It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.

In 2002, Citigroup — fresh from a merger between Citicorp and Travelers Group — hired Pentagram’s Paula Scher to design their new logo. Classic corporate brief: millions at stake, layers of stakeholders, and a brand too big to fail.

Scher walked into the room, listened, and then sketched the entire idea on a napkin: the word Citi with an umbrella arc over the "t". Done. That sketch? It became the Citi logo. It also cost them $1.5 million.

Cue corporate outrage: “We paid seven figures for a napkin doodle?!”

“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”

Of course, they weren’t paying for the 30 seconds. They were paying for 30+ years of accumulated clarity. Scher didn’t need a pitch deck. She didn’t need user personas. She didn’t run a two-month discovery phase. She listened, understood the signal, cut through the noise, and delivered a solution that made all the brand consultants obsolete in under a minute.

This is what seniority looks like. Not a process, a methodology, or a framework — but the ability to see the answer when everyone else is still aligning on objectives.

They later spun off Travelers, and the umbrella (the very symbol they built the logo around) was sold off. The logo, stripped of its original metaphor, remained. Why? Because corporate logic rarely cares about meaning when brand equity gets locked into the asset column of a balance sheet.

What to make of this?

The service industry can be easily divided into two teams. The ones selling their time and the ones that sell their value. It should be easy to know which one you are in or, if you're the customer, which one you are buying. And even for the later (buying value), I understand that customers might feel robbed if someone doesn't seem to spend enough time on their case. Fair enough.

That being said, as I was writing in a paying newsletter on setting up your consulting business:

"(...) whenever someone starts discussing your rate and how many days you'd need to deliver the mission, you are now regarded as a cost, not a value-creator. (...) your customer shouldn't ask if you are cheap or expensive, but if you will provide a good return on investment."

If the customer doesn't know the ROI he should expect, you might be talking to the wrong person.