in particular to one person, its always more valuable to that person than it's overall cost in the marketplace so its very efficient.


Let me tell you my best Needle in a Haystack story. We do a lot of work in the intelligence community and there's one intelligence agency where I was training managers. I had the senior guy come up to me and tell me, "I've got to tell you this story. I hired this guy. He is a high level mathematician with a Ph.D. from a top university. He had the ability, he had the skill; he had a track record of success. He comes in; we get him through the whole recruiting process, the whole selection process, the whole security clearance process. He finally comes in and he's coming in late, leaving early, he's moping around, he's not doing anything, he's not talking to anyone; he's miserable." This manager says, "I knew from our training program that I had to create an ongoing dialogue with this person, I had to spell out expectations, I had to find out what made this person tick. I could tell there was something about the work situation that was making this guy unhappy. So finally I said to him, I know there's something that you want that you are not getting here. You've got to tell me what it is. What can I do for you that I am not already doing for you?"


And the guy says to him, "Well, you see its my Thinking Couch." The manager says, "What? Your Thinking Couch?" "Yes, my Thinking Couch. You see, I have this couch in my apartment. I have all of my computers lined up around it on tables and I wrote my undergraduate thesis in college on that couch. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on that couch. Sometimes my friends come over and we sit on that couch and talk about math. Here in this little cubicle, I just can't think without my couch. It ruins it for me. I just can't function here." So the manager says, "Well, we can't bring your couch into this cubicle." And the guy says, "Oh no, we can, I measured it. It would go right over here."


So this manager says to me, "You've never seen anything like it. We had to have dogs sniff the couch and test it for bomb residue. We put it through metal detectors. We bring this guy's couch in. We even had to hire a moving company to bring this couch in. We took his desk and chair out and put in the couch and a table. I've never seen anything like it. I don't know what time this guy comes to work and I don't know what time he leaves because he is always sitting there on that couch, making codes, breaking codes. I think the guy sleeps on that couch. People walk by that cubicle and he jumps up and says, "Come in, sit on the couch, we'll talk about math." He said "How would I have ever known that this guy's Thinking Couch would be the difference between high performance and low performance?"


See, sometimes you would never know. Sometimes the only way to find that needle in a haystack is to go looking for it.