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Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

I agree. It’s crazy how many senior people don’t understand strategy and can’t deal with complexity.

Ex, I once worked at a company that required creation of a two sided market (buyers and sellers). I proposed that we bootstrap the market by creating a variant of our product to enter an existing, complementary market. By offering a cheaper solution in the complementary market with clear benefits for users, its likely we would have been able to establish a user base that we could then use to stimulate the seller side of the market, thereby achieving our goal of creating a brand new market.

The strategy our management consultant CEO went with was to put ads on LinkedIn.

Nobody works there any more.

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My theory is that people have been trained and rewarded for being “not wrong”. Strategy requires you to take a stance and get specific. Sometimes the strategy will not work.

I think we need to do a better job of encouraging this sort of thinking. I don’t remember where I heard but it was something along the lines of “we tell kids they can be whatever they want and then actively discourage them when they take the necessary steps to do those things by operating outside the box”. So this type of thinking becomes normal. Then when it comes to strategize people try to follow “best practices” and “proven techniques” which is kind of the opposite of strategy.

Yes, I like this comment a lot. Any true strategy will need to have a specific outcome, and therefore can fail if the outcome is not reached.

On the other hand, if you (or in my case the CEO) listen to any one of the thousand consultants who will tell you that, say, advertising on social media is a guaranteed path to sales, you can’t ever be wrong because you’ve implemented - as you say - “best practice” and “proven techniques”; you did your job but “for some reason” - externalities - it didn’t work. There was no strategy involved, but we don’t need to talk about that.

This kind of thinking drives me nuts.

Your theory also helps explain why people buy Exchange, or JIRA, or IBM in the olden days.

People want all the rewards with none of the risk. But what’s funny is they are still taking the risk of failure. It’s more that they can fail and shift all blame away by saying “we did it all right, it just didn’t work”. It’s easier than doing the work themselves.

I just think we would all be better off if we told people it’s OK to try and fail, as long as we learn from those failures. We need to support people trying new things. If we just follow prevailing wisdom, we can only tackle problems that are already solved.

And I think these comments summarize why consultants like Accenture, KPMG, McKinsey, etc survive today. They are for leaders who want to shift strategy risk away from their own responsibility. Whether a strategy succeeds or fails; consultants have a finite lifespan with the organization

Yea absolutely. So much of it is a shell game (in some companies) where you attempt to shift blame and take credit for successes. Those type of consultancies help facilitate the game.

Yeah as a (former) small business owner I’ve been thrown under the bus by consultants more times than I care to recall.

You’re an easy target when you don’t have the political pull to point out the absurdity of what’s going on.

What’s always been surprising to me is that more people don’t recognize it. My background didn’t give me the education I’m wish I had either, in fact I got the opposite. But it didn’t take all that long in the real world to see it. Maybe people just accept what they see and roll with it.

Yeah most of the gigs I’ve worked at where the big consultants have been involved have been all about the billable hours that the consultants can charge, and the internal managers who facilitate these transactions - in order to be able move to a cushy job in the same company, some months later.

It’s quite literally corrupt, but everyone seems to know and nothing gets done - because politicians are part of the revolving door. People like us who actually care about doing a good job are just cannon fodder.

Mostly I’ve just learned to avoid such projects like the plague. As a small enterprise software player, the best customers where those who still had skin in the game.

An aside - JIRA was a great product in it's time. It was free to use for any open source project. And many many open source projects willfully chose it, when there was no money involved.

The reason that open source projects chose it (as a cheap bug tracker) and the reason that corporates choose it (as a substitute for understanding what agile really means) are different tho, which is largely my point.

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