For an industry built on the concept of strategic change, consulting hasn't changed much since Marvin Bower took the reins at McKinsey & Co. back in 1937. Now, as then, consultants talk about working cases, as if we are defense lawyers distancing ourselves from an unsavory client. Like the early acolytes of time-and-motion studies, we profess a detached, scientific objectivity, analyzing our corporate specimens the way entomologists pin butterfly wings to a board. And we still communicate in our own Esperanto, only now it's written in Power- Point. Worst of all, we're still brains for hire. Have contract, will travel — expenses reimbursable, of course.
Like the cobbler's children, always last to get new shoes, consultants often find it easier to preach change to others than to practice it themselves. Visit the Web pages of the top ten consultancies and read what they have to say. The words are virtually interchangeable. If the managing directors of any of these firms swapped jobs tomorrow, they'd quickly find the levers and the place would run, more or less, the way it did the day before. Let's face it, there's a certain evolutionary imperative that drives all successful organizations towards "sameness." Sure, we see it with clarity when it comes to our clients, but when it comes to our own industry, we're vision impaired.
As we all know, without vision, you can't see the future. That's when the industry revolutionaries come along to change the rules of the game, driving the old corporate ships of state onto the rocks of irrelevance. Again, we see that clearly when we're analyzing other companies. After all, aren't we the ones they call to help them catch up with the revolutionaries whose innovations transform the market?
Look at the lessons of the past decade. Most new wealth has been created by industry outsiders toppling industry incumbents — Dell versus IBM, Starbucks versus Folgers, Virgin versus British Airways, CNN versus the networks — none of whom paid consultants big fees to beat the big guys.
Isn't it time we turned the lens on ourselves to challenge our own orthodoxies in the quest to serve our clients better? At Strategos, not only do we want to help our clients lead the innovation revolution, we want to turn the innovation imperative inward and wage a permanent revolution in our firm and in our industry.
Is there a rulebook for the "revolutionary as consultant"? No, but if we were going to write a manifesto, not a mission statement, here is where we'd start:
Build capability, not dependency. The subliminal message of the substitute brains paradigm is that, with the possible exception of dimly perceiving the need to order in a consultant, a company lacks what it takes to go it alone. Yet the fact of the matter is that our clients are getting smarter. They are beginning to wonder why they should pay to teach a newly-minted MBA about their industry. After all, don't some of their own 29-year-olds — or even a 29-year veteran, for that matter — have a new idea or two? Most companies don't know, because they haven't asked.
At Strategos, we're looking to unleash corporate imagination. Our ambition is to help a company use its whole brain, unlocking new voices, new passions, and new perspectives that aren't presently being leveraged. When was the last time an employee exchanged an idea with your client's CEO, other than through you? Our intention is to cultivate corporate capabilities a company has undervalued and overlooked, not to have our consultants on site long enough to be part of the company pension plan.
Bring questions, not answers. Instead of off-the-rack answers stitched together to suit the company at hand, we believe the consultant's role is to come armed with questions. What are your core competencies, that bundle of things you know, as opposed to the menu of products you sell? What are your orthodoxies? The things "everyone knows are true"; everyone, of course, except for the outside the industry upstart who rewrites the rules and wins the game. What are the trends outside your industry that you can leverage to create new wealth? Forget the competitors you know, imagine the competitors you don't know. By asking questions, we teach companies to fish rather than fish for them. More important, these aren't just answers employees own, they are the ideas for which they're ready to take the hill.
Come as equals, not elitists. With our headquarters in Menlo Park, we witness almost daily a consulting saga we call "The Suits Come to Silicon Valley." The first couple of times we saw a suit-and-tie consulting team descending on the T-shirted, kid CEO in our office complex, we thought, "Those guys just don't fit in." Then it dawned on us — they don't want to fit in. They're playing grown-up, trying to remind their clients who called whom for help. Forget the Silicon Valley company and take the standard issue blue-chip organization. Those suits remind the company's employees who really has the ear of their CEO. Let's face it, consultants get a lot of credit for repackaging what they've heard through their interviews. No wonder Dilbert thrives. At Strategos, we strive to be the antidote to Dilbert. Our modus operandi is to come to the company as a partner and engage individuals at all levels in a common effort to understand innovation and harness it for the sake of creating new wealth.
Communicate, don't obfuscate. After decades of baffling our clients with code words, constructs, matrices, and methodologies, it's time for us to use the English language. We need to become relevant for real people. The objective in consulting, as in any other mode of communication, ought to be to get people to understand us, not to stand silently in awe of us. Are we ready to use narrative — the storyteller's art — or just another deck of PowerPoint slides? After we've inflicted another lesson on our clients about the way e-commerce is changing the world, are we, as consultants, ready to enhance our own ability to leverage new media or master the Internet?
Share the risk, not just the reward. Consultants have done well advising clients to inject a risk-and-reward sharing element into all their relationships — with employees, customers, partners, and suppliers. Indeed, everyone except us. How many consultancies are willing to engage in risk sharing when it comes to our own work? At Strategos, we offer every client a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee, or your money back, no questions asked. Sharing risk doesn't get any more basic than that.
Engage emotions, not just intellect. Henry Ford used to lament that the problem with workers was that each pair of hands came with a head. In the information age, our challenge is different: We need to engage employees through their heads and their hearts. How do we bring hope, vitality, a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment — even fun — into the global workplace? To begin with, we can stop objectifying our clients and start empathizing with them. Passion is a far greater tool than a PowerPoint presentation. With the rise of free agency and headhunters constantly churning the market for talent, we know that companies which succeed in engaging the employee on both an emotional and intellectual level can increase retention and turn employee allegiance to competitive advantage. Call it return on emotional investment if you like, but it is successful.
Work from the future backward, not from the present forward. We have reached the end of incrementalism: Companies that seek gains at the margin are getting beat by non-traditional competitors who change the rules of the game. Too much of today's traditional scenario planning merely makes a company a bit-part player in a future someone else is scripting. Companies that ask consultants to help them catch up are playing follow the leader, implicitly ceding to others the right to write the rules that govern their industry. The question we encourage companies to ask and act on is: How do we change the rules of the game before someone changes them on us? Think of strategy as revolution: What's the best way to effect radical change?
Go to the future and work backward. Don't benchmark, leapfrog. Don't reengineer, reinvent. Don't conduct focus groups, change the focus. Although we should desperately care about customers, face the fact that no customer asked for the minivan, the microwave oven, the VCR, or the browser. Better mousetraps make their own markets.
Work bottom up and top down. Much of the cynicism about consulting comes from the fact that what we really do is work top down and that our only audience is the guy who signed the contract. We tell the executive team that it must participate in — not merely review — the work product and that, if we are there just to legitimize what the team already thinks, then we shouldn't be there at all. We're looking for more than a client whose check will cash. The people we focus on are the ones who truly want to leave a legacy, who are willing to admit they don't have all the answers, who believe in using their whole brain — all employees at every level in the company — and finally, the rebel who is ready to be a rule breaker.
Rule 9: Break rules 1 through 8. In business, as in all of human history, today's innovations become tomorrow's intellectual straightjacket. People who make the rules have to have the courage to break them.
We can't profess to having offered you a guide to reinventing the practice of consulting in these pages. We don't think that's possible. But we do know that, if industries can ossify, so can ours and, if other companies can reap rewards from out-innovating and wrong-footing the competition, so, too, can those in the consulting business. As we tell our clients, there's a revolution coming to your industry. If you miss it, you will fail. If you lead it, you will win. Which really only leaves two questions: Will you be the revolutionary, and do you have the guts for it?
