June 2023

Starlight in the Grass

by Alan Culler | Jun 25, 2023 | Living

I call myself a writer now.

Sometimes words flow like a river; sometimes they are dammed up. Not elegantly locked behind a Grand Coulee-Hoover architectural-engineering wonder, but stuck in mud and sticks and crumpled leaves emerging in tiny trickles from the buck-toothed beaver monstruction or clogged in neural ruts unable to break free.

Yesterday morning I awoke to fog on the ridge where I live. From the field a short block from my home we can usually see New York City’s skyline, but there was not even Carl Sandburg’s “little cat feet. . . looking over the harbor and city on silent haunches,” only a grey mist swirling. We’ve had a lot of fog on the ridge this spring. I’m not sure if it is warm-earth-cool-air ground fog or lowered ceiling leaving the ridge in a cloud, but from a visibility standpoint the effect is the pretty much the same, white and grey air somewhere between diaphanous and opaque, breeze blown and damp, making me wish for intermittent wipers on my eyeglasses.

I had some idea to write, often a daily task, and words went on a page, trying to explain a vague feeling of disconnection from . . . the news (?), society (?), myself (?). The sense of what I wrote, like the view, was enshrouded in incoherent swirling grey.

Later in the day I wrote a koan card post on LinkedIn about my many-layered agnosticism, pondering Schrodinger-like if the City was still there behind the fog.

I read. Always a good thing for a writer to do when words don’t flow.

Last night I read some chapters in Neal Stephenson’s The Fall or Dodge in Hell, a science fiction novel about the implications of a deceased, but digitally preserved brain living in cyberspace. The living analyze downloaded data, trying to understand if the “beings” are alive and doing anything. I’m at the part where Dodge’s Brain is constructing “Landform” and there is trouble in Eden, stemming from other digitized souls’ differing socio-political worldviews and power dynamics. The living data scientists are too removed to be less than clueless, like studying the stars with a telescope coated in Vaseline.

I revisited William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

I reread a piece by Jeffrey McNulty on “earthing” as he called grounding himself in nature. I had resisted commenting, but this morning I owned up to the conflict between my nature-boy free-spirit side and my MBA-self who calls such ideas “woo-woo.”

I read William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

This morning I read a lovely LinkedIn piece of poesy by Rached Alimi “Every river cannot avoid falling into the sea. . . . . flow through the rocks, defy the winds and find my way.”

The sun burned through the fog today

I like Sunday morning Pip walks, before anyone sensible is up, not enough to take them the rest of the week, but as Billie gets to sleep in one day a week, I get to ruminate, while keeping Pip from chowing down on deer scat.

Pip is our eleven-year-old Black Labrador Retriever. She and I are slower now than in our youth. Pip is a bit more willful about where she wants to go and for how long, so I had to convince her to amble to the field.

The City was still there. I was greatly relieved, but Pip was singularly unimpressed. We wandered as is our wont, she sniffing, making sense of the world, me doing something similar without the benefit of her super-nose.

In the morning sunshine there were bright silver lights in the grass. Last night the dew was heavy. My brown suede shoes were getting soaked, but my MBA-self was AWOL and nature-boy was enjoying the view.

Suddenly, a pinpoint flash of bright red hit my retina and was gone just as quickly. I stopped. I looked down at the grass. I slowly moved my head and one of the diamonds in the green flashed red again. I slowly turned my head once more and a flash of yellow green zapped my other eye. I stood there moving my head slightly side-to-side and up-and-down for several minutes till I became aware of the grey-muzzled cocked head staring at me quizzically from knee height.

An involuntary chuckle escaped my throat into the humid air and Pip let me know she was ready to go home.

Nature-boy took off his wet shoes and gripped the grass with his toes all the way home.

How Real Leaders Hire Consultants

by Alan Culler | Jun 13, 2023 | Leading

Hiring Consultants = Weakness?

My social circles do not afford opportunity to attend many black-tie events, but I do own a tuxedo. So, even though I thought it pretentious, I attended my thirtieth LBS reunion formal dress dinner in the Kent castle.

“Boards are simply intolerable.”

A tight circle formed around Mike, our only a public company CEO classmate. My class had mostly gone into finance, so Mike was surrounded by ten retired investment bankers who chimed in as Mike lamented the inefficacy of Boards of Directors. I joined the group.

““People arrive late or come unprepared.” “Everyone talks at once.” “They think they are there to make decisions, when they are there to advise and consent.” “I’m the only one who understands the issues, but still everyone has an opinion.” “Meetings go on forever.”

I spoke up. “It sounds like a meeting that might benefit from third party design and facilitation.”

Heads snapped toward me followed by a three second stunned silence and many frowns..

“Of course you’d think that as a consultant” sneered my “friend” Rob, a retired business professor, now an “investor.”

Vigorous consultant-bashing ensued.

“Consultants know nothing. “They’re arrogant. “ “They destroy morale.” “Consultants find any negative information and paint a picture of doom.” “They always want to sell you something more expensive. “They use their Board contacts to make you look bad.” “Their recommendations are either naïve, or destructive.”

Finally Mike raised his voice. “Only weak leaders hire consultants.”

“I’m not sure that my clients would agree with you, Mike.” I said, but soon went to look for another conversation and the group went comfortably back to complaining about directors, regulators, and environmentalists.

I retired from consulting after thirty-seven years and I admit that some complaints about consultants are justified. Some consultants sell by fear. Some are arrogant and demean staff. The percentage of jerks in the profession is smaller than reported but larger than it should be.

Some leaders hire the wrong consultants or hire them for the wrong reason. The “weak” characterization is unfair, but few in leadership talk about why to hire a consultant.

Why leaders hire consultants – the rational case.

A leader might need expertise, to understand circumstances not faced before. The leader may need specialized knowledge and skill it doesn’t make sense to hire full time. A leader might just want experienced heads and hands to help his company through a rough period of change. Or he or she might believe that the organization could use a partner to teach them how to master skills they not needed in the past but required now.

Those are “process needs,” describing how the leader works with the consultant and the first indicator of the kind of consultant the leader wants to hire:

An expert – who provides answers.
A trained resource – who alleviates a staffing crunch
A partner, collaborator, who works with you to solve a problem and implement a solution.

Sometimes a leader starts with the kind of help they want. Many times they start with a problem or an unspecified awareness that something needs to change.

There are only three “problems” – reasons to hire a consultant. These are desired outcomes (mostly); we need to:

Grow revenue
Grow profit, or
Resolve “people stuff”

What about strategy, supply chain optimization, digital transformation?” Strategy, innovation, product design, marketing, sales systems projects bring in more customers or more revenue from existing customers. Supply change optimization, inventory management, process improvement, operational systems projects reduce cost and increase profit.

Not all leaders naturally think in outcome terms. If they did there wouldn’t be a category called “people stuff.” An organization design reduces cost (increasing profit) or specifies accountability for customer acquisition or retention (growing revenue). Compensation and benefits work, or union employee grievance reduction would be a way to reduce the cost of hiring and managing staff. But in my experience, leaders with a people problem often don’t think about it in economic outcome terms. “People stuff” is messy, emotional, uncomfortable for many executives.

Consultants think in terms of service offerings and the academic press has trained leaders to think this way. “I need a continuous improvement initiative” or “Blue Ocean Strategy, or Digital Transformation.” So, many consulting engagements have process deliverables disconnected from results.

The leader has to achieve those results. If you hire an expert for the solution, you’ll have to implement it. If you hire “trained resources” you’ll have to manage them to the outcome. Even if you hire a collaborator, the leader “owns” the outcome.

This is the rational case, but business decisions have more than just the rational. There is often “behind the scenes people stuff,” which influences hiring a consultant,

Behind the scenes people stuff.

“My boss told me to,” “the Board strongly suggested it,” “there are two distinct factions on this issue,” “the last time we attempted this we crashed and burned,” “we have a young team with little credibility with senior management,” or “everyone is complacent, it’s time to ‘shake things up’ a bit.”

Are any of these issues driving your decision to hire a consultant?

Resolve an internal dispute? or
Avoid a mistake? or
Grow internal capability? or
Build internal credibility? or
“Shake things up?”

If so, refocus on outcomes. These are real issues and a leader must resolve them, but they shouldn’t be the only reason you hire a consultant.

Why leaders shouldn’t hire consultants.

Don’t engage a consultant to do the leader’s job or to outsource a core business process.

I’ve seen this happen with “people stuff” projects. Consultants evaluate and coach poor performers outsourcing performance management responsibilities. Sometimes a consultant decides who to let go during downsizing.

Some leaders hire consultants for the same work repeatedly – a new strategy or a new organization every two years. Bring those skills inhouse. Likewise, some companies try multiple continuous improvement or innovation initiatives, using a new methodology each time; Pick one methodology and stick with it.

Don’t hire a consultant to find a solution you won’t implement.

This often happens when a company hires a consultant to resolve a dispute the leader has a strong view about. The consultant comes up with the opposite answer and the report is buried. Sometimes this leader was directed to hire a consultant or is too busy to engage in the project

There are leaders who hire a consultant and “delegate” the entire relationship to a junior person, never seeing the consultant again until the report is presented. In my view, this is not delegation but rather abdication, and won’t produce lasting results. A successful consulting project is determined by the engagement of the leader in the work. Don’t “buy a dog and then bark yourself” as the Cockneys say, but you should “never let go of the leash.”

Don’t buy the latest management fad

Some executives want bragging rights at the Round Table or country club. “We use Six Sigma.” Sometimes they say, “it is good to “shake things up” every now and then. Their people say “Oh, here comes the flavor-of-the-month.”

Don’t hire your friend

A consultant-client relationship is based upon trust, reliable information, respected judgement, and a track record of doing what is promised. A leader must hire a “truth teller,” a person who can deliver bad news without giving offence, but without concern for a personal relationship.

Hire a consultant with a plan to leave. Disengagement with a consultant friend is hard because of the personal relationship. Even non-friend consultants want endless extensions, expansions, and an impressive rebuy rate. A disengagement plan should include how you will deliver results and learning the skills to do this yourself.

How a real leader hires consultants.

I think of consulting as a “helping profession.” So in the spirit of being helpful, don’t hire a consultant without thoroughly thinking through these ideas:

Be very clear about why you are hiring the consultant:
- What are your expected outcomes? What action will you take? (Who might take it and when?)
- If there are “behind the scenes people stuff” reasons you are hiring a consultant, don’t let those cloud expected outcomes.
- What role do you expect from the consultant: expert, extra resource, partner?
Be open with your consultant about the answers to these questions.
Have a plan to bring the consultant’s process inhouse:
- What can you learn?
- Who should learn it?
- What will they do with this new knowledge?
Hire a consultant with a plan to disengage.
Roll up your sleeves and engage with the consultant yourself. If you don’t have the time to do this, delegate, but make sure this person engages and arranges for you to interact (and not just at the final presentation).
Resist the “pitch for additional work” that comes at the end of most project presentations, at least until you have achieved the planned results.

This requires the engagement of the leader. Consulting firms often say there is one client. There is also one person who is the consultant. Yes, there is a team on both sides, but in each case one person is the leader and accountable for outcomes. Many corporations have a staff person send out a boilerplate request for proposal (RFP) to twenty firms and then have the short list of five come in for “bake-off” presentations. This common consulting purchase process obscures the leader to consultant contract and makes success more difficult..

In my experience, real leaders, know why they are hiring a consultant and are intimately involved with the decision.

Learning from Consultant Jokes

by Alan Culler | Jun 11, 2023 | Consulting

“I don’t get no respect, y’know what I mean.”

“You know the definition of a consultant?”

I was at a wedding dinner and the question came from another friend of the father of the bride. I had retired recently, but this entrepreneur didn’t accept that as the answer to the “What do you do?” question. “What did you used to do?” was the follow-up and when I told him he continued with a consultant joke that I’d heard, oh, I don’t know, a million times?

“A guy who knows a thousand ways to make love, but doesn’t know any women.”

“Did I mention that I worked in the field for thirty-seven years? I think I may have heard all the jokes. Tell me what you do?”

He was CEO of his wife’s family’s company, a distributer of certain intermediate chemicals, but he had started, folded and sold several businesses. He was a nice guy and we found that we had a lot in common, but not our financial net worth.

The joke loosely translated means, “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”

Telling consultant jokes is sometimes a trifle aggressive. Perhaps this is a defensive reaction to arrogant young know-it-all types who are themselves “powering up” because they are insecure.

None-the-less in thirty seven years as a consultant I experienced many people just had “to tell the funniest joke.” It used to bother me. I used to feel like the comedian Rodney Dangerfield whose signature line, “I don’t get no respect, y’know what I mean.” heads this section. But I think there is something consultants might learn from consultant jokes.

Finding meaning in jokes

In order for a joke to be funny it must contain some truth. Let’s examine the truth and messages in some consultant jokes

Consultants have no practical knowledge.

The “thousand ways to make love” joke and many others communicate that consultants don’t know anything, have never done anything, and are pretty much useless.

“A consultant is someone who when you ask for the time borrows your watch.”

“How many consultants does it take to screw in a light bulb? I’ll get back to you Monday on that.”

“ A stranger asks a shepherd ‘If I can tell you how many sheep you have without counting them would you give me one as a fee?’ When the shepherd agrees the stranger uses his laptop and a satellite connection and complex calculations and comes up with the right number, and picks up a sheep as payment. The shepherd correctly identifies the stranger as a consultant. ‘How did you know?’ ‘Because you gave me information that I didn’t ask for and already know for a ridiculous fee. Now give me back my dog’”

Message:

Consultants are hired because they “know” how to solve some a problem, but first they must “Learn.” Even an expert consultant who worked in the client’s industry for years has to learn the client’s specific business and company culture. Many consultants are more junior and the client feels that they are “training baby consultants.” The steep learning curve at the beginning of every engagement is what attracts some to consulting, but it can seem like “borrowing the client’s watch.”

Actions:

Educate the team as much as possible from publicly available information before they arrive on client site.
Thoroughly explain the client’s role in engaging with the work including educating the consulting team about company specifics and helping to find data. An engaged client helps ensure and accelerate implementation.
Focus the work on results, outcomes like increased revenue, reduced cost, quantity, quality, timeliness, instead of service offering deliverables.
Teach the client what you do, so the next time they can do it themselves.

Consultants are greedy and destructive.

When clients complain about fees, when their people compare how much junior consultants make vs. their own salaries, it is about relative value. Clients often complain about fear-driven sales tactics, “the worst I’ve ever seen. I hope your bosses [the board, the analysts] don’t find out.” Sometimes insecure consultants (jerks) demoralize client staff. Sometimes an engagement is extraordinarily disruptive. “Changing the tires on a moving vehicle,” sounds heroic until you try it. All these experiences have an impact on the perception of value.

“Difference between a lawyer and a consultant? A lawyer only has one hand in your pocket.”

“Ask them the time, they steal your watch.”

“A consultant, an engineer, and a prostitute were arguing which was the oldest profession. . . the consultant was heard to say, “OK I gel the serpent in the Garden, and then that God the Engineer brought forth Order out of Chaos. Who do you think created the Chaos?”

Message:

Many consultants are allergic to the word “sell.” They think selling is relegated to the much maligned salesman on the used car lot, not “professionals serving executives.” Despite that, consultants are always selling. Extensions (making the existing project last longer) and expansions (replicating the existing project in another buying center) are criteria for promotion to junior partner. Major client acquisition (rainmaking) is often the criterion for promotion to full partner. The “pitch for additional work” is frequently a part of every final presentation.

Actions:

Focus the work on results not service offering deliverables. I know I said this already, but the only way out of being regarded as expensive is to deliver more perceived value than cost. If the economic outcome is greater than the cost, the client may be less likely to call you a thief.
If the client is responsible for implementation, make sure they are prepared to implement. Money spent on recommendations not implemented is waste that will likely be attributed to you.
Don’t pitch additional work until what you promised has been delivered.

Jokes consultants tell about themselves

Consultants often tell jokes about their lifestyle.

Introduce yourself to your next door neighbor for the third time this year? You might be a consultant.”

“What I’m looking for in my second wife [husband]. . . No wait. . I mean third . . . is someone who won’t go ballistic when I say ‘Can we put that on the parking lot?’”

Three consultants are in the hotel bar at midnight talking about the best experiences of their lives. “Sure, sure, a home cooked meal is great, and I remember sex being terrific, but have you ever had a meeting you were unprepared for cancelled at the last minute.”

Consulting is a tough lifestyle, but clients will not appreciate your whining about that or about the consultant jokes.

As a consultant help clients buy for the right reasons and deliver value:

Emphasize economic outcomes and how to achieve them
Prepare to disengage. Don’t put more emphasis on “additional work” at the expense of achieving outcomes of this project.
Don’t create enemies in the workforce by sowing chaos and fear.
Develop capability and not dependence in your clients.
Be helpful – remembering that help is defined by the recipient and help, which isn’t asked for, isn’t help. It’s interference.

Maybe if consultants do these things there will be fewer consultant jokes? Probably unrealistic.

“How do you know if a consultant went to Harvard?”

“He will tell you.”

Aaaask Alan to AI?

by Alan Culler | Jun 5, 2023 | Living, Uncategorized

“Aaaask Alan”

In the late ‘80s when my wife’s children were young and we first began dating, when an unusual question came up and I would know the answer, they’d say “Aaaaask Alan!” Everyone would laugh that I was the font of useless knowledge.

That actually used to happen to me a lot. Billie would ask me about a crossword clue and I’d know the answer. watching Jeopardy I would know the tough question that stumped all the contestant. People, in a social setting, would ask a question or wonder out lout and I would know the answer.

“Aaaask Alan.”

People would jokingly ask “How do you know this stuff?” and I would answer,

“Years of reading the rotogravure section of the Sunday paper.”

This rarely happens anymore. This may be because no one (including me) reads a hard copy Sunday paper, or knows what rotogravure means (description of the unique printing press for the color magazine insert). It may be my 75 year-old, deteriorating synapses limit access to the useless knowledge database.

Or it may be that “Aaaask Alan.” has been replaced. Now at a dinner party when anyone says “I wonder. . .” at least three smart phones are whipped out and the race is on to see whose fingers are nimbler than Alan’s brain. Billie and I participate in this contest too, even when home alone, and when the answer springs forth, we say,

“Google – the death of wonder.”

Now when she asks me crossword clues, I don’t know the answers as often. I speculate how much of my growing trivia ignorance is from the loss of the color insert, and how much is decaying neurons in my brain.

Techno-erasing knowledge and skill

Nan Culler, my mother quit teaching high school math when I was eight (1956) and embarked on a new career as a computer programmer. My mother’s math skills were prodigious.

When I bought my first house, I worried I couldn’t afford the payments and she asked me the price, my down payment, the interest rate (8%) and the tax rate, and calculated my monthly payment, thirty-year compound interest, in her head, to the penny. “You can afford it,” she said, ‘Now close your mouth; you’ll catch a fly.”

When I started using a calculator, she said, “Alan, don’t use those things; they rot your brain.” I didn’t listen. Occasionally now I catch myself dividing numbers by ten on the calculator on my phone. In business school I bought a fancy Hewlett Packard 37E financial calculator and now have to look up formulas for basic accounting ratios.

I drove a cab in 1969 in Boston and knew all the street names in the city, my suburb, and most towns in between. When I lived in London I was amazed at black cab drivers who knew most streets in the 300 page A-Z map book.

We didn’t own a car when we lived in New York City, but in 2008 moved to New jersey and bought maps, not realizing GPS adoption. We bought a Garmin. Now GPS is on our phones and on the car “Nav” system. I periodically catch myself using GPS to go where I know the way, and I know few street names.

Several years ago years ago at Christmas time we gave our then eight-year-old granddaughter the job of handing out the presents from under the tree. She picked up a package and said “ I can’t do this. I can’t read cursive.” She’s almost twenty now and that’s changed, but I saw a video about a new service designing signatures and teaching cursive for your name to those who never learned.

Lost knowledge and skill isn’t new. I remember helping my father clean out his workshop in the 1970s. I found a canvas bag with four tools I didn’t recognize.

“Oh, those are the old Model T wheel tools,” my dad said. “This one is from that later model, a wire spoke straightener. This is a spoke shave for wooden spokes. This is a true-form for the 21” wheel rim.”

“An what’s this?” I said, holding up a weird small sledge hammer-hatchet combination.

“If you hit a hole and you had the wooden wheels, you had to cut a spoke from a tree branch. The mallet was for truing the wheel. I got to where I made and carried spare spokes. Then the wire wheels came out. Still needed the mallet and true-form.”

I wish I’d hung on to those tools as a symbol of knowledge and skills lost to new technology.

Artificial Intelligence, a “hair-on-fire” moment

“ChatGPT, Google’s Deep Mind, AI is changing everything!” There is a story nightly on the nightly news that only people my age still watch. (At least we use the DVR and speed through all the drug commercials.)

OK, I admit that deep fakes in political ads are scary and I watched the “Terminator” movies so I have free-floating anxiety about “SkyNet becoming aware and saving the earth from humanity.”

Tech companies invent things because they can and we should think about the unintended consequences of AI, but, call me crazy, I’m not sure it is worthy of the “hair-on-fire” news coverage right now.

Now anyone who knows me, a “late adopter “ with a dubious relationship with computers may be saying. “Alan is not the person to listen to on technology.”

Fair point. Take this with a grain of salt, but “Aaaask Alan,” I’m going to opine anyway.

There are three complaints drawing media “ink” and airwaves at the moment,:

AI will steal jobs.
AI is stupid!
AI will change everything in ways we can’t anticipate.

AI will steal jobs

Probably. All new technologies change jobs. Farhad Manjoo, the New York Times columnist wrote recently describing how AI will eliminate the need for basic computer programming, which was the job that was supposed to be safe in a digital world. “Learn to code” was what politicians told displaced workers. Now AI is coding. Is that a bad thing? Yes, if you are a coal miner who just learned to code. Manjoo goes on to show how advanced coders are using AI to enhance their skills.

Does AI do a better job than people? Do those chat bots really replace a good CSR? Not in my experience, at least not now. Will Chat GPT replace all writers? Maybe the bad ones. (Hope that’s not me. Who decides?)

AI is stupid!

A story in Futurism.com complained how AI aided search came up with a parody of Vermeer’s painting “Girl with Pearl Earring” instead of the real thing The girl in the painting found had lightbulbs for earrings. Horrors! Culture will be destroyed. Maybe if Vermeer were alive and considered the parody defamatory, he’d have a point, but AI is an infant.

New technologies take some time to get as good as the old or as human skills.

For years steel companies showed TV ads where a man first in overalls, later in a heat suit, controlled a bucket pouring molten steel to be rolled into sheet steel.

When I moved to Pittsburgh people still mourned the loss of the highest paid union job in the mill. The worker judged steel viscosity by the color and the feel of the heat and by the way it sloshed in the bucket. What could go wrong with that?

Many people died, before the mills replaced that job with computers. In the beginning the computers were stupid. It took five years for computers to get as good as a human..

AI will learn faster, but it’s going to be stupid for a while.

AI will change everything in ways we can’t anticipate

Another New York Times story told the tale of a lawyer who used AI to put together a brief. AI made up cases that didn’t exist to support his client’s case. The judge found out. Oops.

This may be an example of the stupidity of AI. Or it may be an example of the potential misuse of technology by people with bad intentions. The news has its “hair on fire” about “deep fakes,” exchanging faces and voices on photos and videos, to show people saying and doing things they never did. Some twenty five-year-old made those for the news show. Scary.

Some people of bad intent may make themaand post them on social media spreading conspiracy theories and other misinformation to influence elections. More scary..

From my uniquely techno-incompetent point of view, we shouldn’t be concerned about the stupid AI. It will learn.

We should be slightly less concerned about lost knowledge and lost jobs. Knowledge gets lost. We are still trying to figure out how Stonehenge was built. Some programmers may be displaced, some people will forget how to compose a sentence, but the majority will figure out how to survive and the chosen will still make art that speaks to the human condition.

What we might want to think about is how to protect ourselves, our children, and our societies from people of bad intent. AI may be faster.. The stakes seem higher, but humanity has always tried to limit the damage of people of bad intent.