The Firm Off-Site

I think it was at the end of our first year, a new start-up consultancy with one ”famous” founder and his two founding partners, and by this point twenty people total. We’d had a good year; some very large clients had hired us and we’d hired many impressive young people. The senior partner made his opening remarks at the off-site meeting. He expressed gratitude for the large pharmaceutical company and the telecommunications company which had entrusted us with work. He was expressed pride that his partners had brought in those large pieces of business. He enthused with pride about the excellence of the staff naming people by name, the Olympic level rifle markswoma, the various super-smart junior people who had stepped up in our first year, “Alan who got a standing ovation. I never saw a consultant get a standing ovation.”

“Wait, what?” I thought “What is he talking about? Oh, at the speech at the media company.’

Someone asked me later, “Did you really get a standing ‘O? The boss was really impressed. He kept talking about it. I think it kind of unnerved him.”

“I worked with all the managers in that room intensely for a while and then I hadn’t seen them for five years. They were just saying hello.” I really hadn’t thought anything of it.

When I thought about later, I realized that I had unintentionally upstaged my boss.

I arranged for my boss, a senior director originally from a Big Three consulting firm to speak at my former client’s leadership off-site. We first met my former client, the CEO for lunch. I don’t think they particularly connected. My client was an extrovert, a glad-hander; my boss was a quiet thoughtful type. The CEO was a flamboyant dresser; my boss was quietly dressed in the gray suit, consulting uniform. My boss was to speak on his book, which had sold quite well, but  even though I sent it over a week before my client hadn’t looked  at it.

The CEO kept saying how much his company had enjoyed working with me and the results they had achieved. I think he was trying to build me up with my new boss, who seemed uncomfortable. I kept bringing the topic back to the speech and the lunch was pleasant enough, but I left feeling a little awkward.

The offsite came and I was embarrassed to learn that there was another speaker, an L.E.K. partner who was going on before my boss. My client confided to me that this consultant had done some work and would be presenting it. “I had to make sure that there was enough content,” he said. I was not happy, but put on a brave face.

The L.E.K. partner spoke for two hours in the morning; my boss was on for  an hour before lunch. The core of what the other consultant presented was a custom metrics developed tree for the firm, a balanced scorecard of sorts. This firm sold national spot radio time on literally thousands of radio stations to advertisers. There were sales metrics, agency service metrics, station service metrics financial metrics, different types of revenue, profit margins for each, all linked to growth targets for the next year.

He presented well, built the tree up from scratch with animation, but I think the audience of forty to fifty year-old advertising salespeople might have found it a little dry  It was clear that the CEO liked the tree and that they’d all be measured by this tree next year; they golf clapped when the L.E.K. guy was done..

Then the CEO read from my boss’s bio about the critics reactions to his book on teams, and said that this speaker was “made possible by someone you all know, Alan Culler.”

The entire audience rose as one applauding, whistling and hooting. I waved, but they kept applauding for over a minute, while my boss stood at the podium, nonplussed waiting to speak. Eventually, he cleared his throat, things quieted down and he spoke. He spoke well as usual, with some humor, got good applause when he finished and took questions, which would have gone on longer except lunch was served. He got applause again at the end of questions, but people came up to me all during lunch to say hello.

As I said, thinking about it later, if I were my boss, I would have felt upstaged.

Consulting is NOT about Standing Ovations

Consultants help people and companies change. The best consultants are almost invisible, quietly transformative.

Clients hire consultants to achieve a certain result, more revenue, or more profit, mostly. Sometimes clients hire consultants for “people stuff,” conflict resolution, training, getting people on the same page, reorganizing. I spent a lot of my career doing people stuff, but I always kept the goals of more revenue or more profit in mind. So I did work in three areas Innovation (more revenue), Improvement (more profit) or Integration – making sure that change was integrated into the organization,

My goal was to always be helpful, as perceived by the client. Help is defined by the recipient. Help that isn’t asked for isn’t likely to be perceived as help, more likely as interference.

The last value that shaped my practice was to always remember, “it’s the client’s business.” This meant that I was religious about giving credit for ideas to those who came up with them and never taking credit for results. I worked with clients, helped where I could, They achieved results.

So standing ovations, applause of any kind, weren’t something I sought. I facilitated leadership team meetings, ran leadership workshops, and training sessions. Sometimes at the end, the leader would thank me and my co-facilitator and that would prompt applause. Sometimes I’d say, “Thank you and now give yourselves a round of applause, because you did all the work,” which produced laughter and applause.

There were some incredible meetings over the years, where people got a lot done and were grateful and applauded. Some of those were at the radio rep firm.

What Happened in this Case

My mentor George introduced me to the firm, He worked with the CEO on and off for more than thirty years at that point. George was regarded as smart, fun, a little crazy, a “force of nature.”

This was a small company, two to three hundred people. They handled huge amounts of ad revenue for their client stations, so they needed the systems and processes of a much larger firm. Further, they managed two distinct ‘customer” groups. There were the radio stations, whom they called “clients.” The stations themselves had many influencers at the station level and  were owned by an ever-changing array of individuals and corporate media groups.

The second group of customers bought advertising on the stations. This was an equally complex collection of decision makers, media buyers, media planners and some creatives and account people at advertising agencies,  as well as marketing managers at client corporations.

About 11 years prior to the off-site where my boss spoke, the company had a new strategy to reverse the decline of radio’s share of the advertising mix. In short the strategy was to increase calling high and wide. Instead of just calling on media buyers, after a campaign was planned, reps would call higher and wider. We created a new salesforce, and a relationship manager structure to manage the internal cooperation necessary to pull this off.

I designed a strategic training program based around the Forum Corporation’s Influence Management course. I used Forum’s feedback instrument, questionnaires sent to five people with aggregate feedback given to participants as to drive the training. We used two sets of feedback, customers, and internal resources the participant needed to make the strategy work.

The program was a four day residential program delivered in the company’s conference center, a late nineteenth Century mansion in Tuxedo Park, NY. The sessions started Sunday evening, ran from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 pm Monday Tuesday and Wednesday, and till 1:00 on Thursday. Meals were phenomenal, alcohol flowed at night. The sessions were intense and I did feedback coaching sessions with anyone who wanted it.

I literally trained everyone in the company in the four-day program.  The relationship managers program was two one week relationship management simulation based sessions that I trained with a Harvard Business School professor, a Harvard DBA and a former Monitor consultant.

The strategy was very successful for the next few years. In the interim I went first to Gemini Consulting and then to this start-up firm.

So my boss’s audience was mainly the mid-career people I had trained who had risen to be new leaders of the firm as well as the remaining leadership team had not seen me in five years.

Therefore, my interpretation of the standing ovation I received was long separated old friends saying hello. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t anticipate it or I might have warned my new boss, as I certainly didn’t intend to upstage him.

My boss didn’t close work with this firm, but I did, on and off until the CEO retired.

Lessons from the Standing ‘O’

I never explained this to my new boss. He never asked me. I explained it to those that did (in much less detail). But as I think about it I learned some things:

• Don’t seek applause – Focus on results -“It’s the client’s business” -give credit where credit is due.
• Be helpful-giving help where requested -check to see how it is received.
• Be gracious -if someone expresses gratitude, applauds in some way, say “thank you,” and mean it, but don’t milk it or let it go to your head.
• Try not to upstage your boss.

The Company, CEO, Division Head, Shareholders, Workers, Humanity?

“Who is the client? Are you kidding me? It’s the person who hired us, the person who will pay us or not pay if you don’t do your job!”

The newbie who asked this wasn’t being a smart-aleck. The project manager met regularly with the division head and firmly believed that anyone who didn’t know that this person was the client was an idiot.

However, in the project kick-off, the CEO came and spoke to the combined team of client department heads and consultant team leads. The CEO nodded to the partner on the project and there was an obvious relationship there.  The CEO mentioned in passing that the project had been suggested by the company’s largest shareholder who sat on the board. The CEO also talked about a solution that was good for the company and its workers.

I had been “around the block” by this point, and suggested that we map the “client system as we knew it.” The project manager wasn’t happy but agreed if we included the partner, while she was still in town.

In the session the partner explained that she had met with both the shareholder and the CEO, but that was not “common knowledge.” The partner would continue to check in with her contacts over the project, but  “for the day-to-day the division head should be treated as the sole client.”

What the newbie (and perhaps others) learned is that this isn’t always a simple question.

Client Accountability

The client is always the person who is accountable for the results of the project. This is why the client is always an individual not a company, a division, or a group of any kind. Sure, presentations are often given to a leadership team and, depending on the culture, they may all have to sign off. Some may have more input than others; some may have to do more work as a result of your project. But there is usually one person who can say “Yes” when alb tl others say “No.”

In this case, the CEO and the board member viewed themselves as recommenders. The division head could have said “No” to their suggestion. He didn’t. He thought the project would help. Would he have hired a consultant on his own without prior approval?  Probably not.

To the partner, the client was the shareholder; the CEO was critically important, but didn’t initiate the project. From the point of view of the project manager and therefore the project team the client was the division head.

From a consultant’s point of view the client has two roles, hiring us and benefiting from the results of our work i.e., positive change. Sometimes both these roles are invested in the same person, but not always.

Consultant Accountability

The partner made it clear that our job was to deliver results for the division head.

She also told us that this was a very collaborative culture so the division head wasn’t the only one we had to keep happy. The project manager facilitated building a client system map with individual consultant responsibility for individual client system influencers. This was a rudimentary map. It evolved as we learned more during the project. The consultant team had periodic meetings with two-minute relationship reports.

Each team member of the ensured that our work withs and the leadership team was never caught off guard, surprised by our findings.

This experience was at Gemini Consulting doing operations improvement work, process consulting. This approach is less common in content consulting.

I worked in some expert consulting environments  (e.g., strategy projects) where findings were kept close to the vest to avoid people running off to fix things before all the data are in. The client focus in these situations was on the single client or a few on the senior leadership team.

The danger of a limited contact approach is that it often doesn’t build organizational support for implementation. The danger of the wider client system approach I described is that consultants can get co-opted into the politics of the organization.

Politics and Other Client System Conflict

Some people in organizations see consultants’ arrival as an opportunity to push their ideas. Some political players see the consultant as a way to gain power or advance at the expense of their “rivals.”  Consultants must be vigilant to avoid being “played.”

Sometimes a member of the client system does something in their own interest not the company’s interest. Rarely this is illegal or immoral.

In business school, three students including me were given a small project by a professor. An aluminum can manufacturer wanted help with warehouse capacity. Should this firm buy additional peak warehouse capacity on contract or should they buy adequate warehouse space for the peaks and contract it out during non-peak periods.

In our initial analysis we looked at the peaks in early July and January. The warehouse problem was caused by unusual can returns from the largest customer, a soft drink manufacturer. The can maker was shipping twice the monthly average to this soft drink producer in December and June, only to accept half those cans back as returns January and July. This overloaded warehouse capacity in those peaks and increased warehousing of unused inventory over time.

We asked our client, the Controller, why that might be. This accountant slapped his forehead and paid us for work to date and cancelled the project. We were bummed out.

Two months later we received a note from the professor. The Controller wanted to talk. He came to campus and we met in the professors office, all sitting very nervously.

The Controller apologized for cancelling our work and thanked us. Apparently we had uncovered a fraud scheme between the manufacturing managers at the can and the soft drink plants. The can manager was paid a bonus twice a year on production shipped (June and December) and the soft drink manager was paid a bonus on inventory reduction in February and August. This had been going on for several years. Both managers had since been investigated and fired. Apparently the scheme was suggested to them by a consultant who worked for both firms. We had naively stumbled on this by asking “Why.”

What that consultant did was wrong and most consultants would never do anything like that, but keep focused on the goals of the project and confront or report destructive behavior. Being a consultant is a fiduciary responsibility.

Your Ideal Client

I learned about ideal clients early in my career because I started working for myself. In 1987, I became an independent consultant so I could be home more with my kids. I had some sub-contract work for my former employer, bur I had to develop local business and quickly. For the first time I thought about the kind of people who might hire me. I thought about my skills, matching them to opportunities in local companies. Over time I formulated my ideal client profile.

Those who hired me were often highly analytical, but aware they had some blind spots about people. They were also curious and wanted to be involved in my process. They had a strong sense of humor and especially didn’t mind laughing at themselves.

Your ideal client may be different than mine, but it’s worth thinking about even if you work for a big firm.. Your ideal client is someone who likes you, believes in you, and for whom you provide a unique value. It might be that you fill out their flat sides. It might be that  they think you are really smart, caring, and/or competent. They key is they want to hire you.

During my first stint as an independent consultant, an old hand, Bob, said, “You only need five clients to feed you for the rest of your life. You’ll only work for two each year and that leaves two to three years between engagements.”

I could see how it worked for him. Later in my career I suspected that he was creating dependency. He wasn’t teaching his clients to outgrow him.

That is a particular bugaboo of mine. I think clients should learn to do things for themselves, actually not use consultants. (If you are a junior in a firm, don’t say this out loud. It’s heresy.)

It’s not that I didn’t work on multiple projects for the same clients over many years. I did, but I was doing different things. Sometimes a former client would call me from a new job and hire me for the work I’d done in his last firm.  But even then, I tried to reinforce what that client had learned, and engaged him or her to teach others. This attitude did mean that I engaged in more client development than Bob did at his peak. In lean periods I met with former clients seeking referrals not  work, though I didn’t turn down work if it came.

There were some times I turned down work even when I didn’t have other work to replace it. That was when I was asked to work again for a former client who created a toxic work environment for his people. It only happened two times over my entire career, but I felt good turning those engagements down. Life is too short to enable jerks.

In my view a client is someone you can help deliver results. Paraphrasing American psychologist, Carl Rogers,

• Help is defined by the recipient.
• Help that isn’t asked for, isn’t help; it’s interference.
• Helping someone requires “unconditional positive regard.” You can’t help someone you don’t like.

Rogers was talking to therapists, but his advice applies to the client-consultant-relationship. too. Scope carefully and make sure both parties respect each other and ensure that you remember who is the client.

The Ancient Late Adopter speaks

Let us be clear, I am old. I started as a consultant in 1980; I retired as a consultant five years ago. Most of what I write about consulting comes from those thirty-seven years. I look back over my career and try to extract lessons from my mistakes to pass on to newbies, yeomen and old hands in the field to help them avoid my most boneheaded moves:

• Newbies – understand the kinds of consulting, content and process, and which you might be a better fit for, Oh and start planning for up or out on Day One.
• Yeomen – learn to sell -it is the criterion for promotion and decide how you’ll bring in clients direct selling or thought leadership -yeah, I mean writing books that sell and doing speaking engagements and podcasts.
• Old Hands – If you still want to “do the work” rather than just sell it, you’ll probably have to start a firm or “go independent.” Both are tough roads. And forget about fantasies like “bringing the clients to us” conference centers are hotel and meeting space businesses; your brilliant content is irrelevant compared to sheets, water pressure and cookies.

Interesting as I might think my acerbic self-career-analysis is, I concede it isn’t very forward thinking. As one millennial reader of my upcoming book, Traveling the Consulting Road, said,

“A lot has changed in the consulting world over the years and the way millennials make career decisions has changed too. They are much more aware / well-read / well-connected than folks their age 1-2 generations back. Some of Alan’s learnings are a given now and his advice is not key insights.”

Ouch.

Also, I make no secret of the fact that I am a technology laggard. I use a computer and own a smart phone, but I definitely don’t have the latest apps or social media profiles. I still own a turntable and am encouraged that in some circles vinyl is coming back. (My thanks to Neil Young and Jack White.)

So it is fair to say that maybe I’m the last person who ought to be talking about the future of consulting. But some clients hire consultants for their “intelligence,” whether problem-solving ability, or specific knowledge of industry or competitive dynamics, or “emotional intelligence,’”  unique insight into the mysteries of human behavior inside organizations. Now  comes “Artificial Intelligence.” What does that mean for consultants?

Artificial Intelligence

I already established my complete lack of bona fides to talk about this subject. My mother was a computer programmer in 1956, but I have been dragged painfully slowly into the twentieth century and am still coming up to speed in this millennium.

But I read a book. (“Isn’t that just like a consultant? He read a book and now he wants to talk like an expert?”)  The book is “The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology by Juliette Powers and Art Kleiner and I’d recommend it, but it isn’t really a technical book. It is more of an ethical or philosophical treatise on how to avoid the dangers of AI and use it for the benefit of human society. It did get me thinking in a more future focused way than is my habitual wont.

In the book Powers and Kleiner focus on what they call Triple-A systems, algorithmic, autonomous, automatic systems.

Algorithms

As I understand this, my online searches and transactions fit into a model (algorithm), which is a set of rules, if / then statements for example, that predicts what I might do in the future. Amazon sees that I bought a book on AI and offers me many other books on AI. This happened, and might be a good model for books, interest in a topic begets more interest. It doesn’t work so well for eyeglass screwdrivers because how many do you really need? Tell that to Amazon which keeps offering me eyeglass screwdrivers because I bought one last year.

The algorithms update when they get more information and they have a search function to take in more data. This may be relevant to me on Amazon, but it is really relevant to all aggregated customers on Amazon or if we are talking about government or political campaign systems, it is very powerful and a little scary.

Autonomous and Automatic

After some initial programming, these systems operate on their own. They go looking for new data and build the model further, make decisions and take prescribed actions. The problem is AI sometimes takes proscribed actions, actions that should be limited by law, common sense or just plain good manners. AI just doesn’t know any better. This is why the news media currently has its “hair-on-fire” about AI technology. There are huge data ownership, privacy, and efficacy issues. There are stories of ChatGPT being used to write a legal brief and  when ChatGPT didn’t find case law to match the brief, the software simply made it up. It doesn’t take much imagination to apply my Amazon eyeglass screwdriver anecdote to decision making around nuclear weapons launch monitoring and response systems being run without human oversight and judgement. As I said, scary.

The book goes on to promote ways to design and use this new technology in responsible ways,

• Integrate four logics in design
  • Engineers – we can
  • Social justice – we should
  • Government – protect and serve
  • Corporate -serve stakeholders (make money)
• Abide by principles -Intentionality and open discussion in areas of risk, transparency, privacy, bias, accountability, etc.

AI and the future of Consulting

This book got me thinking. Writers are worried that no one will hire them because they can just plug “give me a script for ‘Two and a Half Men’” into ChatGPT and zip-zipidee it’s done. Actors are worried that the ability to program facial and body movement recognition data will mean that their carefully produced image will show up on screen with no paycheck. These are perhaps valid concerns, but what about consultants?

Some companies have huge databases of customer and customer and competitive data; what will that mean for strategy consultants?  Some social networks  (LinkedIn) have databases of jobs and job seekers; might this inhibit headhunters and human resource consultants? Maybe.

When I was at Gemini Consulting there were repeated attempts to package various service offerings,  “Process Improvement  in a Box,” “Balanced Scorecard in a Box.” These offerings combined some written and some digital tools, packaged with some Gemini training in their use. These were attempts to “productize’  a service offering that was “commoditizing “ and being brought in-house by clients. McKinsey Solutions founded in 2013 seems a subscription model of the same concept and other consulting firms may have followed with their own offerings. Some worry this is “giving away the store.” Others say it is extending the firm’s reach to people who would be unlikely to be mainstream clients.

If we regard consulting as providing information and expertise only, then perhaps Algorithmic, Autonomous, Automatic systems may change the way consultants do business. Generative AI, with natural language processors like ChatGPT, Amazon’s GPT3,5, Google’s BARD, Microsoft’s Bing AI, might simplify proposal and report writing, but at this point will still require substantial human editing.

But if we define consulting as helping leaders change their companies, we probably have a long time before consultants will be replaced.

Business is about people. Whether you call them customers, suppliers, staff, competitors, shareholders, or community, they’re all people. People are messy, complex, and a bit unpredictable. So the interface with technology to make it do what works (vs multiple eyeglass screwdriver purchases), the creativity that sparks innovation, the commitment that leads to change will require people-savvy consultants.

Will consultants need to understand how AI tools can save time? Yes. Will they need to be sensible how these tools are used? Yes.

Will AI replace consultants in helping companies change? I don’t think that will happen for  long time.

* (This post was written entirely with ChatGPT.)  😉 No. It wasn’t. 😊 Really, it wasn’t. No, I mean it. It wasn’t 😊 I have a special offer of eleven eyeglass screwdrivers for $7.99 – delivered tomorrow – free shipping – click here. (just kidding)😊 Can AI make a joke? Or take one?

 Improvement and Innovation

Over my thirty-seven years as a change consultant, I worked on a lot of improvement and innovation projects. These are similar but different methodologies.

The people who work on these methodologies tend to focus on the differences. Improvement often makes an existing product or process better, whereas innovation tends to invent new products and processes. Sometimes where there are both improvement and innovation teams in the same organization the competition can get a little nasty.

“You improvement people are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Oh yeah, innovation people? You focus on where the rubber meets the sky and have no results.”

Innovation and Improvement are both necessary for a healthy business and they are more similar than different.

Both improvement and innovation processes are disciplined problem solving processes. Both combine divergent thinking techniques (e.g., brainstorming) to generate ideas and detailed evaluation and planning to implement and integrate the changes.

One of the concepts both innovation and improvement are supposed to have in common is that they are designing or revising products and processes with the user or customer in mind.

In most continuous improvement methodologies this is called “Voice of the Customer.” In innovation circles there are whole methodologies built around this concept. “User-Centered Design,” which came from the software development industry was created to bring the user into the process earlier than what was traditional software “change management,” which was a half-day user training program.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) built on the functional needs of User-Centered Design or User Experience (UX) to add more psychological and emotional needs.  HCD practitioners often use a wider lens and talk about benefits to society or humanity. HCD  is often the innovation methodology of choice for lifestyle products and services including social services.

I saw several problems at clients trying to make change:

• Innovate or improve? Indecision and conflict about whether to use innovation or improvement methodologies. This is a matter of the life-cycle of the product or process and the degree of change needed. At the beginning of the life-cycle improve it. At the end, or if major change is needed innovate.
• Methodology bingo – regardless of the whether they chose to improve or innovate, when the going got tough someone would say “What we need to do is – Lean, or Agile of HCD. Because I worked with so many different clients over so many years, I became methodology agnostic. I used to tell clients just pick one and stick to it.
• What Customer? One of the biggest problems I saw was internal focus caused by immersion in these methodologies, the lack of any disciplined focus on the customer, the end user or often even the internal recipient of the process.

Sometimes there would be a survey about previous products or services. Sometimes this would be treated reverently; sometimes not. I saw a project manager throw the marketing survey on a desk saying

“Yeah, yeah. The dogs don’t like the dog food. Funny how they keep eating it.”

Voice of the Customer Failures

Recently I had some experiences that drove home this lack of the voice of the customer in the design process.

Lefties (not political)

My wife does most of the cooking in our house. Oh, I cook a couple nights a week, sometimes I cook “enough for the Army” and we eat another night of my leftovers. Billie is one of the ten percent of all people in the world who is left-handed. Over the years she has acquired a saucepan with the spout on the right and a slotted spatula that slants in to the right.  Sometimes I inadvertently pick one of these implements up.

“This [saucepan or spatula] is really awkward,” I whine.

“Welcome to my world,” Billie snipes back, “I have been cooking for over fifty years and I have very few left handed kitchen tools. You pick one of them up and complain.”

Ninety percent of the people in the world are right handed, either because they really are or they were “encouraged” to be. (They tied my father’s left hand behind his back until he was five.) Ten percent of the world or about eight hundred million people are left handed, thirty-three million in the United States. You’d think that would be a big enough market for someone to make a few left-handed kitchen tools.

A friend, a guitarist, complains about finding left-handed guitars. “Just restring it,” a sales clerk told him. Of course, that’s ridiculous because the nut and the saddle are cut for strings in the order of a right-handed guitar. Even if you did that the intonation would be wrong because the saddle is often slanted to make up for differential tension on the strings..

We righties are clueless about the difficulty of being a lefty living in a righty world.

I think product designers design products for themselves and assume that everyone else is like them.

“That’s a child-proof cap.”

Right, except when the arthritis in MY HANDS keeps me from opening the bottle of extra strength arthritis medicine,  and I hand it to my four-year-old granddaughter to open as I have done more than once.

What really inspired this post:

I just purchased hearing aids. Rock-and-roll finally caught up to me. I have lost high registers in both ears. The right is worse than the left. It’s too late for my children, but I tell my grandchildren, “Don’t stand in front of speakers that are taller than you are.

Let me say I love this product. I can hear my granddaughters when they mumble, our TV is set at a significantly lower volume, and Bille tells me I say “What?”  less when she holds a conversation with me from her office down the hall.

It took a while to learn the smart phone app and I still haven’t figured out how to have my Bluetooth car connection not be overridden by the hearing aid connection.

The manual says to “turn the hearing aids off when not wearing them and when they are not in the charger. Put them in the case to go swimming, for example, turn them off, but when you put them in the charger turn them on or they won’t charge. Turning them off a few hours a week will extend battery life.”

There is a rocker switch on the back of the piece that goes behind my ear.

My audiologist demonstrated.

“When you turn it off it plays this little electronic tune.. . . When you turn it back on it plays this tune. Hear the difference?”

“No. . . .  in fact I can’t hear either tune.”

 “Oh . . . of course you can’t. well maybe I can figure out how to lower the tone to the range you can hear unassisted.”

 “OK, but If you were the genius who designed these, don’t you think a small LED bulb would have been a better off / on indicator than those high frequency tunes. I mean these are hearing aids, right?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

These are all tone-deaf product designs (pun intended). I’m sure it is easy to imagine service designs that fail just as completely, like calling when the Internet is down and being told by the phone tree to “visit our website for faster service.”

What to do?

It just isn’t that hard to get the voice of the customer into product or service design or into improvements or innovations.

• First you have to believe that the customer’s opinion is important. So no more comments about the dogs and the dogfood.
• Next ask them.
  • If you have surveys already -read them. If not conduct surveys, or
  • Focus groups, or
  • Customer interviews.
• Integrate the Voice of the Customer into design
• Have some customers evaluate and test whether you got it right.

For clarity, I am talking about end users, and Internal customers who receive the output of the process you might be improving. There should be a straight through line from all inputs to the final customer.

Fine, but what if providing everything every customer asks for is too expensive? This is a real world concern. Make sure you have their highest priority needs and maybe tell those who gave you the feedback the reasons you won’t get to that right now.

The point is improvements and innovations are for the customer. Let’s make sure the customer’s voice is heard.

Two roads diverged . . .

Perhaps you read “The Road Not Taken” in school. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I — I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference.” My English teacher told me this was about Robert Frost’s choice to become a poet, which he felt, in retrospect, was a good choice for him.

I don ‘t remember a “two roads diverged” moment, but I chose the consulting road. I think it was a good choice for me. After all, I travelled the consulting road for thirty-seven years.

I just wish I’d had a map.

So this is a map of sorts, an outline of career choices in consulting. Most of us make career choices serendipitously. Someone gives us advice; someone offers an opportunity at the right time – happy accidents. Consulting careers happen that way too. Mine did. Maybe yours will too, but if you were the kind of kid who learned Excel pivot tables at ten or collected baseball or Pokémon cards and kept them in pristine condition in little wax paper envelops rather than tossing them ten feet into a bucket or clipping them to your bicycle to make motorcycle sounds, then maybe you could plan out an entire consulting career before you graduate middle school.

For the rest of us, wherever we are in our career, here are some of the career choices points involved in consulting:

• To be or not to be. Choosing to be a consultant will always involve the questions of why, when, what and how.
• Up or out or Grow or Go. Most large firms evaluate consultants at promotion points analyst to associate, associate to manager, manager to partner. The job changes from doing the work to doing and managing to doing, managing and selling. If firm managers can see you in the next level you are promoted, if not you are invited to leave. The more levels there are the more opportunities to “get on with the value-added part of your career ̶ somewhere else.” Smaller firms may be less rigid, but still manage staff this way.
• Rainmaker or Thought Leader – the choice between whether a partner brings in clients through direct selling or research and service offering development may start earlier than the partner transition point. A few rare partners do both paths.

Why?

You’ll probably be asked this in your first interview and you’ll say that you “like to solve problems in a fast-paced team environment,” or words to that effect. This article isn’t intended as interview training. It is intended for you to ask yourself why do you want to be a consultant.

Some good reasons to become a consultant:

• You like business and you like immersion in different types of businesses.
• Learning: You are good at absorbing a lot of data and quickly seeing patterns.
• Solving complex problems.
• You like to be helpful and don’t crave credit (It’s the client’s business.)
• Work with teams of smart people.
• The money ̶  you need to pay off student loans. (Obviously you don’t say this in an interview, but it is a reason many people enter a field where starting salaries are relatively high.)

Some bad reasons to become a consultant:

• The money. Yeah, starting salaries are high, but they level out and you will work very hard for what you earn.. If you want to be rich become a tech entrepreneur, or an investment banker.
• The prestige. OK, the Tumi rolling suitcase and computer bag are cool and telling “client disguised” war stories at parties is fun, but it wears thin quickly, for you and your friends.
• The travel. When you realize that you are working in Paris or Bangkok, but only see the inside of office buildings, hotels, rental cars and airports, the magic of travel wears off. Sure you can stay over for personal travel, but most weeks you just want to go home.
• Easy respect from senior managers. Consultants get opportunity to talk with executives, but respect comes from the analysis they do, and the knowledge and skill they acquire over time.
• Be a star. Consultants don’t get credit for results; clients do.. Standing ovations are so rare as to be non-existent.
• Learn people management skills. I saw some great people managers in consulting, but I can count them on my fingers. Constantly changing project teams, speed of delivery, and consultant egos don’t create fertile ground to grow people managers.

When?

Consultants typically enter the field at four times:

• From undergraduate school. Undergrad hires are often analysts. In some firms they stay in the office and analyze data; in other firms they go to the client site. Most leave to go to graduate school or other jobs in two to three years. A very few stay with the firm or are sponsored to graduate school.
• From graduate school. This used to be mostly MBAs and lawyers, but has expanded to other graduate degrees. These newbies enter as analysts, but are usually staffed on client project teams. They will usually face a promotion or depart choice in two to three years.
• After 5-10 years in industry or academia. This group is usually hired for industry or discipline expertise (marketing, operations, etc.). They may face a grow or go choice in three to five years.
• After 10-15 years in industry or academia. This group may be hired for industry or discipline experience, but is usually hired for their contacts and is used in client acquisition (selling) or advanced service offering development.

What kind of firm?

One could write a book on this choice. There are firms that specialize in all disciplines (strategy, marketing, operations, human resources, technology, etc.) and industries. Of course, candidates should consider the specialties that interest them. I also encourage you to consider firm size and whether the firm has a content or process focus.

Large firms offer more training, broader project variety, a more generalist orientation, but they are often more rigid in promotion criteria for up or out or grow or go choice points. Large firms have more prestige and are good places to be from as you move into industry.

Smaller firms often offer more opportunity quicker. They may be less rigid in up or out, but they are also more susceptible to changes in the business cycle.

Firms with a content orientation, expert firms tend write reports and make recommendations as an end product. Project length is often three to six months. Process oriented firms tend to stay longer with the client during orientation. Content consultants sell answers; process firms sell the process.

Some disciplines (strategy, marketing, certain types of financial analysis) lend themselves to content orientation. Process improvement, organization development, and management accounting lend themselves to a process orientation.

How?

How the firm works is sometimes explained on websites and recruiting materials. Sometimes you’ll have to read evaluations on sites like Glass Door or Indeed.

Elements to consider:

• Staffing. Is staffing done by partners as a group or are you assigned to one partner? Is there a central staffing group? What is the expectation of application rate? (the percentage of time you must be applied to client billed work.) Is staffing local, global or in-between?
• Training. There is likely to be induction training, methodology training that will happen on a project and there may be training when the job changes, e.g. management training as analysts move to managers, or sales training as managers move to partner.
• Outplacement process. Some firms have a very active alumni network and use it to place those who leave the firm. Some firms offer outside outplacement services at transition points.

Unanticipated consequences of a consulting career.

Like lawyers, consultants must put up with the jokes about their profession. One joke says a lot about the career.

“If you introduce yourself to your neighbor three times, you might be a consultant.”

Constant travel, meeting new people all the time, can be quite disorienting. The lifestyle is a challenge. There are no mid-week book clubs, yoga classes, or PTA meetings. Finding a spouse, if you’re interested, is hard and maintaining relationships is harder. Some firms have programs to reduce this strain now, reduced travel, family leave, etc. It is worth planning how you’ll manage these issues.

I had to pay attention to staying in shape. For me that meant early morning workouts in the hotel fitness room. It wasn’t my ideal workout time, but the end of the day was too unpredictable and the inevitable Thursday night team event –“Big Food” – made it absolutely necessary.

If I’d had this map, would I have still chosen a consulting career? I think so. I loved the variety of work, the people (clients and colleagues), and the learning. I adapted.  Maybe this map will be helpful to others to minimize some of the challenges I didn’t anticipate when I began my career.

The fallacy of values-based consulting

“Wait. What?”

My regular readers should be forgiven for their cognitive dissonance. I have written often about my consulting values:

• Be authentic
• Be helpful
• Stay focused on results,

I have even suggested that all consultants should have these same values. I might even still believe that, despite how self-centered and arrogant that sounds.

My point is that values are personal, internal, developed through life lessons. The very idea that I might suggest to others that they adopt my values suggests that, despite all my verbiage to the contrary, I did not escape the consultant disease, “being a bit too full of myself.”

“Oh, but that wasn’t my intention.”

Well, you know what they say about intentions. . .  “road to hell” and all that.

I preached results because I saw consultants (including me) get hung up on service offering deliverables and recommendations and then, nothing changed for the client’s business.

I preached authenticity because, the little voice in the back of my head was saying the opposite of the words that came out of my mouth.

I preached being helpful because I believed, still do, that consulting is, can be, should be a “helping” profession like medicine or psychotherapy.

Do sermons work?

I am not a regular church-goer, but I’ve been to Sunday services in many churches of various denominations. I’ve gone with friends to some synagogue services, at Jewish holidays. I’ve been to revival meetings of Billy Graham and some real tent revivals in Kentucky. I don’t think I’ve ever changed my behavior dramatically because of a sermon, but people do sometimes, I think. Perhaps, the occasional repentant sinner, is what keeps preachers like me preaching.

But preachers forget that the sinner’s heart must be open. Alcoholics Anonymous works hen the member has hit “rock bottom.” A helping hand is grasped when you are falling and know it.

Help is defined by the recipient.

I first read Carl  R. Rogers, “The Characteristics of A Helping Relationship”  (September 1958, The Personnel and Guidance Journal) in Psychology 101. Like a lot of assigned reading in college I absorbed enough to write a paper and answer questions on an exam.

Rogers was an American psychologist who introduced a humanistic, client-centered approach to psychology, perhaps in reaction to the intellectually analytical followers of Sigmund Freud and the experiential analysis of Carl Gustave Jung. His work became part of the “Human Potential Movement,” of the 1960s and 70s.

The second time I came across the “helping relationship” article was in instructor training for one of the Forum Corporation’s management training courses. This time it had a more profound impact on me.

“Help is defined by the recipient.” 

“Help that isn’t asked for explicitly is rarely perceived as help, but likely to be perceived as interference.” 

“You can’t help someone you dislike. Therefore the first requirement of the helping relationship is “unconditional positive regard.’”

To be clear these are not direct quotes of Dr. Rogers’ article, but they are direct quotes from the Culler sermon that emerged from my reading of that article. I preached this definition of help in management training, to internal and external consultants I trained, in articles.

Maybe sermons work, . . . sometimes . . . for some people.

I have found that many consultants think of themselves as helpful. A manager in a British consulting firm once described his job:

“Imagine a group of people of considerable ego, whose view of themselves has progressed to the point that they believe that others should pay them for their advice. Now imagine managing such people. Managing consultants is an oxymoron, a complete and utter contradiction in terms.”

Once again, to be clear, I include myself. I worked for thirty-seven years as a consultant, was unmanageable, and even fell into the trap of being “helpful,” when  I was not asked.

That is the key to being helpful. You have to be asked for help. And not in a general way that occurs in any client consultant contracting session, “. . . and anything else you see while you are here.”

So every time I wrote a whitepaper about “unsolicited observations from my work,’ when I thought I was being “helpful,” I was really a self-involved geek. Every time I turned to the last page in the final presentation, the “pitch for additional work,” (which was called something lofty to the client but the “pitch” to the consulting team), I was acting in my own self-interest not “helping.”

That’s the bit that all-too-frequently, we consultants miss. Help must be asked for. Even this post falls into that trap – unsolicited advice. Perhaps if you’re reading it, it is your choice.

Soliciting “the ask”

“How do you get the client to ask?” I was frequently asked this during the Culler consulting skills sermon.

My answer was “it starts early in the contracting session.” If I was working with an executive who was leading a change, early in the discussion I would ask, “What is your part of this problem?” Depending on the answer, I could ask if the client wanted my observations and feedback.

Waiting till later, “Can I give you some feedback?” is less optimal. A colleague once said to me “Whenever anyone asks me that I always say ‘No!’ ‘cause it’s always bad news. Nobody asks permission for the good stuff.”

If you weren’t asked, Stop Being Helpful.

Here are some ways I have seen consultants (including me) offer help. When you haven’t been asked,

STOP:

• Selling “Chicken Soup” projects. This comes from a story about a mother extolling the virtues of chicken soup in fighting colds: “Well, it couldn’t hurt,” If you hear the client, your boss, or anyone say that about a consulting project – Walk away. Selling the latest management fad, or a project that isn’t designed to solve a specific problem or achieve a specific result isn’t “helpful.” It will give you, your firm, and the whole profession a bad name.

• Evaluating the client’s people. You probably don’t know enough. “I have a real problem with so and so.” Who cares! It’s not you job.

• Taking actions that the client should take, like handling complex statistical analysis in a continuous improvement project you’re coaching, or calling key customers speaking on behalf of an executive.

• Making yourself Indispensable and the client dependent, Facilitating every meeting, typing up all the notes, doing all strategic or organizational analysis, talking in inscrutable language and using undecipherable frameworks.

• Pitching new work before you deliver results on what you’re working on. I know, I know, extensions and expansions are how consultants get promoted, but look at the client resources available and ensure that results can be delivered.

• Forgetting to leave. Plan for disengagement. Plan to teach the client enough to achieve and maintain results. Remember it’s the client’s business.

Remember: The Client’s experience determines if you are “helpful,” not your intention.