I Am Lucky to Have Smart Clients
They tell me that a business blogger should offer a personal observation from time to time as a way of introducing oneself and providing a more complete picture of the person who is delivering professional services. So let’s take a crack at it and springboard from today’s activities. One of the things that management consultants have to do is keep their Statement of Corporate Qualifications current. That’s because you are looking for a new job every day. I have been looking for a new job every day for the past quarter century! Anyway, this task involves listing clients and reference contacts, describing assignments and the like. When you are writing a major proposal, it’s only natural that prospects want to know where you have done work before and how they can contact your references to assess client satisfaction with completed projects. I confess that I don’t keep the Statement as current as I should. What with client work involving extensive travel, sometimes international, it gets hard to squeeze in such a task. However, periodically I do get it done and I make sure that every assignment gets posted (except for those governed by Non-Disclosure Agreements).
I was updating the Corporate Qualifications the other day and decided to count the number of clients for which I had done work related to matrix management. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that the January 2010 cumulative total is 50; just for those related to matrix management! A handful of these were here in the Washington DC area, but the vast bulk involved travel.
I recall fondly my first matrix management client. It was Boehringer Mannheim Pharmaceuticals–now Boehringer Ingleheim. This was some two decades ago. The R&D section had a facility up in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Suburban Maryland had an up-and-coming pharma and biotech corridor that’s now pretty well established. The Director of R&D, now retired, was an MD and a former executive at the FDA. As I described my approach to the assignment – it was a matrix organization “tune-up” project for an existing matrix structure, I saw his eyes light up. He said to me, “As a scientist, I must admit that I am both surprised and delighted…you have a structured, systematic approach to all of this.; I feel better already.”
It was through that first assignment that I learned how much I enjoy working with scientific and technical people and intelligent and engaged people, in general. Their personalities tend to be pleasing, or, at minimum, highly interesting. They insist on logical, step-by-step approaches. Boehringer was a great environment in which to “cut my teeth.” Boehringer was the first of many pharma clients. The Director of R&D and later, the COO for the U.S., provided me with many interesting challenges. They did so even though I had a steep learning curve about the industry. Then, as time went by, new industries presented themselves. There was more for me to learn and yet other executives gave me the benefit of the doubt that, indeed, I could learn about the contours of their industry and then apply my templates and knowledge to assist them. Through all of this, I began to see transcendent dynamics which apply to many, if not all industries. I also began to connect the dots and become confident that I could work a particular industry, either because I had worked in that industry before or because it was a “neighbor” that shared common core characteristics with an industry in which I had worked previously.
I am fortunate in having so many smart clients. I have learned something from each and every one of them and that has, in turn, helped me work more effectively with the next client. Along the way, I have made many friends. Sometimes the travel gets a bit much but, all in all, the level of satisfaction involved in helping people get the most out of our consulting and training services along with the opportunity to work with great people and make friends along the way – balances everything out. The job also provides a great deal of variety: There is no boredom. I am grateful for my clients – past, present, and future. I just have to remember to write it all down.
Beware of “Cotton Candy” Consulting
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During my quarter-century consulting career, I have seen a good many management fads come and go. Every once in a while, a new “model” becomes a proven classic and actually affords enduring value. However, you don’t have to look far to discern elegant models which appear to offer value, but then upon further examination, the value melts away like cotton candy. Cotton candy may be sweet but it has no known nutritional value, and it doesn’t take much of it before you start suffering indigestion.
A cotton candy consulting model has several defining characteristics:
- It makes sense logically; there’s usually a glossy color graphic that suggests a systematic approach, even though it’s a triumph of marketing over substance–perhaps a triumph of PowerPointing over active thinking
- It conveys commonly shared but often unspoken management values such as engagement, collaboration, distributing credit fairly, etc., or at least it conveys values that work well in abstraction, freed of the hurly-burly of surviving and prospering at the speed of business
- It is usually testosterone-free, meaning that the exercise of decisive authority, particularly in high-stakes situations, is rarely mentioned. (Androgynous solutions–providing a mix of “estrogen” and “testosterone” approaches–are usually the most effective in meeting everyday work challenges).
- It seems to be intellectually unassailable because it exists at a level of abstraction that camouflages or ignores the inconvenient reality that human beings are creatures of habit and that changing these habits requires sustained focus on day-to-day organizational life at the behavioral and performance levels
Sometimes organizational life can be akin to building sand castles at the beach. You put up a structure and it’s wonderful to behold for a short while but then the tide rolls in and takes its toll. It is then time to repair the castle or build it anew. That’s a problem with the cotton candy model: It rests on the implicit assumption that you perform Step 1, it ossifies or becomes permanent, and now you go to Step 2 as if you were doing a simple construction job on dry land in an ideal world, happily unfettered by environmental regulations, weather cycles, permit problems, or union squabbles. Were that organizational life were so simple and straightforward! (Of course, that would not only take the fun out of it, it would put me out of business).
Truth is, reality is neither clean nor clear-cut. When making change of any kind, organizational defense mechanisms kick in and the “two steps forward, one step back” phenomenon may obtain. Indeed, effective planning and implementation coupled with a bit of good fortune may yield “two steps forward and one step back.” Not a shabby outcome because at the very least you are one step ahead of where you were and that’s progress: Progress is tough.
Effecting real change takes real work and that’s a far reach from the implied simplicity that cotton candy models seem to promise without actually saying so. Take a second look and trust your instincts: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
I don’t really know if anyone actually buys these cotton candy consulting models on a widespread basis. One sees them advertised on websites and brochures. Maybe clients buy but don’t actually eat the cotton candy. That would make them half-right. I am aware that some amount of cotton candy consulting sells if it is associated with a “big name” firm, but that’s usually because the corporate buyer of the services may feel like it’s a safe bet because, after all, who could go wrong with a brand name… You think a Tiger Woods’ consulting outfit would be a safe bet?
That said, if the client has a sense of urgency about making change because current strategies, systems, and structures aren’t working as well as they could or should, then that client will need protein.
Lovely to look at, sticky to hold, cotton candy makes fools of those sold.
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