Oops and OS#!T: Consulting Failure Modes

Oops and OS#!T: Consulting Failure Modes

by | Mar 7, 2025 | Consulting

I survived a life career in consulting without being murdered by clients or colleagues. That isn’t to say I made no mistakes, nor suffered no injuries, just that I learned quickly enough to recover, if not on that project then on the next.

These days, in comfortable retirement, I’m looking back with wonder that clients, bosses, or fellow consultants didn’t call “Vinny from Providence to take me for a ride.” In gratitude, I thought I’d share some things I observed that make individual consultants fail.

Most consultants have done one or more of these, and some continually get away with more than one for no reason other than their confidence and charm to skate over thin ice. I was never that good on ice skates; I just learned to avoid these mistakes.

The “smart guy” aura

Consultants are often naturally insecure, but want to appear confident. They think dressing like the CEO, pricey suits, fancy cufflinks and watches, helps them. Some show up in a polo, ball cap and chinos, but the watch is still there. It’s a form of self-promotion that is read as arrogance.

Consultants understand that arrogance is off-putting, but there are little things they can’t seem to stop, like:

  • Mentioning their degrees and alma maters in introduction.
  • Name dropping clients they worked for.
  • Quoting the latest management best-seller.
  • Sharing everything learned about the client company and industry from the pre-read.

Presenting yourself as a smart guy just puts up a barrier to empathy, which is what will distinguish you.

“The worst I’ve ever seen”

Selling by fear was common when I worked in reengineering. Those who did this believed that it raised client urgency to hire consultants. I observed that was true for underconfident clients. Other clients were angered.

“The worst I’ve ever seen” produced a “you don’t understand” response, or worse a “don’t let the doorknob hit you on the way out” retort. Even when we were hired, the negative sales approach made it harder to get clients to move as rapidly as we wanted. People lower in the organization tended to hide data that made them look bad, or work extra hard to justify the “way we’ve always done it.”

Crowing about early findings

This is such a rookie mistake. Early in the analysis, a young stream lead or project manager finds an anomaly, too much inventory, two initiatives with the same objective, an unhappy customer complaint that hasn’t been resolved, or one department with a 1/5 span of control when others have one manager to ten staff members.

Sure you are excited. You are already earning your fees. So you run to tell the buying client and anyone who’ll listen.

Then you find out. We stock extra inventory from that supplier because they are shutting the factory for maintenance, the two initiatives do entirely different things and are coordinating on the shared objective, the CSR solves the problem she’s been waiting for her manager to return from holiday to approve, and the low span of control department staff are all new and being intensively trained by the manager.

What you wanted to do was impress the client and you undermined your credibility because you didn’t ask enough questions.

Just look at the numbers

One of my earliest projects was to help decide whether a can manufacturer should rent enough warehouse spare space to manage a biannual peak in capacity or to buy an extra warehouse and rent out the extra capacity at non-peak timeframes. We were given spreadsheets of manufacturing output and warehouse costs and the real estate transaction costs for an empty local warehouse. We were expected to do multivariate correlation analysis.

I suggested that we interview some manufacturing staff. There was a lot of staring at their shoes and one said, “you should interview customers, especially at the soft drink plant.” The soft drink plant manager stared at his shoes a lot, too.

We did some more analysis and uncovered a deal between the plant managers at the can manufacturer and the soft drink plant. The two firms were on fiscal years three months apart. Cans were shipped and returned to maximize each manager’s bonus. There was no need for more warehouse space.

I have worked on downsizing projects that looked at what people were paid in total but ignored overtime that was cause by understaffing in some departments. I have looked at excess inventory numbers, as described above, where a colleague wanted to fire the inventory manager.

Numerical analysis can identify a potential problem, but you have to verify the root cause. Sometimes that means you have to talk to real people.

It’s simple

I admit this is a pet peeve. Murphy is right: “Nothing is as easy as it looks.”

Consultants are hired to help companies change. The client may want to increase revenue, or increase profit, by reducing cost. There may be inefficient processes, antiquated equipment or systems. There may be some “people issues” in the way, wrong people, too many or not enough people, a lack of integration between departments or divisions. Or many of these things at the same time. If it was simple the client would figure it out on their own and never hire a consultant.

Why then do I see consultants advocate a “ten percent across the board headcount reduction” that treats growing understaffed businesses the same way as declining overstaffed ones? Why do they offer staff a buy-out to leave, “eight months salary,” so that the most competent, i.e., anyone who knows they can get another job, leaves? Why do they design an organization by drawing redlines through names on a spreadsheet with people’s names, grades and salaries without ever talking to people or looking at personnel records? Why do they start new systems or processes without running the old in parallel? Or just copy a strategy, metrics, or other solution from another client without analyzing potential differences and conflicts?

It’s because they think it’s simple. Easy peasy. It’s not. And it’s just another disrespectful, arrogant failure mode born of the belief that we’re the “smartest guys in the room’, which is what the Enron guys used to say, and that worked out so well.

What is simple are the words that describe the antidote to all these failure modes: gratitude, humility, empathy, the foundation of being helpful when asked.

That’s simple to describe, but it does take some self-awareness, discipline and humility to apply.

 

 

There are more stories of success and failure from my life in consulting in Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates and Their Mentors. Click here for details.

Client Bashing? Stop.

Client Bashing? Stop.

by | Feb 16, 2025 | Consulting

“Can you believe how stupid?”

“I know. You’d think they’d see the obvious . . .”

I was in a small group of twenty-something consultants complaining about our client. I’m embarrassed to say I was in my fifties, but I was joining in. Suddenly a founding partner of the firm, seventeen years my junior, joined the group.

“Permission to not client bash?”  he said quietly.

“Oh. . . point taken,” said I sheepishly. I had delivered this message to teams before, but I had backslid into a client bitch session.

Client bashing happens much too easily in consulting, for many reasons.

The “curse of knowledge”

You are hired to help solve a problem. You use the obvious methodology, which you’ve used before, and you wonder how anyone else wouldn’t know that. That’s called the “curse of knowledge;” once you’ve learned something you forget what it was like not to know it. Clients may never have been exposed to zero based budgeting, or whatever specialized knowledge you are peddling. They may be too immersed in the day-to-day and miss what you see as obvious. That doesn’t make them stupid. They just need your help. And you know what? That’s why they hired you.

Insecurity

A senior partner explained the MBA recruiting criteria to me.

“We are looking for smart, nice people, who are just a little insecure. You have to be smart because clients have difficult problems. Clients and the team must like you, so it helps to be nice. We look for those who are a little insecure, because they work harder. This is a tough business which requires people to power up to deliver results.”

Sometimes imposter syndrome, smart people who are insecure and ‘power up’ to compensate, leads to what is perceived as arrogance. Consultants who have learned enough about a business to sound intelligent, may stop listening, or worse privately demean their clients.

Noblesse-Oblige-less-ness

Sheldon Cooper, the main character of the Chuck Laurie television comedy “The Big Bang Theory,” is a genius. We meet him as a Cal Tech theoretical physicist who went to university at twelve, and got his PhD at eighteen. He is almost completely devoid of social skills and completely obnoxious. Sheldon has been the smartest person in the room his whole life and has unmistakable disdain for lesser beings. The twelve season show milks the comedy of his much too slow humanization. There are far too many Sheldons in consulting.

Despite the smart-nice-insecure recruitment specification consulting hires too many Advance Placement, Ivy-Tech, Rich and Famous or RaF wannabees. These folks are not just imposter syndrome arrogant they are the genuine article. They really do believe they know better, do better, are better, than everyone else. Some of these folks, like Sheldon, get humanized as they age. Some do not.

I could go on, but the reasons for client bashing are less important than the effect.

Client bashing impedes service

It took me a while to understand that consulting is a helping profession, like medicine, or psychotherapy or social work. Clients have a problem, not enough revenue, too much cost, or people stuff, – you know, messy-motional-humans getting in the way of a well-engineered technical paradise. Clients ask for help solving the problem, which is a good thing, because as American psychologist Carl Rogers reminded us, “help that isn’t asked for isn’t perceived as help. It is interference.”

This brings us to the first problem. Often the boss asked for the help and the people below him didn’t. Oops. So consultants arrive ready to help people who don’t want the interference. Bash, bash, bash.

Carl Rogers also said, “it is impossible to help someone you don’t like.” He advised “find something about your client that you like.”

The converse is, when you are bashing your client, you are deeming them unworthy of your help. Why would you “serve’ someone you considered unworthy of your service? You would be unlikely to do your best work.

Bashing the client sets up an adversarial relationship. In your mind, they are less, and you must win, and get the credit, rather than helping the client to win, even if they claim to have “done it themselves.”

RIF, Rightsizing, POP

In the 1990s I did a lot of reengineering work. Reengineering was just business process improvement, but it took on a mystical ethos due to the book of that name by Michael Hammer. The firm I worked for was hired for huge projects. We’d arrive with a large team of smart, nice, insecure young people and take over a client’s organization for a year.

Sometimes these projects were run to teach the client process improvement. In those projects there was a large client team, lots of team training, and the organization was left more efficient and productive.

Sometimes the consulting team did most of the work. On those projects, I observed the project leader often promised a specific reduction in force, (15% RIF). They talked about euphemisms like “rightsizing,” or POP (people off payroll). There were no revenue growth goals; marketing processes were never looked at.

In the first kind of project client bashing was minimal. There were real improved business results, some revenue growth, some cost reduction. Downsized people were treated fairly and often redeployed elsewhere in the company. When the project was over, there was often a goodbye party where the client teams sent consultants off with thanks.

In the second kind of project, client bashing was the order of the day. There were often union actions and lawsuits. Sometimes there was virulent “resistance” and on more than one occasion violence.

Correlation is not causation. So the client bashing is probably a symptom. And who is to say where the adversarial relationship began, with the consultant, the hiring client, or both.

When you need people to change, bashing them isn’t service, and in my observation isn’t a success strategy either. If you find yourself tempted to client bash, stop, and repeat:

First, do no harm, be helpful where asked, focus on outcomes and process.

 

 

Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates, and Their Mentors is the story of a consulting career where I learned these values. Click here to learn more.

Untangling the Mess

Untangling the Mess

by | Jan 19, 2025 | Consulting

He was introduced to us as “Charley, an old-time key logger,” an introduction that seem to both amuse and annoy him.

“Thanks, I guess, Carol, Did you really have to put in the “old-time” bit? These folks can see I’m old just by looking at me.”

“Oh, sorry Charley,” Carol from HR laughed, blushing a bit, “But I hope he tells you some stories about being a jam-breaker.”

Charley didn’t look like a lumberjack. He was about five-nine, slight of build, and lean in a hard sort of way. He was bald with the gray fringe buzz-cut short except for a little forelock which stood straight up about three quarters of an inch in what might have once been a crew cut.

There were about ten of us in the group, contract facilitators of what were called “quality circles,” for a forest products company. This was our half-day orientation to the business, a multi-slide show with various speakers, to be followed by a small school bus tour of some facilities.

I don’t know why I instantly liked Charley, but I think I wasn’t the only one in the group who did. His face glowed of working outside with deep smile lines. I thought he must be over seventy. Maybe he was younger, but I was in my thirties, what did I know?

“Well,” Charley began. “most of those stories are what a male cow leaves in a field. Nowadays, most all product moves by truck, but when I started, way back with the cavemen, much of it went into rivers. There were logjams and some of my early training was as a jam-breaker. I might have actually had the title of ‘key logger,’  but the idea that a guy could show up in a pick-up and point at a log in a jam, say ‘that one,’ and drive away while the crew pulled it and all the logs flowed downriver is pure Disney. Most of what I did, was stop dumping logs upriver and make sure no one was standing on the jam when it broke.

There is an analogy though, to what you folks will be doing here. Our improvement efforts depend on information from guys at the mills, and field surveyors and logging crews. They’re going to have complaints, and identify problems. Some’ll suggest solutions. Your job is to untangle the mess, to see the connections, and the stuff in the way, like the old-time key loggers used to do.”

Charley went on to orient us to the business, to show us slides of logging sites and roads, of raw product sawmills and pulp mills and manufacturing facilities for paneling and composites. He spoke for about an hour, handed out a glossary of terms and took some questions. He was a lot more interesting than the accountant who followed him.

The first session I facilitated was a disaster. The session process we were given, was as Charley had described it, three questions: complaints, problems, solutions. In a three hour session I never got out of complaints. Evidently, other facilitators were having the same problem. Someone suggested starting with “What’s working well?”

That made a huge difference in the mood of the groups and facilitators were actually able to get to some solutions.

By the third of the six sessions I evolved four questions:

  • What is happening that should be happening?
  • What is not happening that should not be happening?
  • What is happening that should not be happening?
  • What is not happening that should be happening?

These questions started with what was working well. That placed some perspective on the complaints and problem definition that followed. The “positive” view outlined what was working, identifying constraints for any solutions, so we didn’t break what was working.

Staying with the fundamental question, what is happening, was a fact based approach  and avoided the kind of fact-free speculations that we would call “conspiracy theories” today.

In the rest of my career in consulting, I used these same questions in many contexts. I used them with continuous improvement teams who were having difficulty defining a problem because they had combined many different problems in a tangled mess. I used them in an initial meeting with a division CEO who was unclear what was wrong, but knew it threatened planned results.

Over time I learned to record these questions in this matrix:

What is happening: The Is-Should matrix

This matrix makes the tangled mess visible. It shows that what might seem like one problem is many problems, which may be interrelated, but also may be able to be addressed separately.

I always started with the positive, what is happening that should be happening and what is not happening that should not be happening. I asked “what else?” until we ran out of the category before moving on.

When the tangled mess was complete, I asked which problem was the greatest priority, or had the biggest pay-off or was linked to others so that solving it would help the others. People were often amazed at the clarity it produced and were grateful to be “unstuck.”

 

That felt a little like Charley’s key log stories, not as tangible, nor as cool, but rewarding all the same.

 

Cover Traveling the Consulting Road

There are more stories and consulting tools like this in Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates, and There Mentors.\ Available on multiple platforms here

Humbling and Gratifying

Humbling and Gratifying

by | Dec 15, 2024 | Consulting

It has been almost one year since I published Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates, and Their Mentors. This year has been gratifying and humbling.

It has been gratifying because a significant number of people have bought the book. Amazon data shows that my book sold more copies than 90% of self-published books. It also sold slightly more than the average number of copies for all self-published books.

This is humbling. Clearly this distribution is very skewed with a very long tail. Many books do not break double digits; a significant number are under 100 copies. When you look at non-fiction self-published books I do even better, but that just means the distribution is even more skewed.

So I am very grateful for all the people who purchased my book this year and for those who left a rating and/or a review. Some have written that the book was helpful. Gratifying.

I always knew this was a niche book. One of my beta readers described the niche character of the book this way:

“Traveling the Consulting Road is full of fun stories and useful tools. I can’t imagine it will sell much. It is a book for young consultants, who won’t listen, and old consultants who don’t read.”

Ouch. As I said, humbling.

Remembering this near the one year anniversary of the book’s publication, I got to thinking. I found that statement funny because there is some truth there. As a young consultant, heck as a young person, I didn’t listen well. If you ask some people who love me, they will tell you that affliction hasn’t abated.

There are many jokes about consultant arrogance:

“Sure he’s smart. Just ask him, he will tell you how smart he is.”

“A consultant is a person with an opinion on absolutely everything, without the benefit of experience in anything.”

“Consider if you will, a person educated to the point of unbearable ego, such that they think that people should pay them for their advice. Now imagine trying to tell that person anything, an exercise in utter futility.”

But, I wrote this book to share what I learned, over thirty-seven years. I wrote what I learned about getting a job and being successful inside a firm, about solving different kinds of problems that clients call consultants for, about how I learned to become an independent consultant, start a firm, etc. I wrote down all the mistakes I made as a young consultant with the hope that other consultants might learn from my mistakes.

Yeah, right. Would I have bought this book at thirty? Maybe, but probably not. Do I expect undergraduate juniors or first year MBAs looking for an internship to go on Amazon looking for this book? Maybe, but probably not.

But wait, I also wrote this book for mid-career consultants and senior consultants, mentoring their younger colleagues. When I was in those roles inside a firm, I was a trifle busy. I did make time to keep up with the business press. I subscribed to The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, but truthfully, I mostly scanned the Table of Contents to see if there was an article about my current clients, their competitors, or a particular issue that they were facing. I did read some business books, but mostly best sellers by academicians or CEOs. So while I might deny membership in the “older consultants who don’t read,” maybe I was more so than I’d care to admit.

When I worked for myself, I was better about reading because I had more control of my schedule, and the autonomy I had, allowed me to follow my interests. Also, the life of an independent consultant is often dominated by meetings with prospective clients, and reading makes for more interesting conversation. Did that make me “well-read and au courant?” I wouldn’t exactly say that.

Many independent consultants write a book to give themselves credibility. I didn’t do that, probably should have, but if I had it wouldn’t have been this book. It would have been a book describing a particular methodology, in which I wanted more work, the “one pound business card.” No, I wrote a book of consulting career advice, hoping the audience would be less arrogant or overly busy than I was.

So I wrote Traveling the Consulting Road for the young or old consultant I wish I was. That realization is humbling.

It is, however very gratifying that there are quite a few of those people out there. Thank you young consultants who listen and old consultants who read. You restore an ancient consultant’s faith in humanity.

Recently, another market emerged, which had not occurred to me before, retired consultants buying for their children and grandchildren.

I received a note from one retired colleague, who bought the book for his grandson who had just become president of his university consulting club, and another consulting partner considering retirement, who bought the book for her daughter who was in her first year at another firm.

Whooda thunk it? I have mailed to university and business school consulting clubs and that did produce some sales, but the grandparent market never occurred to me. And the retiring partner?  She said, “I hate to admit that my daughter does not seek me out for career advice. Perhaps she will listen to you.”

So parents and grandparents, if you’re still looking for gift ideas . . . (I’m not too humble to ask).

And thank you to all who have bought, read, and/or reviewed Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates, and Their Mentors.

I am very grateful.

Come to think about it. I have written before about humility and gratitude being tickets for admission to becoming a good consultant.

May 2025 be as humbling and gratifying for us all.

 

For those interested in the book

The Grateful Consultant

The Grateful Consultant

by | Nov 22, 2024 | Consulting

It is almost Thanksgiving.

At our house we all sit around the turkey, for those who partake, and four-cheese mac-n-cheese for those who don’t, and say one thing we are each genuinely grateful for. Saying just one thing often precludes career stuff, I mean it doesn’t really stand up to health, and the love of family and friends gathered together,

But I am grateful for my thirty-seven year career in consulting, my clients, my colleagues and for interesting work, and enough remuneration that I was able to retire.

I actually think that gratitude is a required value for a good consultant. If you are genuinely grateful for your job, for the opportunity to help clients and their companies change, for the relationships you build and the collaborations with clients and colleagues, wouldn’t that make you a better consultant?

When I worked for myself, and received a check, I called, or wrote my client and said “Thank You.” Sometimes I sent hand written “”Thank You” notes. Thanking people for their business always seemed to pleasantly surprise people. When I called, I said thanks, and people often asked what I really wanted. “Just to say Thank You.”  “Really?” “Really.”

Did you ever thank your boss or your colleagues? I wish I’d done more of that. I got wonderful opportunities and enjoyed working with mostly smart nice people.

I told clients I pitched, thank you for the opportunity, and I may have said the same when I was interviewing, but I don’t think I said  ‘thank you’ enough after I was hired.

Thank You.

I’m pretty sure I’ve told George Litwin I appreciate the way he mentored me and for some of the most exciting projects of my career. Thank you again, George. Did I thank Ellen Hart for hiring me at Gemini Consulting? Not sure. Thank You, Ellen. Did I than Jon Katzenbach, Marc Feigen and Niko Canner when I was hired at Katzenbach Partners or at any time before I quit four years later and left the same day? Thank you, Jon, Marc, and Niko.

Did I thank my partner Keith Morton at Morton-Culler and Company or my Results-Alliance partner the late Ric Taylor? I think I did, maybe not enough. Thank You Keith and Ric.

Thank you to Jere, John, Roopa, and Brigitte, and any and all who helped me and especially to those that I behaved in a less than grateful way.

I was probably better at thanking clients than I was at thanking bosses and colleagues. How very me.

“Hey, wait a minute,” you say. “What about self-confidence? Isn’t that the core of consulting? Shouldn’t  bosses, clients, and colleagues be grateful to work with me?”

You make an interesting point, person powering up. You are smart and nice and a little insecure so you work really hard. (This is the hiring spec for most consulting firms.) But are you sure that you aren’t covering your insecurity with confidence? Consultants sometimes do that so well that they come off as arrogant. Of course, there are also consultants that have been told for their whole lives how smart they are; these consultants come to believe their own press and their insecurities become buried so deeply below projected confidence that no one, not even them, know their insecurities actually exist. (Guilty.)

Don’t be that guy? (Most of these consultants are men, but perhaps gender-jerk correlation is not causation.)

Gratitude, though? Is that really necessary? Yes.

Let’s say you work in a firm with two mid-career consultants. One thanks the analysts and production people who stay up all night so the consultant has the deck for the client at 9:00 a.m. The other says “That’s the job. I did it. They’ll do it if they want to stay with the firm.” Who gets their work prioritized in a crunch? Who gets analysts to request to be staffed on their project and who gets those who are “available,” no matter how often the project manager complains to staffing “availability is NOT a skillset.”

Gratitude is a leadership trait and the definition of a leader is a person others want to follow.

And you have to be grateful even when you get bad news, “We need more time,” “The data show that your hypothesis isn’t true,” or “I made a mistake.” How a leader (grateful consultant) reacts to bad news, influences whether people tell you the truth, or are willing to take the calculated risks you ask of them.

Gratitude and humility are correlated, maybe even causally. The core of humility is respect for others. It is the willingness to admit that someone might have a better idea than you, or work at least as hard, or see a way to proceed that you might be blind to. If you respect others to that degree, wouldn’t you be grateful that they are on your team?

Some, who have met too many ungrateful, unhumble consultants will guffaw now, or at least, not believe this thesis. If I thought my apologizing for my own misdeeds and those of the miscreants of my former profession would help, I’d say “I’m sorry.” I am sorry.

My current contribution is to encourage others to be humble, ask more questions before you present an answer, and respect not just your client, but all junior members of the client system. Respect your colleagues even those much below your level. And be grateful these people give you the opportunity to help make positive change.

 

 

At this Thanksgiving time, I am grateful for grateful consultants, for all my former clients, consulting colleagues and bosses, for subscribers to Wisdom from Unusual Places, and for those who helped me with, bought, read and/or reviewed my book, Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates, and Their Mentors.”

Thank You!

Strategy: It’s the Thought that Counts

Strategy: It’s the Thought that Counts

by | Oct 12, 2024 | Consulting

I wrote a book on consulting. I am writing another book on leading change. This quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower is in both books.

“In planning for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”

This quote is attributed to Eisenhower in Richard Nixon’s book Six Crises. It is also mentioned by General David Sarnoff’s published papers. (Sarnoff was a Brigadier General on Eisenhower’s communications staff during World War II and the CEO of RCA before and after the war.)

“In planning for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”

“This makes no sense,” my primary editor, my wife, said to me in frustration. “First, he says plans are useless then he says they’re essential; which is it.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this reaction. When I facilitated leadership teams at strategy off-sites, some leaders said “Huh?” Then, as now, I tried to explain.

“What Eisenhower is saying is that the plan itself isn’t what’s important. No battle ever went according to a plan. What’s important is the process of planning, the thought that goes into anticipating the enemies movements, and advantages and disadvantages. That thinking allows the general to act and react during the battle not slavishly follow a plan.”

This explanation didn’t work with those leaders either. I put it down to the strange way I think and therefore communicate. I take in information intuitively, filling in blanks, and making connections that aren’t apparent to seventy-five percent of the population. So I talk in a shorthand that assumes others make the same connections I do. I get the “Huh?” reaction a lot.

I tried the other similar Eisenhower quote:

“No battle was ever won following a plan, but no battle was ever won without one.”

Worse and more of it. “Which is it?”

To me, this concept is critical for business strategy. It ain’t about the report or the deck from the strategy consultant,. “It’s the thought that counts.”

Why is it that strategy consultants find that clients fail to implement the pristine strategies they design? It’s because the client didn’t do the thinking; the consultant did.

To be fair this complaint is old. These days many expert strategy consultants involve the client in data and framework analysis and conclusion formulation. Process consultants facilitate leadership teams in gathering the data, analyzing it, and formulating strategies. However, I’m sure somewhere there is still a client who makes the cringeworthy comment:

“Change? We don’t want to change; we just want a new strategy.”

Among business majors, MBAs, consultants, and some client managers, the word strategy has a golden aura, delivered in a flash of inspiration from some mystical place – the collective unconscious?- or wherever really smart people get their ideas.

A strategy is a plan. That’s it – just a plan. Sure, it’s “a plan to achieve an objective in the face of competition.” Still just a plan.

I’m told that the word strategy comes from the Greek word strategos, meaning generalship. We might ask why pick the language of war? Business leaders often use war words, conquest, slaughter, defeat, decimation. I don’t really get that. I mean, we are just talking about whether customers shell out shekels for your product or the other guy’s. But what do I know.

I know that a strategy is just a plan.

Cue the Eisenhower quote:

“In planning for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”

Remember:

“It’s the thought that counts.”

Here is an outline of what I think the thought is:

Understand (collect data and analyze)

  • Understand the customer,
    • Who -demographics, psychographics, buying history, share of wallet
    • What they need, want, wish for
    • Where – location, preferred channels
    • When – buying seasons,
    • Why – purchase criteria
  • Understand the competition
    • Who – Major players and minor, alternative products
    • What – offers, business models, advantages and disadvantages
    • When – do competitors’ seasons vary?
    • Why- customers buy from them (and not you)
  • Understand other forces (suppliers, community standards, regulation, etc.) that shape consumption and competition
  • Understand ourselves
    • What are we good at, business model (how we get revenue, operate, make profit)
    • What are we traditionally not good at -why- can we innovate-improve or integrate ourselves out of this problem.

Look for trends rather than point in time conclusions. What is different? What trends that may not be recognized? What new technologies that may change the game? What new groups of customers, new needs, anything that presents opportunities? Is there something in the standard marketplace that you can change, improve, find another way of doing, stop doing because it adds no value?

Plan (There is really nothing mystical about a plan)

  • What are you going to do and why? (specific actions)
    • In product or service design ( How can you differentiate hardware or physical stuff, software – or use instruction, service – personalized connection to the customer).
    • In marketing (Price, place, promotion)
    • In operations (Make vs. Buy, Quantity, Quality, Timeliness)
  • How are you going to do that? (Detailed inputs, activities, outputs and metrics for each and contingency plans for when things get off track.)
  • Who is going to do what? (Actual people who will be held accountable for each action.)
  • When? (A lack of specificity or over-optimism in deadlines is one reason for strategy implementation failure.)

Yes, it is complicated and there are many unknowns and unknowables, but still doable.

Who plans?

Executives formulate strategy and operations managers execute it. Yeah, right. Or worse strategy consultants formulate strategy, present the deck to the C-suite executives and operations managers executes it.

What’s wrong with this picture?

People have been separating the planning function from implementation since Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote Scientific Management in 1911, despite numerous social science experiments that prove how inefficient this practice is. Understanding gets lost in the hand-off. Operators don’t get the “why” of the new strategy or they fixate on one output metric (quantity) and short circuit another (quality) with disastrous results.

But you can’t invite the whole company into the strategy offsite. No, but you can invite a cross-section of the firm and arrange for level and functional communications sessions using those who were there.

And remember

“Strategy is a gift: It’s the thought that counts.”

But. . .

It’s integrated action based upon that thought that gets results.

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