Stop selling, start sharing
In contemporary world consulting has changed
I have been an academic practitioner throughout my professional life. To be honest that was partly for money (academics are paid miserably here in Italy and I come from a low middle class family) but the essence is that I have always dreamed of leaving a mark, maybe negligible but real.
Seven years ago I received a call. It was the CEO of a major Big Four company. They were looking for someone to help them develop a team at the intersection between organizational design and HRM. I reminded him that I was an academic, tenured full professor and I was not in the mood for a radical change of life. We moved on and signed a deal where I would be allowed to continue my academic role. Eventually we did not work together well and parted ways after 12 months, but I will always thank that company because it allowed me to understand how consulting has changed and allowed me to create my own start-up, OrgTech.
The way it was
In Economics we know that knowledge and information are difficult goods to sell. The minute you reveal them, your customer acquires them. It is as if you had a brand new car to sell and the minute you describe it to a potential buyer she owns it. Who would spend any money in buying something they can have for free? And who would get into a business where what you create cannot be sold?
It might be for this reason that while consulting should be about ideas and knowledge, the dire reality is that it is mostly “body renting”. Sure, you need to convince customers they have some needs with an accurate storytelling, but the money comes from heavy operational activities carried on by brilliant young employees. In the essence you think of joining to create and sell ideas and you end up as a modern “slave” trader of a sort.
The way consulting has worked for almost a century is simple and twofold.
Either Executives are under pressure to deliver and grow, run out of options, and call consultants asking for ideas or they need to deploy some actions and lack the workforce to do so (either in terms of time or experience) and call consultants asking for work capacity.
The trick by commercially successful consultants is to frame the first process so its outcomes are the same as the second:
the company paying high fees on a daily basis to consultant paid a fraction of their price (no wonder consultant are crazy on utilization rates — that’s where the money comes from!). An endless discussion should follow on why paying high fees to people whom you could hire permanently at a fraction of the cost, but it is not due now.
The incentive structure for consultants is skewed toward having few ideas at each time and pushing them through. Innovation, creativity, intuition are of limited value. Much better to either invest into highly operational and technical stuff or come up on a campaign basis with some kind of “this is the new black” (sometimes actually rephrasing the same old stuff…). If they do their job well, they are only profiting from the constraints in terms of time and workforce that managers face.
The way it will be
As Christensen, Wang and van Bever pointed out in their Harvard Business review article (“Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption”), consulting is not shielded from the massive transformation we are into. The hardcore business of body renting will be soon substituted by the diffusion of job market platforms (it is only due to the laziness of many HR departments if it has not yet happened, and you cannot be lazy throughout your life or… you are in a coma!). And what about ideas and knowledge?
There comes the good news. If you cannot sell ideas and knowledge, then… share it.
I have done it for many years because of my dual nature. Academics are built to share and circulate ideas. As an academic practitioner it has never occurred to me to think that I should refrain from doing so. Fore long though, that led to much praise and little business. Eventually, now the time has come for an alignment.
I do not sell, never. I only talk about ideas and share advice across my wide executive network. I enjoy those conversations and never push them to business. I have not changed, it is not a strategy. That’s authentically who I am. And all of a sudden they ask me about how to do this and that. How would I implement this idea? How would I face that problem? And I answer. Most of the time I anticipate that I have no certainties, but that’s how I would proceed if I were them. It is the realm of ideas and intuition. It was always like that, only that now they move on to ask for a proposal. It is only if you have ideas that you can draft concrete proposals to emerging and novel needs. Else you end up forcing pre-defined solutions to ill defined problems like many of our established competitors do. I fully understand the rational, but that is not my concept of consulting. It has never been. And that’s why we parted ways.
But authentic as I am I will always thank them. They made me realize that consulting is not about selling. It is about sharing! And that’s precisely what I wanted to share with all of you!