Management consultant: Difference between revisions
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A good management consultant approaches her task the same way a bad teacher approaches a parent-teacher evening: by begging questions<ref>Sample exchange: <br> | A good management consultant approaches her task the same way a bad teacher approaches a parent-teacher evening: by begging questions<ref>Sample exchange: <br> | ||
Teacher: So, how do you think junior is getting along? < | Teacher: So, how do you think junior is getting along? <br> | ||
Baffled parent: Um, isn’t that the question I’ve come here to ask you?</ref> | Baffled parent: Um, isn’t that the question I’ve come here to ask you?</ref> | ||
Revision as of 09:27, 20 May 2018
One of those people with an MBA who is profoundly deaf to protest “that is easier said than done”, largely because his role is to say, while some other poor sap[1] is expected to do.
A good management consultant approaches her task the same way a bad teacher approaches a parent-teacher evening: by begging questions[2]
. Her first step will be to make her client figure out what opportunities exist for synergy, optimisation and automation. She will demur from recommending anything herself. Indeed, the art of management consultancy is to carry out countless chargeable hours precisely without doing that: the key is to elicit ideas from the client as to what to do, responsibility for which, when inevitably they fail, can safely be laid at the client’s own door.
In ordinary Euclidian space-time, there is a simple formula — not quite as elegant as E = MC2, but close — which sets an immutable bound on the minimum time (t) required for a management consultant’s “output” (∞) to be implemented[3], which must be longer than the maximum theoretical length (L) of the management consultant’s engagement (e').
- T∞ >Le'
A management consultant will necessarily be long gone and onto his next job well before it becomes clear that the changes that were implemented as a result of his consultancy are a disaster (again, be careful never to describe these as “recommendations”: A management consultant can ask open questions by which a firm can navigate its own way to “water”, but it cannot make it drink).
When the enormity of the situation has finally descended upon all stakeholders you will not see the management consultant for dust. Someone’s posterior will be required for kicking, and most likely it will be the head of the documentation unit.
Dramatis personae: CEO | CFO | Client | Employees: Divers · Excuse pre-loaders · Survivors · Contractors · The Muppet Show | Middle management: COO · Consultant · MBA | Controllers: Financial reporting | Risk | Credit | Operations | IT | Legal: GC · Inhouse counsel · Docs unit · Litigator · Tax lawyer · US attorney Lawyer | Front office: Trading | Structuring | Sales |
References
- ↑ See, for example, Head of the documentation unit
- ↑ Sample exchange:
Teacher: So, how do you think junior is getting along?
Baffled parent: Um, isn’t that the question I’ve come here to ask you? - ↑ Careful: a management consultant’s output is never called a “recommendation”.