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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

"A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time." During my time as a consultant I can affirm that this is 100% true. But it cuts both ways - you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist.

Most of my time as a consultant was asking low-level employees very obvious questions: What are you wasting your time on? What's the bottleneck on X? What could you be doing that made the company more money? Then we would compile a bunch of squishy numbers into some fancy looking charts in a slide deck for the executives.

In my mind this is more of a symptom of a crisis of leadership in business. Absolutely none of the value we provided couldn't have been replaced if executives actually learned to trust their own teams. But MBAs are trained to be drawn to the shiny allure of "data" over quality insight. Or they are so myopic that they need outside help to find solutions they are not bothering to look for.

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One of my mantras to my associates and consultants was that our job was to be one part therapist, one part sociologist, and one part accountant. As you say, if the client could fix their own problem, they wouldn't have called in a consultant, and, if the problem could be fixed by throwing developers and designers at it, they would have called someone cheaper. The implication of getting that phone call is that there's a gap between what the client's asking for and what the client needs, which has led them to bring in an outsider. Generally the answer to what the client assumed was a technical or design issue actually lay somewhere in the organizational structure, interpersonal relations, or the cash flow and balance sheets.

It's true that consultants generally (certain kinds of expertise-led consulting aside) don't do anything an organization can't do for themselves, but it's also true that a therapist doesn't do anything an individual or couple can't do themselves. Bringing somebody in to ask both the stupid questions and the hard questions, without being beholden to internal power and communication structures, can often be very helpful, as long as -- big "if" here -- you can trust the consultant isn't going to featherbed for the sake of the SoW.

Having said all that, I've seen some terrible, terrible work from consultancies, including some big screwups from my old firm (which, to their credit, the cost of which we ate rather than our clients). More than once I've seen large clients outsource strategy, innovation, or the entirety of execution to a Big Three/Big Four firm, and waste tens of millions on work that delivered a couple dozen binders but not any tangible value. The common thread is usually that the company abdicates responsibility for overseeing and critiquing the work, rather than taking a firm hand. That never turns out well.

Every problem is a people problem. Especially when you're told by your client that it's not a people problem.

I look back on my time as a consultant, and I think we largely did good work. I just personally found it frustrating how much time we spent spinning our wheels vs making progress. I spent 6 months on a slide deck that no one ended up looking at.

If I had one takeaway, it's that our clients were entirely too risk averse. Rather than just start executing on something and learn along the way, they would rather front-load every business decision with 500 hours of coordination and planning meetings. And as consultants, we were incentivized to enable this type of behavior.

I think it's pretty telling that, while I believe consultants can provide value and do good work, I have to admit that I never would have hired myself on any of the projects that I worked on.

I expect the company was too risk averse, but the individual players, familiar with how blame and credit were distributed there, were pretty finely calibrated in their behavior.

The implication of getting that phone call is that there's a gap between what the client's asking for and what the client needs, which has led them to bring in an outsider.

That's the apparent answer. Underneath it, the real answer is someone in the org, most likely whoever approved spend hiring the consultant, knows the answer but needs insulation from the political fallout from saying it out loud.

Or someone to blame if things go sideways.

> you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist.

Or there was a political battle over who would wear the watch, and whose budget it would come out of. And the only person who owned a watch lived in a different time zone and didn't want to change it to a timezone they didn't live in.

Pretty much. Lol.

It's unbelievable how many expensive reports we generated that said "fixing X would result in $Y revenue" and the business response would be "well, that would piss off Ryan so we can't do that".

In Ryan's defense, the firm he hired wrote an even prettier and more expensive report supporting his decision.

Consultants pay attention: this is how you're perceived.

Lucky bastards, I’d love to be perceived as “work product is linearly related to compensation.”

Aye. Bill more make more. Reminds me of bartending, where if I worked doubles or weekends -- often crazy, long, hard days -- I could walk out with more cash. And not like an abstraction, like literally $100 cash in my wallet, if I sold more expensive drinks or put in more hours.

Hard work though, fairly tough maximum caps in terms of pay, and brutal to have to do into retirement -- my knees (or liver) wouldn't last long enough to do it for 30 years.

Better yet, Jeff's been yelling that we should do X for months and now that we have an expensive report says that we should do X, we're gonna do X. But not at all because Jeff thought it was a good idea. And then wonder why Jeff up and leaves the business.

The funny thing is, if someone actually has the guts to tell Ryan "Hey you know that thing you insist we do? It's costing us $Y every year. Do you still want it?".

The Ryans of the world usually respond with "no that's mad, why didn't you alert me sooner? Stop that at once!".

no the actual issue is that it would mean a demotion for Ryan

Like our tech director spending millions on Microsoft stuff. Anyone sees that it's not really the most sane investments to be making. But the only way out is to fire the guy, and that's just one step too far.

So the ryan's are untouchable because of politics, they want to keep their scope and budgets. If nobody wants to decrease their budget, no money is saved sadly

I worked for two separate Fortune 500 companies that had byzantine internal political struggles like that. My hypothesis is that large organizations inevitably accrue that sort of cruft.

I was similarly a consultant and I agree - in those projects (~25%) where I felt that we actually "created value" it was simply by talking to a bunch of junior people (not ICs, but ~managers of managers), kind of piecing together what was wrong (not very hard), and presenting that to the CEO. The CEO never heard this shit by themselves because everything was polished before being reported up the management chain.

I literally had one guy saying that a big problem was that the device's battery life was very low, and we should include a second battery. This kind of budget ask would have never gotten off the ground without us, we took it to the CEO and said it would cost $m and he said "sure" and that was that.

> you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist

Some more cynical view. You are only there because your boss doubt that you know how to look at your wrist.

You're only there because there's been no visible effect of whether you look at your wrist or not.

You're only there because instead of quantifying work, boss worries about whether or not employees are looking at watches.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound (make a difference)?

Some would argue yes. Others won't know until something is broken.

> Or they are so myopic that they need outside help to find solutions they are not bothering to look for.

Anybody in charge for long enough loses the muscle of being able to accept questions or criticism. You buried the lede.

In a way it's sad when they've hired consultants because they at some level acknowledge they need help, but when it comes to looking at their own actions or behaviors nothing is wrong or needs fixing.

Which one is it, do you need help or not? If you don't need help and know it all why are the consultants here?

To give a bit of defense to consultants, there are a lot of parallels between hiring a consultant for a business and a therapist for yourself. Both are expensive in their own ways. And both focus on helping you help yourself with your own resources. I wouldn't think of you as an idiot for admitting you needed help to look at your own actions or choices.

But I think the difference is that you can't just fix yourself by swapping out pieces of your brain, but a business can! Why would you keep around executives or teams that need constant, regular intervention?

> Anybody in charge for long enough loses the muscle of being able to accept questions or criticism.

Perhaps, but more importantly anyone inclined to accept questions or criticism rather than assuring that they get credit for success and someone else gets blame for failure just doesn’t get to be in charge at all, because they end up getting stuck with the blame for other people’s failure while the credit for their success is stolen.

It seems like abysmally bad management and also pretty common, to have to bring in an outsider to ask the workers “what obvious stupid things do you see going on here.”

They are a bit hokey, but I think this is something shows like Kitchen Nightmares or Undercover Boss or The Profit get absolutely right - just a few honest conversations is often all you need to uncover a bunch of improvement opportunities if you know how to ask questions.

This is why Toyota consistently crushes it with quality and manufacturing efficiency - their entire idea of continuous improvement depends on trusting low-level workers to have the expertise to suggest improvements.

Except Toyota's process isn't secret. Any company that cared to execute well could simply buy everyone a copy of one of several books on Toyota's system and start cargo-culting themselves into success. The only explanation I've found with predictive power is that most managers/executives don't really want to do things right, they just want to BE right. It's rare to encounter a "leader" (at any level!) willing to admit they could improve.

I think this is one of those reasons where leadership quality and company culture are still important. Toyota knows they can't be copied which is why they share it so openly.

You can even read up on the failure of NUMMI where Toyota literally tried to teach GM executives their production methods and GM just couldn't do it.

Also, critics of Toyota's offerings never understand the appeal of reliable and easy to fix cars to the masses, and how people value boring over unreliable, cost optimized "excitement"

There is a saying: "there's the right way, the wrong way and the Army way". You can replace "army" with the name of your employer. Every organization has their own way of doing things. Sometimes you need that outsider to point out that your-employer's-way is not working and is not a "best practice".

>Most of my time as a consultant was asking low-level employees very obvious questions: What are you wasting your time on? What's the bottleneck on X? What could you be doing that made the company more money?

Come all ye good workmen beware the command. That comes down on high from the desk of a man. Who's never held steel or torch in his hand.

Sounds like a lack of leadership is driving this.

That doesn’t necessarily seem true. Many professions rely on peer review and mentoring even at the highest levels so everyone can make fewer mistakes and continually improve. We don’t assume a generalist doctor is incompetent because they refer a patient to an appropriate specialist. We don’t assume a pilot is incompetent because they have a copilot with them and they run down a checklist before taking off. We don’t assume a software developer is incompetent because their work goes through code reviews. Why should business leaders be expected to know everything and make the right judgement every time without the same kind of peer support?

The difference here is that the major consulting firms are not specialists in anything. To the extent that companies rely on consultants, it's for a blank slate or neutral party. But trying to rely on these external parties for expertise would be akin to a doctor referring you to an urgent care center.

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