Once upon a time, I met a drunk consultant
who defined consulting in the coolest possible way I have ever heard “Consulting
is all about borrowing your watch and telling you the time by it”. It was a remarkably
candid explanation summing up a lot of things consultants do (alcohol can work
wonders on you).
The consultants are curious
creatures- they walk into your organization, the same place you have been working
for donkey number of years, find problems which were always glaring at you for
all these years, package them nicely and charge a bomb from you for their gyan.
I am very tempted to say what most people who fail to make it to big consulting
firms on campus say “Ah those blood sucking buggers who just gas around and
charge big monies for it”. But let us not jump into that and look at things
little deeper.
A few facts are true: consulting
firms use kids, fresh out of B-schools with no real experience to help
companies solve monumental business issues; the problems these firms find in
the organization are not the ones which company is not aware about and they do
charge a bomb. That’s quite obvious, they pay young, and smart champs fresh out
of B-schools well; so they have to charge a bomb to run the system. But you
cannot dismiss them as people who do nothing useful; if that was the case the
profession would not have survived the tides of time. Let us look at a few
scenarios where these time tellers are indispensible.
“I know that my watch shows the right time but I want a credible name
to certify that my watch reads the right time”. When in college, we worked
with a SMU which was into footwear manufacturing. The SMU asked us to make a 5
year strategy plan for them. The SMU also had E&Y working on the same
project. The CEO of the SMU told us that they planned to apply for a big loan
for their expansion and they wanted a globally reputed brand like E&Y to
give them a detailed report adding credibility to their plans. He said that
such a report will play a very important role in getting the loan sanctioned.
Names like McKinsey, BCG, E&Y etc can really swing the decision in favor of
you.
“I know that my watch reads the right time but my colleagues refuse to
believe the time and keep reading a different time”. The CEO of the organization
understands the problems of the company and wants to implement changes but the
employees are against the changes, especially the top management. Generally the
other power centers like the CFO, CIO etc gangs together and try to scuttle the
changes. The CEO in need of a powerful backer brings an external agency to bring
credibility to his arguments. The agency is generally a hot shot consulting
name like McKinsey. This especially happens when the CEO is an outsider who has
been inducted to get things right in an organization which is on its decline. When
Louis V Gerstner arrived at IBM in 1993, his ideas were at 180 degrees to the
existing wisdom at IBM. The IBM top management was after the “baby blue plan”
which aimed at breaking down IBM into separate operational units and hiving
them into separate companies which will have their own brands and a sleek cost
structure. Gerstner on the other hand believed that the whole of IBM was
greater than the sum of its babies. He also realized that IBM was wasting time
on hardware and OS contradicting the strategic direction IBM was then taking. To
take on the IBM racket, he brought an army of consultants from his previous organization
(McKinsey). McKinsey, in its recommendation, provided the support Gerstner
wanted backing the decisions with enough data and analysis which IBM syndicate found
tough to argue against. This worked wonders at IBM and Gerstner eventually “made
the elephant to dance”. But such interventions were always not successful. Jeffrey
Skilling did the same thing in Enron and managed to mow the company down into
dust and ended himself in prison.
“I am so busy cleaning my watch that I have no time to look at the time”.
In most cases, company executives get so busy with their daily work that
all the strategic aspects of their work take the back seat. In the war between
the operational and strategic tasks, the operational tasks always take the precedence
as it is most overbearing on your KRAs. So getting things done is much more
important than doing the thing in the best possible way. To get things back in
perspective and stay recent, it becomes imperative to have someone from outside
to come and take a look at your business from a totally unbiased angle time to
time. As the process requires a lot of comparison with the industry standards
and competition; it is doubly good if the “unbiased” analyst is someone with
worldwide knowledge base and network and has access to competitor actions.
Next time someone asks you for
time, think about those “poor” consultants who make a living reading time J
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