The other day I was in a deliberation and after concluding some ideas I've reached to a term:

business therapy.

For an instant I've though I was being original but 2 seconds later I've searched internet to see what others wrote about this term.

Here is what google says for today (December 13, 2009) in:

English
62,900 links for "couple therapist"
52,500 links for "pet therapist"
13,100 links for "business therapist"

Portuguese
57,600 links for "terapia de casal"
48,600 links for "terapeuta de animais"
1 link (wow!) for "terapeuta de negocios"

Spanish
491,00 links for "terapia de pareja"
19,600 links for "terapeuta de animales"
0 links (wow!) for "terapeuta de negocios"

What can we take from this?

We can conclude that spanish bloggers spend more time rationalizing about couple issues than making businesses? right? :)

So far we can take this: social media is a game changer and the businesses that "get it" are starting to do its homework and transforming themselves from the crappy corporativistic paradigm to a more personal, human and modern one.

Not all companies will make it. Some will get it eventually, hopefully on time. What we know now is that every day consumers have a clearer idea of which companies are honestly achieving it and which ones don't.

If a business or movement is going to get more personal, it's predictable that it will need to deal with both: the emotional and the rational part of the brain of the customers and employees. That's not new.

What is new is founders and partners looking at their companies, more than ever, as a juridical person. This time with emphasis in the person part. And if the companies, now as personalities, are going to engage more personally with customers, they will feel fractions of the load of the stress of their customers.

The size of the fraction matters because it's multiplied by the scale of that business. And is very healthy for a business of the global age to design things in a way that scales.

So, what would happen when they need help to process that stress?

People will say that consultants are the guys for that job. The problem is that not everybody understands what it is. So don't have a clue of what is going to get or what to expect because how the business is faced.

In the other hand if you take things as therapy from the beginning, things are more clear and it smells like a market gap.

Meetings won't solve the non rational needs they will face. If those companies don't have a solid culture among employees to digest that stress they could get in trouble. But even with trouble they can get better if they have competent therapy from somebody filling that gap.

One of the rules of startups is:

attitude over performance

A talented co-founder, even a rock-star one with the wrong default attitude to make anything can still kill a startup.

If people trying to make a business really understand this, they will be willing to give their money to the one who help them to prevent a crappy hire or a bad business foundation?

Who is going to design the next generation of startup founder profile tests then?