50 Shades of Consulting

Source: VeraSage Institute

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a blog entry by Ron Baker.

The following is from one of our latest practicing fellows, Matthew Tol, from Australia.

The 50 Shades trilogy are some of the fastest-selling books ever. Quite a feat when you see that all “serious” reviewers describe it as appallingly written. It must have something to do with the escapism the books engender.

In many respects, consultants to the professions fall into the same mold. They offer up a fantasy, some escapism and possibly a somewhat removed-from-reality view of what a “normal” firm should look like. It appears that they have a view of the world based largely on some experience they had many years ago. Whilst there are some things that the consultants to the professions do well – mainly cause people to think – their approach is possibly not relevant in the current environment.

For consultants to be truly effective, they need to assist the firms they work with to develop new and innovative strategies to manage and inspire their staff.

Lots of firms base their existence around timesheets. This is a measurement tool that is so subjective as to be fictional and which bears no connection to quality or creativity in problem solving by the people on the job.

I received an email the other day from one of the consulting groups talking about concepts like “value billing” and the like. Great. But then they go on to discuss the need to measure the time spent on the job to see whether it is profitable. You agree on a price with the customer based on the results you're going to deliver. You then spend time recording the time you spend so that you can get to the end of the job to spend more time determining whether it was profitable? At what hourly rate were you working? This is like driving your car in the rear vision mirror.

For the complete entry, read “Why the Consultants to the Professions are Whipping us into Irrelevance.”

From VeraSage Institute, July 23, 2012, http://www.verasage.com/index.php/community.