Any consultant worth their salt has the ability, and frequently the occasion, to wear many hats. Jack Williams, senior managing director at Mesirow Financial Consulting, who also works as a full tenured college professor at Georgia State University College of Law, must have a closet full of them. Not surprisingly, Williams, who is also wrapping up a PhD in Archaeology, says sleep is "highly overrated."
Consulting: Do you think of yourself more as a professor who consults or a consultant who teaches?
Williams: I have a passion for helping people, a passion for tapping into the best qualities in people and a passion for identifying and solving problems. That passion happens to manifest itself in a lot of different ways. Whether it's helping a business owner or operator directly, or using my students as force multipliers so they can go out and help businesses become better at what they're doing. Answering that question is kind of like asking which of my four boys do I love the most.
Consulting: Which pursuit came first?
Williams : I've always worked in an area where there was strong overlap with finance and accounting on one hand and management on the other. Even when I was wearing my law hat as a practicing lawyer I was doing a lot of business counseling, and it just lead into my academic interests in business and law and the field of archaeology. As consultants, we also do a lot of what archaeologists do. I've been working on a book called The Archaeology of Management, it's really a reflection on management leadership and the things that we do in business from the perspective of an archaeologist. Looking at what archaeologists do and borrowing from it in the business context. In business, particularly consulting, we're archaeologists. We rarely get the luxury of seeing any client from soup to nuts. What we do instead is get this kind of slice of our client, and we have to build an appropriate context to understand our clients needs, desires, strengths and weaknesses by focusing on clues, tales and cues which we can use to build a profile using those particular tools and context in which we can help our clients successfully manage their business.
Consulting: How do you divide your time?
Williams: It's difficult at times because I'm full time at university. I love my students, and it takes a lot of my time to do it right. I love the people I work with at Mesirow and my clients there as well. I work a lot and don't sleep a lot. I sleep enough, but I've always believed sleep is highly overrated. I enjoy very much the challenges of both teaching and consulting, there's no compromise on either side. There are great synergies between teaching and doing, and I want to go full speed with both of them until I can't go anymore.
Consulting: Can you speak a bit about the overlap between what you do in the classroom and on engagements?
Williams: This semester I'm teaching an advanced business reorganization class focusing on businesses in financial distress before and after they go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Every phase of the class is a reflection of work I am doing or have done in the last three years. The overlap is in the ability to bring real world examples into the classroom to get their perspective and fresh insight on that kind of analysis from people in many different walks of life. On the consulting side, I'm able to bring a more robust understanding of the questions having thought about them and probed them with some level of deliberateness and detachment which sometimes we don't get in the business consulting world. We're often too reactionary.
Consulting: You're also pursuing a PhD, I see?
Williams: Yes, I'm wrapping up my long-deferred PhD in Archaeology. I'm looking at the archaeological issues in the context of armed conflict. Going way back to Syrians and Macedonians right up through Afghanistan and Iraq, and looking at the abuse of cultural heritage to oppress people, assert sovereignty and things of that nature. It's a meld of my interests in early- to pre-historic commerce, archaeology and the law.
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