“Consultant for thirty-seven years? What? You couldn’t find a real job?”

Bada bing.

I was at a wedding yelling to be heard over the band’s bass, turned to teeth-rattling volume.

“You know what the definition of a consultant is?” Shouted this friend of the bride’s father. “A guy who knows a thousand ways to make love, but doesn’t know any women.”

Bada boom.

“As you might imagine, after thirty-seven years, I’ve heard all the jokes.” I half-smiled and asked him what he did.
“Zinc recovery and remanufacture.” I didn’t know any zinc jokes so I moved on.

Consultants get a bad rap.

I didn’t know that when I joined the field, but it soon became apparent because at every client site and every backyard barbeque somebody had the killer consultant joke. “A priest, a rabbi, and a consultant stood at the Pearly Gates. .  . .”

Some people have no idea what a consultant does and peppered me with question after question resisting every attempt to change the subject, “How ‘bout those [insert sports team here]?” And for me that would be a sign of true desperation because I don’t follow sports. No, I mean, I really don’t follow any sports.

So many people think that consulting isn’t real work that I used to introduce myself at leadership workshops I ran like this:

“I’ve been a consultant for many years. Aside from running my own business, most of what I know about business comes from observing and talking to people like you. As a result I’ve become quite good at ‘Talking about Work.’” This has given an abiding respect for people who actually Do Real Work.”

It always got a laugh and I think people cut me some more slack than they might have otherwise.

I came to describe myself as being in the business of helping companies change, that is helping them innovate or helping them improve. That often led me to the pieces of what I did, running initiatives, training, measuring results, etc. That, at least, the zinc recovery guy could understand.

I asked myself why people both understand what consultants do. People may not know the law, but they understand what lawyers do. Sure there are a lot of lawyer jokes. They may accuse lawyers of being dishonest, but they don’t accuse them of not having a real job. People may not want to be an accountant, but they know what they do and don’t hesitate to hire one at tax time.

Perhaps, the only professional I heard have similar difficulty explaining his work was an actuary. A client of mine had a business that sold pensions to companies. As an actuary he looked at the age and health statistics profile of a company’s workforce and estimated how much money the company would have to contribute to their retirement plan each year. At a party, I once heard him say,

“Actuary. It’s like an accountant, only more boring.”

One problem with people not understanding what consultants do is that there are so many different kinds of consultant. After all, a consultant is someone who gives advice or assistance. (Pay attention to that distinction, advice of assistance, I’ll come back to it in a minute.)

Advice or assistance at what? Could be anything, strategy, manufacturing, data mining, recycling. Consultants often get past this by describing who they work for, “I’m a management consultant.” Most people have heard of the large management consulting firms, like McKinsey & Company, or the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). If you look at the websites of those firms and didn’t really understand business, you might still have difficulty understanding what they do, apparently everything.

So if you are a consultant and you want people to understand what you do, you probably need to describe the part of a business you work in and what outcome you are trying to achieve.

“I help manufacturing plant managers reduce cost through managing inventory turn.”

“I plan new business to business marketing approaches to increase sales.”

“I help senior leaders implement strategic change, getting everyone on board, planning new processes, training new skills, and measuring results.”

Advice or Assistance

I did say I’d come back to this. Advice or assistance is one way of describing two different kinds of consultant, the content consultant and the process consultant.

The content consultant typically works in one industry, like airlines, or banking,  or group of industries, like transportation, or financial services. As a result of this specialization they have expertise and can offer advice. They provide answers through industry research and knowledge. They may also have functional expertise, strategy, marketing, or operations.

A content project begins with a client question and ends with a consultant report, recommendations, advice.

The process consultant provides assistance. The process consultant may also have some experience in an industry or a function or both, but the orientation is different. The process consultant may ask many more questions. The process consultant may seem more like a teacher or coach. The process consultant may work in many different industries and typically stays with the client longer than the content consultant.

The process consulting project often starts with an outcome, something the client wants to do.  A process consulting project often ends when the client has either achieved the outcome or at least is well under way and knows how to proceed. The client no longer needs assistance.

Help

Both content and process consultants provide help. Content consultants provide helpful information. Process consultants teach the client how to do something.

Carl Rogers, the American psychologist, said “Help is defined by the recipient. Help that isn’t asked for is usually perceived as interference and not help.”

A Real Job

Earlier in the piece I whined about consultant jokes and the “bad rap” that consultants get. The bad rap (negative description), the bad rep (poor reputation) that consultants get may be due the Rogerian definition of help.

A consultant who doesn’t listen, but is quick to offer advice or assistance isn’t perceived as helpful. He is seen as arrogant, a know-it-all. A consultant who offers advice when the client wants assistance is perceived as “a guy who knows a thousand ways to. . .” a talker not a doer.

So if you are a consultant, be clear about what your client wants, listen more than you speak, and wait to be asked for help. Then provide what is asked for.

This won’t stop the jokes at parties, but at least your client will know you have a real job.

Strategy consulting has a golden aura.

Strategy consulting has a glow, a mystique, and definitely prestige for most new entrants to consulting. If we come back to earth for a moment, a strategy is a plan:

• What are you going to do and Why?
• How are you going to do it?
• Who will do what by when and at what cost?

That’s it – just a plan. More specifically strategy is a plan to grow revenue of profit or both in the face of competition or other uncontrollable variables, (like available supply, changing technology, or government regulation). It’s a collection of decisions of actions you will take and, maybe more importantly, actions you will not take.

The word strategy comes from the Greek word, strategos, which means generalship and  military warfare was the first use of the concept. Most people trace the widespread use of the word to Carl Von Clausewitz, the Prussian general who wrote On War describing the strategies of Napoleon and Frederick the Great. Von Clausewitz gives some credit for his observations to an ancient Chinese text  Sun Tzu’s The Art of War written around 500 B.C.. While he never uses the word strategy, Sun Tzu is prescient in concepts easily translatable to business. In one of the most engaging strategic planning projects I ever ran, the leadership team compared Sun Tzu descriptions of battlefields, “Ground. . . death ground. . .downhill and uphill. . . the mud or swamp” to the Michael Porter Five Forces model of Industry structure and the nature of competition. The group went on to find winning niches where they compete even today.

Is business war? Some like the military model and many of those people elevate strategy to its exalted  position. I like to remind those people of the words of one  very successful general Dwight David Eisenhower, commander of Allied Forces in western Europe in World War II (and 34^th President of the United States).

“In preparing for battle, plans are useless, planning is essential.”

This quote speaks to the value of thinking in advance of action, but hints that action “on the ground,” will need to be adapted to changing circumstances.

The Plan

Strategy is still just a plan, what and why, how, who and when. The thinking behind the plan should prepare the business to adapt as needed.

There are a lot of strategic planning frameworks. The consulting firm you work for has one, and you will use it, but here is a generic framework to think about.

Strategy must be based upon information about something new in the environment.  Often when a client decides that they need a new strategy it is usually because they missed the changes in the environment – new customer needs or they didn’t anticipate the competitor response. Sometimes the firm doesn’t notice until revenue drops substantially.

If an expert strategy consultant is brought in, that firm may arrive with much documented evidence of those changes based upon their experience in the industry. Or the strategy firm (content consultant) collects data and analyzes it and delivers recommended actions.

The strategy process consultant may have some experience in the industry, may even have opinions about the best course of action, but works with the firm’s leadership to do the research and analysis. The strategy process consultant may even create an environmental scanning function so that the firm doesn’t get similarly caught flat-footed again. The strategy process consultant often works alongside the client to execute the strategy.

Implementation: Strategy Execution

A McKinsey senior director once said to me, “implementation is the client’s responsibility. We would never usurp our client’s responsibility.” My other favorite quote from a military general is from Brigadier General David Sarnoff who was on Eisenhower’s staff and both before and after te war was the CEO of RCA:

“The ‘B’ quality plan executed in an ‘A’ quality fashion will always beat an ‘A’ quality plan executed in a ‘B’ quality fashion.”

I believe that process consultants have an advantage in strategy execution, but even content consultants can succeed if the client is engaged throughout the project. My first project was a new product feasibility study for a heavy duty truck company in the United Kingdom. The project lead engaged the client in the analysis by conducting weekly updates. By the time the client got the recommendations, “build the eight wheel truck, stay away from distribution box vans, there’s no available premium for “heavy duty,” he was convinced and implemented everything.

My second project was with the same project lead who convinced the client to sponsor a study of the market for automatic transmissions in the bus market in nineteen developing countries. However, the client insisted on a “hands-off approach,”  only attended an abbreviated presentation, may not have opened the detailed report, and never implemented anything, though there were seven of those markets ripe for his firm’s transmissions.

I think that even Newbie consultants in a content firm can help the client execute strategy, if you are on-site ask your project lead to allow some feedback of the analysis you are doing from the people in the client system who would be most likely to act upon it. You will need to approach this delicately as some project leads may feel threatened or worry about “leaking” the answer before the big presentation,  If you get shot down remember the idea for when you are managing projects

Business strategy has progressed in the 1970s from the BCG analytical matrices to the models of Michael Porter of Harvard to the value engineering approach of Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, in Blue Ocean Strategy. There will always be new glitzy frameworks from rock-star B-School professors and big and boutique consulting firms, but strategy is always just a plan and a plan must be implemented to be worth anything.

Thought leadership is a phrase that is overused in consulting.

I first encountered it at the Forum Corporation as a descriptor for the instructional designers that conceived of the idea for a training program and structured the research upon which the program was built. Later, at other firms, it became the descriptor of a different career ladder, i.e., you could rise to partner through service offering development as opposed to sales.

At Gemini, service offering development was controlled by the disciplines, strategy, operations, organization, etc. Some service offering development occurred as collaborations between disciplines. For example, I was on the post-merger integration team, that developed that service offering that was sold to many different industries. Gemini’s Business Transformation service offering designed by Francis Gouillart and published in his book written with James Kelly, Transforming the Organization, was an example of thought leadership.

Business Transformation was called thought leadership at the time. It was composed of an analytical framework, the transformation map that showed the current state of every discipline and part of the organization and the desired state of that vector. Plans were developed and actions were taken. The book used a Cigna project as a case example. The transformation map was used on the service offering description using the Leonardo Da Vinci Vitruvian Man, circle in the square, drawing in the center. Many at Gemini mocked the drawing calling him the ”naked guy.” Later it was the paperback cover.

When Gemini Consulting alumni gather, Business transformation is variously described as:

• “ Misguided. I never met a client who said their business needed to be transformed. This was the sole reason for the decline of Gemini Consulting.”
• “Brilliant, but misunderstood. Francis never said you had to or even could do everything at once. Gemini Business Development Executives just saw the dollar signs of ‘whale projects.’”
• “Ahead of its time. It forms the basis of ‘digital transformation’ today.”

By the time I got to Katzenbach Partners, thought leadership was a part of the performance appraisal discussion at most major consulting firms.

So perhaps it is worth talking about. There are a few true thought leaders in consulting firms, Francis Gouillart at Gemini, Tom Peters and Jon Katzenbach at McKinsey, Fred Reichheld at Bain. These folks and others do come up with service offerings, but they also write books and speak about their ideas. Most ultimately leave their firms, join a university or go out on their own.

In fact, being a published thought leader is the single best path to continuing to work as a consultant into you eighties and nineties.

However these cases are rare.

Thought leadership for the mid-career consultant or even the old hand means solving a client’s problem in a unique but replicable way. There are three parts to that:

Solving the client’s problem, this means that the client must be not just satisfied, but enthusiastic about the results, perhaps even to the point of wanting to co-author an article in the Harvard Business Review.

Unique, this means that the firm’s partners haven’t seen a problem solved this way before, and that most people think, “Wow, I never thought of that.”

Replicable, means that others at your firm can understand what you did and copy it. It must be therefore easy to explain and imagine how it might work.

Thought leadership is innovation in consulting. Like all innovation, it comes from seeing things in one context and transferring them to another, analogy. It comes from seeing a need that seems impossible and asking how could that work, visioning. It comes from one of dozens of ideation techniques, to arrive at an idea that is then tested and developed, and executed.

Thought leadership is not talking the most or loudest in a meeting, or using  fifty cent words and quoting obscure academic theories, hoping people will say “he’s so smart” when what they really mean is “I haven’t got a clue what he is talking about.

It definitely isn’t saying “here’s another idea” in the middle of a tight delivery. If is not a designation that one uses to self-describe (“I’m a thought leader.”) nor a defensive response, (“Hey, I’m just trying to contribute a little thought leadership here.)

But if you want to be a consulting thought leader:

Read a lot of business articles, trade press, and academic journals. I think all consultants should do this, but if you are going to be a thought leader, you have to be a researcher first.

Collaborate. There are people who invent things on their own in a basement, but they are typically not the type of people who become management consultants.  Collaborate with colleagues, with university and business school professors and with clients. Every Steve Jobs needs his Woz (Steve Wozniak.) Every Francis Gouillart needs his James Kelly. (Kelly was the president of Gemini, a salesman,  and was widely assumed to have simplified and clarified Francis’s ideas for the general market).

Experiment and find clients who will let you experiment, not with half-baked ideas, of course, but gathering data that you may publish or co-publish later.

Teach – the best consulting thought leaders refine their thinking and share their thinking by training other consultants and the world at large.

There are some who would say that the decision to become a thought leaders is a “Grow or go” decision at the partner career juncture, but I say this is something that mid-career consultants must decide much earlier. They must consider whether they want to continually sell as they progress or whether they want to develop client relationships through research and innovation reported and taught to others

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The man was old. His skin was lined and brown like tooled leather. His clothes were worn but well mended. They now fit him loosely and it wasn’t clear if they always had fitted him this way, Perhaps he wore loose robes to keep him cool in summer and warm when the biting wind blew down along the road from the mountains. Or had his body age-wizened leaving him with loose clothing.

With the sun he rose and after a small breakfast went to the gate of the walled city. The road that passed the gate was well-travelled, but not by many. There was another city a half-day walk in either direction down the dusty road. Most of the travelers walked; a few had loaded beasts or pulled loaded two-wheeled carts. There were no horses here.

The old man fitted himself into a niche by the gate and read. In late morning a young boy would come with his mother. They would bring cistern of water and offer it to travelers without charge. They sold small vegetable cakes for a copper each.

The city was the halfway point. Most drank, the water ate the cake, and walked on. The old man read what most assumed was scripture.

From the road, a man would call out “You there, Old man,” To these,  the woman and boy seemed invisible. The old man would raise his head and smile,. “How can I help you traveler?”

The man would complain about the heat or the cold and say he was thinking about an early end to the day..

“What kind of people live in this city?”

“Where are you coming from?” the old man would cheerfully inquire and the traveler would tell.. “Oh, what kind of people did you find there?”

The traveler would sneer, “They were venal and mean. They looked like they would beat me, Everyone tried to cheat me, but I was too smart for that. They served me garbage and day old food and thought that I would sleep on last month’s straw, telling me it was all they had.. It was awful!.”

“Alas, traveler. This city is filled with those people as well. It’s best to walk on down the road. Perhaps you’ll have better luck there.”

Some such travelers thanked the old man or threw a copper in the dirt at his feet. Most did not. The old man went back to reading.

On occasion a person would buy something from the boy and his mother, smile and converse with them.

Then this person would siddle over toward the gate and say, “Excuse me, Grandfather. I am sorry to disturb your study.”

The old man would look up and smile, “’Tis naught but some old poems. How can I help you traveler?”

The traveler would then ask about the poems or tell his own name and ask the old man’s. Eventually pleasantries would be dispensed with and the conversation would proceed as before.

“What kind of people live in this city?”

“Where are you coming from?” the old man would cheerfully inquire and the traveler would tell. “Oh, what kind of people did you find there?”

“Oh ‘twas wonderful! Everywhere people offered to help me. Our dealings were always fair. They fed me well and I slept on the same straw they themselves used.”

“You will be most welcome here traveler for here you will find people of the same kind. Please come in..”

This story is old. I believe it is a story told by Sufis, the Islamic mystics who used stories to teach lessons of right living, but the story may be older than that.

I first heard it from a trainer in a management training program. The lessons he taught were that people often perform according to your expectations.

It is a story about life orientations. If you expect to find people “venal and mean” you will find plenty. If you expect that people will be helpful, giving and fair, you will find them so.

Of course, the old man, the gate keeper, has a different perspective. It is his job to sort those who join his community. If people find others venal and mean then they are likely so themselves and he sends them elsewhere.

If they find others helpful, giving and fair he warmly welcomes them.

The gatekeeper was the keeper of the culture; he conducted screening interviews.

I worked at a small consulting firm that conducted many selection interviews. To many applicants it seemed like they “interviewed with everyone at the company.” In the beginning that might have literally true, but even as we grew it wasn’t unusual to have more than ten interviews.

I remember one candidate. This person had been a partner in a large firm and was put-out to be “interviewing with kids.” A former partner with a track record as a “rainmaker,” was something the firm needed.

The junior associates universally said “No.” They found this person “arrogant, demeaning, and not respectful to them and to clients talked about during the interview.”

The partner who brought in the applicant was angry, sputtering “Perhaps junior associates can bring in million dollar projects?!” In the end, the firm made no offer to the rainmaker. Protecting the culture was more important.

This was around the time that Robert Sutton published The No Ass-hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Several people at the firm used the book’s title as a way of justifying culture building and culture protection.

These days there is quite a lot of discussion and lamentation about working for bullies, narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths and other generally unpleasant people.

I recently responded to one social media post:

First, Don’t be that guy.

If you find out you are that guy, get help. Change or stay home.

If you work for that guy and you are close -tell him -ever-so-gently- “Hey, you know- you might be that guy.” It might be a good idea to get help from colleagues before you do this because jerks can be vindictive. (In any case, don’t expect to be thanked.)

It is better if you can keep jerks outside the gates to begin with.

“What kind of people were at the last place you worked?”

Please scroll down to comment.

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The brothers were close in age, identical twins in fact, born two minutes apart. This was a source of pride and pain as the “older” twin was always saying “Respect your elders!” The younger twin didn’t like that teasing much, but his frowns were not long-lived.

People usually had some difficulty telling the boys apart; they seemed to be exact physical copies of each other, but these boys did not grow up with the fun of the pranks of exchanging places as some twins do. For as identical as they were physically, whenever they spoke it was apparent that they were completely opposite in attitude.

The “older”  complained a great deal. He saw the defects in anything. A spring cloudless day was “a little cold.” A person’s friendly gesture caused him to wonder “What does he want?” When the family was making plans, he often said things like, “Let’s consider the worst-case scenario,” which sounded strange when he was six.

His brother’s disposition was completely opposite. He expected good from everything and everyone. On a day dark with rain clouds he would say,  “I think the sun is poking through.” When it poured, the youngest twin would say, “It’ll be over soon, in fact, I think it’s stopping.”

The neighbors called the boys “Dark” and “Sunny” though those were not their names. When unsure of something they would joke, “Let’s ask Dark and Sunny and then pick what’s in between, that’ll be closest to the truth.” Everyone would laugh.

Once when the boys were eight years-old, they overheard  a group of neighbors tell.one of these jokes. Dark was unhappy. “They like you better than me. They think I’m depressing. Why do they call me Dark?” Sunny tried to comfort his brother, “Come-on, bro, they’re only joking, let’s go walk the bridge railing.” “Too dangerous,” moaned Dark.

The parents grew concerned about their boys. The twins ninth birthday was approaching and the parents hatched a plan. The adults had always given their boys gifts that were the same or complementary, similar toys, games they could play together, matching clothes, with small differences so they could tell them apart in the wash.

This year they decided would be different.

The birthday came. The parents took Dark into a room with nine brightly wrapped presents that contained toys, and clothes.

They handed Sunny an old shovel and told him to clean the manure from the barn.

The birthday wore on. Dark opened each present. He thanked his parents for each one, but he also fault with each and all. This toy was “poorly made”. That one had “sharp edges.” This sweater was an inconsistent color. He hesitated to play with toys that might break or wear clothes because he might ruin them.

The parents despaired, but decided to check on Sunny.

They found the younger twin at work on the load of manure that they parents had delivered. The dung pile filled the barn  and the boy worked furiously. He was sweating, but smiling as he shoveled. “How’s it going?” They asked.

“Great!” the boy enthused.

“I figure with all this manure, there’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere.”

This is an old story. I often find that old stories are Sufi stories, teaching vehicles of the Islamic mystics. But I am not sure about its origins.

It is usually told as the optimist-pessimist contrast. “Isn’t it much better to go through life with a positive orientation. Don’t be a ‘Debbie Downer’” (of Saturday Night Live fame).

I first heard the story when I joined Analysis & Design at Gemini Consulting. A&D was Gemini’s turbo-charged sales process for reengineering projects. An A&D was a smaller project sold “at cost” (usually at a 15-20% margin vs. a 60-70% margin for normal projects). The objective as told to the client was to do detailed analysis to diagnose problems and to design a solution – a project design to deliver results.

Of course, Gemini hoped to deliver the results, so the A&D objective was to sell the second project. But it was a client decision point. The client could choose to deliver the results on their own and not hire Gemini for the Results Delivery (RD) project.

Most can see that this process, A&D to RD, is open to abuse and conflicts of interest and I certainly witnessed some of that. But Gemini in its heyday had an 80% conversion rate of A&Ds that sold the larger RD project and Gemini’s clients were by and large happy with their work.

The A&D team was under a lot of pressure. A&D projects were usually eight weeks long. They needed to word hard and fast and find process defects that were costing the company money. The team was usually on-site at 7:00 a.m. and often didn’t leave till 10:00 p.m. Consultants frequently flew out Sunday night and home Friday night. It was a meat grinder that many Geminites avoided.

But A&D had esprit d’corps. They believed that they “fed the firm.” They took pride in their workaholism. (I did mention that I was part of this unit, right?)

So when I heard this story in A&D it was in it’s extremely truncated version, just a piece of the punchline really. . . ”Whatcha doin’?” . . . “Lookin’ for the pony in the barn.” Sometimes analysts just said “lookin’ for the pony.” That communicated “I don’t have time to talk , but I will emerge from all this shit with a smile on my face and a ‘finding’ in my hand.”

Mostly, when I heard the entire story told the “Sunny” character was the hero. Everyone would rather be around the optimist. So I’ve heard the story in leadership workshops and personal growth webinars. The message is always how my sister used to answer questions about her blood type, “B-positive and that’s my attitude in life!”

However, once I heard a process improvement trainer tell this storymto a group of internal process improvement consultants. He let the laughter at Sunny’s pony quest die down and then he said:

“The twins grew up. Dark went into quality control. Sunny became a salesman.”

He then proceeded to conduct a discussion of using everyone’s strengths on an improvement project. Sunnys were good at management presentations and funding requests. Darks were good at seeing unintended consequences of a plan. “Everyone has a role,” he said, and then he showed this Hagar the Horrible comic strip.

 “Tell me, what did you learn?”

It was the last team meeting of my first consulting project. The team was entirely composed of London Business School first year MBA students. We had just spent the summer studying the UK commercial vehicle market to determine the feasibility of two new truck lines. The client was ERF, a Cheshire assembler of heavy duty forty-four-ton articulated lorry cabs (called tractor-trailers or semis in the US). ERF asked us to study whether they should build a thirty-two-ton,  eight-wheel vehicle (think garbage truck or road construction dump truck) and a sixteen-ton box van (used for grocery distribution and U-Haul rentals). As the “data secretary” for the team, I felt that the question was directed at me.

I stumbled a bit over the words but launched into a summary of the findings. “In the market for the sixteen-ton distribution vehicle there is no premium end of the market. There is a substantial penalty for vehicle weight because margins are razor thin. . . .”

“No, what did you learn?”

The questioner, Basil, had been the team’s advisor while the project leader, Dick, went to the south of France for four weeks. Basil was a tall lanky man, a bit craggy of face, and a kind, almost professorial demeanor. In our weekly meetings with Basil, he would quietly listen as we reported findings, his long fingers steepled, touching his lips. He only lowered his hands slightly to make the occasional quiet suggestion; we students were pretty much on our own. I had no idea what he was looking for, but commenced again.

“By contrast, the thirty-two-ton market does offer a premium for durability, and the power of Gardiner drivetrain has a certain cache. . . .”

“No. . . what did you learn?” Someone else jumped in to describe how the British Leyland Chieftain was the clear price leader in the sixteen-ton market and no competitor seemed to be able to underprice them, nor establish a premium, for even six months without dramatically impacting their own sales.

“No, no, no. . . well. . .”  Basil intoned in a gently condescending way. “Let me tell you what you should have learned. Perhaps, you learned how, with very little prior industry experience or knowledge, to get yourselves to the point where you could have intelligent business conversations with people who had worked in this industry for their entire careers.”

I looked around the room. It was clear that all my fellow students were simultaneously coming to the same realization that we had in fact done that.

“If you did learn that,” said Basil quietly, “It will feed you for the rest of your lives.”

Thinking back on that first project, how did we learn enough about the UK truck market to be credible to industry insiders? We read a lot and talked to friendly industry people before we ever talked to a client.

For me, the excitement of starting a new project and the steepness of the learning curve are what kept me in consulting for thirty-seven years.

After so many years in the field, I’ve recognized that each phase of the consulting process has its own learning requirements:

From Discovery to Decision the learning requirements are technical and project-specific. Disengagement is hard. Many consultants want to pitch more work and forget that the client must implement.

But in Entry the learning curve is the steepest because the consultant must learn enough about the industry and company to earn the right to proceed.

I worked with some consulting firms and project managers who were really good at preparing the team to learn quickly.

I also worked with consulting firms and project managers who didn’t spend enough time preparing the team. They sent consultants to initial interviews with little prep and clients felt like the consultants were “borrowing their watch to tell them the time.”

Some consultants feel the need to demonstrate how smart they are, which gives all consultants the reputation for arrogance.

But the consulting firms and project managers who are good at preparing the team all provide some of the same things:

• An industry pre-read deck, which includes Information about:
  • Customers and buying criteria
  • Competitors and their products and services
  • Relevant previous industry project materials, if available
  • Articles about industry history and trends
  • Harvard Business Review industry notes (or similar)
• Company background
  • Annual report and analyst notes if a public company (client-supplied data if a private company)
  • Organization charts
  • Relevant previous company project materials, if available
  • Product/service brochures
• The project proposal or statement of work or the relevant portions of those documents
• An email and telephone list that includes all consultants and clients and rules (e.g., only the project manager is to talk to the CEO)
• An opening meeting to discuss questions from the pre-read and the project plan

Many times all this information isn’t available at the beginning of the project, but a good project manager creates a template and charges the team to help fill it in. Clarify what is confidential material and be careful to “not leave this stuff in the photocopier.”

These materials can’t cover everything, but it can lessen the magnitude of the learning curve, which provides a lot of the “fun” of consulting.

And learning quickly “will feed you for the rest of your lives.”