Monday, April 5, 2010

Be the heart surgeon

I am a consultant, more specifically a general management consultant, and one of my biggest gripes with being a consultant is that the general consultant model is there to benefit the company that the general consultant works for, not so much the client.
I always liken it to being a doctor. If you have absolutely no idea what's wrong with you, it makes sense to go to a primary care physican, because they can diagnose your sickness and perhaps help solve some health problems, but if you have some sense of our problems, i.e. you have a heart attack, you don't want to go to a PCP, you'll go to a heart docotor. Most of the times, organizations are run by people with knowledge of what's going wrong in their companies, so they don't need a PCP to diagnose their issues, they need a specialist in marketing, or org or finance. Consulting companies want to staff themselves with generalist because (they say) that you get a wide assortment of projects and can learn about wide variety of issues and blah, blah, blah, but in reality the driving issue is that a staff full of generalist means you can staff easily (it's called being frontable). But imagine if instead an organization was staffed by specialist? It would be a nightmare for the staffing person but the clients would get people who have a deep knowledge of their particular issue.
I believe the key is to do away with the generalist consulting organization model and replace it with smaller specialist agencies. Clients should get people who have a deep and refined knowledge of their problems, no ta generalist who has to reinvent the wheel (or learn how the wheel works from a specialist partner) every time. When I go to get heart surgery I want a heart surgeon, not a team of PCP's and so do clients. Business needs to stop focusing on what it needs and more on what's best for the clients.

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