Consultants on Consulting: The Cobbler's Children

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?