The Business of Consulting

As with pretty much everything there is the Good Consultant and the Consultant. The difference lies in the level of visionary thought a consultant is able to marry in with tactical details. Unfortunately, in an industry dotted with too many consultant speaking in Consultese (a word coined by a good consultant I know), the effort is more in terms of justifying than actually making a difference. For all those who hire consultants from the large hives - McKinsey and Deloitte and the likes, know this, every consultant is essentially measured (I mean the crux of keeping their jobs is justified) by billing rates and billed hours. To that extent not many consultants are different from the more popular category of leeches viz. lawyers - and we all know the level of love and respect practitioners of law command. Coming back to the point, about 85 to 90% of the industry (if you can call consulting an industry) is ridden with mediocrity! 

Here is what your typical $100 - 500/hr consultant gives you. 

• States the obvious in pretty pictures (frameworks, matrices, models, etc. - many names)
• Way too many credentials - inflated truths that most probably include all realms of the possible universe
• Over a period of time, takes you around in a full circle to where you started
• Comes with the capability of sounding intelligent at the expense of the folks who actually know what they are doing
• Jargons (or Consultese, as I now refer this language as) that really express what should ideally be common sense
• An airline view of life that will take a load of money and effort to implement in real terms (some of that money will of course find its way into the pocket of the said consultant)
• Make you a business case that will be ridden with assumptions and dependancies for future finger pointing in case of limited success
• Convince you that what is being said is (irrespective of what reality suggests) the Best Practice (another jargon that has no relevance, because if everyone followed a certain best practice we would be living in a communist world)

Broadly that summarizes it! For those of you who now think that you have been wasting money over nothing for some time, I must defend the profession saying that your money deserves to be spent but it is just being spent on the wrong set of people. 

When you are hiring a consultant what you first need to look for and possibly dig through the credentials list to find is whether the man/woman you will pay to tell you to do the right thing, understands the 'thing'! Putting credentials to overwhelm the client is pretty much the nature of the beast but the almost mythical Good Consultant will tell you on questioning how much time and in what role they have learnt and practiced the 'thing'. 

Why do most consulting gigs give you something impractical and sometimes just too high level to make any tactical sense? The most important reason most often is because as a client to the consultant, the company or individual sponsor is also withholding information and marking territory. Most consultants will work around this bottleneck (it's a part of the primary Consultese education process) and the outcome is just what you can expect - a presentation that is very abstract and needs significant additional effort to actually implement. It is most often the client who allows a consultant the excuses to get away without contributing to the cause. 

As a client to the consultant, you need some education of the jargons of Consultese you need to avoid. What you should not pay a consultant to tell you?

• Benchmark for everything: It is very crucial to be aware of what can and cannot be benchmarked is extremely important if you do not want to be sold on generic data
• Best Practices do not exist: While some practices prove profitable across the industry, as a client one must have conviction that your business is unique unless you are in a price driven commodity market; do not get sold on random best practices defined out of perspective
• Employees know better than frameworks/models/simulations/matrices: As an institution is run by its employees, it is quintessential that a Consultant's frameworks/models/simulations/matrices are validated, critiqued and sieved by employees who are the real practitioners. In my years of engagement with clients, I have realized that the people at the grassroots know the best solution for ambient challenges
• Powerpoint Slides make for bad strategic decisions: Real life business is very difficult to reduce down to slide ware - beware of slides that represent a living breathing business in bullet points

So then, what makes for a good consultant?

• A Good Consultant takes the pain and even invests in understanding the business or technology environment at a practitioners level - it's easy to decipher a Good Consultant in this respect because he or she will never start by telling you about industry trends and the best practices
• A Good Consultant uses jargons that have a ring of familiarity therefore - he has learnt from the employees and understands the language & uniqueness of the business
• A Good Consultant will present a model that includes all strategic and tactical aspects of the problem instead of force fitting the problem into what's very often a framework that has been plagiarized over generations of abuse
• Last but not the least, a Good Consultant delivers a business case that actually reflects the state of the business and a journey that is inclusive of extraneous considerations like weather, competition, economy or whatever may or may not affect the future of the financials

A client or an institution sometimes plays a crucial role in making a Good Consultant of a Consultant by undertaking a few simple steps before engaging a consultants. 

• Identify the right people to interact with
• Get all the accessible information available and make them available to the consultant - don't hold back and expect miracles
• Invest sufficient time and mind space your hired consultant - left alone and isolated any person or team will produce an output that is not going to be relevant.

And last but not the least, have commercial agreements that are outcome based. Pay on completion of a satisfactory outcome only.