There’s a joke that takes a long time to tell, and I won’t. But at the end of the story, the man asks the shepherd, “How did you know I was a consultant?” The shepherd glances over at his flock of sheep and says, “You drove up out of nowhere, stopped me from getting my work done, told me something I already knew and then charged me for it. Now give me back my dog.”
You don’t really need to hear the whole joke to chuckle. (Except knowing why the shepherd has to ask for his dog to be returned is a particularly funny element.) Anyone who has interacted with consultants in a business setting is familiar with the feeling that an interloper is getting paid a lot of money to expound upon things that are someone else’s responsibility.
My schizophrenia on this subject has been chronic, since the late 1980s. I am a business advisor (which includes consultant and board director). I am also an operating officer and business owner who has hired consultants. This constant dual role over the last twenty years has made me extremely sensitive as to whether my advice is actually worth the money I’m paid. Often it’s hard to tell, for me and for my consulting clients or shareholder constituents. I’ll ask if they got anything out of the engagement or the working relationship. Seldom will someone complain or express that they received no value. But that doesn’t mean some of them didn’t. It just means that they didn’t want to tell me about it at that moment. Once in a while, I can point to a measurable, unambiguous positive result of my involvement with a company. Those are precious moments.
I don’t want to be the kind of advisor or board member who thinks they are contributing, but are actually the butt of water cooler sarcasm. My overarching objective as a business psychologist, advisor and board member is to not see myself in the context of a Dilbert cartoon. I don’t want to hear words coming out of my mouth like “agile strategy”, “best practices”, “alignment”, “core competencies”, “human capital” or any other of hundreds of catch phrases that sound important, but are vacuous, meaningless conversational fodder, like the puffed up term papers we used to crank out in college, when we thought that grades were assigned according to relative mass of the submittals.
To me, the best test of a valuable advisor is to query them about the mistakes they made. My former father-in-law and constant friend, Larry, was a very successful surveying engineer in the Sierra foothills. His business card said, “Foothill Engineering. We help you avoid all the mistakes we’ve made.” Then, appearing at the bottom of the card in small font was, “We don’t rent pigs”, referencing the popular book and movie, “Lonesome Dove”. So Larry was saying his value was in his history, frequency and depth of mistakes. But there were some things he couldn’t do.
Any business advisor can be measured against these two criteria to determine if they might be worth the money they will charge. That is, ask them how many and what types of mistakes they have made, and evaluate whether or not those mistakes are related to your business and your challenges. Then press to see when they will turn down a consulting opportunity because they don’t feel competent or prepared to satisfy the request. Or as they say, “You can’t rely on someone who says yes to everything”.
A good friend of mine recently loaned me “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”, a collection of the wit and wisdom, the biographical sketches of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s co-pilot and business partner for 45 years. He’s the less visible of the two, and seems to like that modicum of anonymity. His wisdom is clear, easy to understand and directly applicable to most anyone’s business activities. Charlie is pragmatic, efficient and direct in providing his opinion. In his book, Charlie takes shots at the Wall Street wunderkinds out of Ivy League business schools who invent complex terms and concepts in order to attract more clients, to mollify or mystify their existing clients, and to establish authorship of truly novel and hopefully profitable investment mechanisms that may be phenomenal opportunities for high returns. Or not. But that doesn’t matter to them. Once the advice has been paid for, the advisor often doesn’t feel a professional responsibility to his or her clients. Just ask Bernie Madoff.
What the heck does “agile strategy” mean anyway? “Think fast on your feet and don’t commit to any long-term programs”? Or “If we succeeded, we are agile. If we didn’t then we aren’t”? What does “alignment” mean? “We all have the same goals, mutually complementary responsibilities, skills and knowledge”? Or “We can all repeat the scripts like parrots, but few of us believe the spiel.” And for Heaven’s sake, what is “human capital”? Should I treat human beings like inanimate currency or raw materials?
Advisors and consultants would be well-advised to only offer advice that they have personally applied and found useful. They should be able to demonstrate that they bet their own money on the advice they’re giving. They should act like they’re spending their own money on the advice.