Principle & Process — Part Five of Six.
- for a Trust Business.
Agents love this phrase. Survival of the fittest. It gets used to explain why the market is hard, why some agents win and others don't, why competition is simply how things work. It sounds like science. It sounds final, like a law of nature nobody can argue with.
It is also being used wrongly, and once you see how, it's hard to un-see it.
"Survival of the fittest" does not mean the strongest individual beats every rival in a fight to the death. That's not what Darwin was describing. He was describing which animals survive long enough to pass on their traits — and very often, the animals that survive are not the ones that fought hardest. They're the ones that fit their environment best. Wolves that hunt in packs kill larger prey than any lone wolf could manage alone. Ants that work together build colonies that outlast any single ant by years. In nature, cooperation is often the winning strategy, not the losing one. The industry borrowed a phrase about fitting an environment and turned it into a slogan about fighting each other. That's not the same idea. It's a different idea wearing the same words.
Apply the correct version to real estate and something becomes obvious. The environment an agent operates in is trust. Buyers and sellers are handing over the biggest financial decision of their lives to someone they've often just met. An agent who fits that environment well is one who earns trust and keeps it. An agent who treats every other agent as an enemy to be beaten is optimising for the wrong thing. They may win a listing. They are not fitting the environment. They're fighting a battle nature never asked them to fight.
Paul Polman, who ran Unilever for a decade, makes a related point about business generally. He argues that companies which take more from the world than they give back cannot last, no matter how well they perform in the short term. Companies that give more than they take, he argues, are the ones still standing when the dust settles.
"People with purpose thrive, brands with purpose grow, and companies with purpose last." — Paul Polman, Net Positive
Picture what "taking more than you give" looks like for a single agent. It looks like overstating interest in a property to rush a buyer. It looks like taking a listing you know is overpriced because saying no costs you the commission today. Each of these earns something in the short term. Each one also spends something that doesn't come back easily: the trust of the person you just dealt with, and the story they tell about you afterwards. An agent can do this for years. Eventually the stories catch up. This is what taking more than you give looks like when it's slowed down enough to see clearly.
The opposite approach spends nothing that isn't replaced. Tell a seller the truth about their price, even when it costs you the listing, and you have given something — honesty — that costs you today and pays you back later, when that seller tells a friend who is selling next year. This is what giving more than you take looks like in an ordinary week. It is not a slogan. It is simply what happens when the agent's principle is to leave people better off than they found them, and the process follows from there.
Barbara Marx-Hubbard wrote about something similar on a much bigger scale. Her idea was that evolution doesn't stop at competition. Competition is an early stage, not the final answer. As living things get more complex, they get better at cooperating, not worse. Cells cooperate to form organs. Organs cooperate to form a body. A body that turned its own organs against each other in competition would not survive very long. It would call that competition "healthy" right up until it killed the whole system.
Real estate, as an industry, is closer to that failure point than most agents realise. An industry built entirely on individual agents competing against each other, with almost no shared trust between them, is not a mature system. It is an early one, stuck at a stage that living systems move past once they get complex enough to know better. The industry has not moved past it because nobody selling process to agents benefits from them moving past it. Cooperation doesn't need a new script. It needs agents willing to stop treating each other as the enemy.
This closes the argument this series opened with. The industry keeps asking how to process better — better scripts, better tools, better ways to win. It rarely asks what it exists for in the first place. Every article in this series has pointed at the same fork: agents who exist to win, and agents who exist to serve. The industry has spent decades building process for the first kind and calling it inevitable. It was never inevitable. It was a choice, made over and over, by agents who were never asked to examine it. Up next, later today, the three agents who never follow the herd.
THE BRAND WITHIN is required thinking because someone has to ask the question the industry keeps avoiding. Not how do I win. What am I actually here for. Every agent answers that question eventually, whether they mean to or not. The only choice left is whether they answer it on purpose, or find out by accident, years from now, standing in the wreckage of a career built on beating people instead of serving them.
If you missed previous articles, here's the link:
Article 1: https://thebrandwithin.me/blog/principle
Article 2: https://thebrandwithin.me/blog/process
Article 3: https://thebrandwithin.me/blog/physics
Article 4: https://thebrandwithin.me/blog/simplicity
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Chris.
Originally published on LinkedIn.