LET ME HELP YOU: A CONSULTING FIRM IS AN INTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATION: A PROFESSION

LET ME HELP YOU: A CONSULTING FIRM IS AN INTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATION: A PROFESSION OF BENEVOLENT SPYING.

Why do you think I built so many consulting firms?

And I was very good at it by the way – thanks. Because I am honest with myself about that business. In the most part, as an intelligence specialist, you gather information from one group inside the organization and transfer it to another group who is dis-incentivized for various compensation and status reasons to cooperate with, defer to, or obey the directions of the other group.

In most large organizations the answer to every current problem is hosted in someone’s brain somewhere in the organization (often in the marketing department’s middle management, or in the bowels of accounting where some uncomfortable truth is protected from release).

But the incentives to act on that knowledge – often precisely because of the individuals who host it – cannot or will not be acted upon. Otherwise, people will not act on the solution to a problem because the incentives of the organization are perverse (counter productive). Or because the individuals currently in positions of decision making would be subject to negative effects (usually middle and upper management other than the c-suite).

So the job of a consultant is to simply get people to talk to you on one hand, and to produce a deliverable that provides a means by which the knowledge that exists in the company can be brought to fruition by some sort of reorganization of goals, processes, responsibilities, incentives and compensations. But mostly – at least a the level I tend to work – by giving people in the organization PERMISSION to change alliances and loyalty relations without breaking an alliance or loyalty.

The mistake of most neophytes is to assume people are ignorant, stupid or stubborn, when in fact humans pretty much demonstrate rational action.

Despite their policies against it I have, (and many agency networks have) had parallel projects in multiple cell phone providers. Each desperate to protect some strategy that is well understood by the competition – so much so that the internal ability to execute has been inhibited by this defensiveness: which I usually view as an excuse to not get work done more than defensiveness.

At every level of the organization there is information that is either true and actionable, false and actionable, inactionable, or irrelevant. The trick is to find it. Why? Because a company and processes aren’t special or unique or interesting, or special or a competitive advantage any more than whether a culture practices tea ceremonies or dances ’round the may pole. What separates a good company from a bad is the quality of people, their ability to reorganize in response to market changes, and the quality of information they make use of, and the technological means by which they warranty that they are not privatizing the shareholder commons either by action or inaction, statement or silence, constructive suggestion or destructive rumor and gossip. They are probably obvious and the central problem of organizing production under voluntary employment, is in preserving the will of those with knowledge to make use of it.

Basically, truth wins. Discover the truth. Provide a plan. And in that plan, find a way to preserve signals for everyone. Pay people if you must to take a hit. Don’t expect them just to take a hit for you. If you try to do things without compensating people then you’re not engaging in exchange.