Alan Weiss
If you don’t have very good math skills, I doubt that you’d try to become, say, an actuary. In fact, you wouldn’t make a very good dealer in a casino. If you don’t like the water, then perhaps being a lifeguard is beyond your grasp. I don’t like small talk very much, so I don’t pretend to host parties, (though I pay for a lot of them!).
What’s the ability you need as a consultant to ensure that you’ve got a fighting chance of making it?
Common sense.
Yes, But What Instrument Do I Need?
When I tell people to listen to the buyer and use his or her questions, reactions, and concerns to direct the conversation toward mutually-beneficial ends, I sometimes hear, “Yes, but what instrument can I use for that?”
I don’t know. What instrument do you use to determine if you should drive a car with your eyes open or closed?
Consulting is MOSTLY about common sense. It’s the ability to find the most direct, simplest route to improve a client’s condition and deliver value commensurate with a significant fee. There is nothing wrong with asking a client why he does something if he complains it’s uncomfortable for him to do it. You don’t need a month of needs assessments, or a coterie of 360° interviews, or weeks of observation to note that, if conducting media interviews is painful, maybe someone else should do them. At least that’s a start.
Consulting is not engineering, where you perform calculations and come out with solutions within a zillionth of an inch tolerance. Consulting is not the law, where you can argue the merits or the law and depend on precedent or the sympathy of the jury. Nor is consulting artistry, where a gracefully performed lateral arabesque will get you a 9.8 from the Romanian judge.
Okay, Then What Model Can I Use?
There are models and matrices which can work to market and implement consulting services. I’ve used my share and even created some that others use. But common sense trumps all.
For example, I’ve never found a needs analysis that justifies the time, expense, and risk (you could wind up without a project) when common sense will tell you most of the time what the real issues are. I’m not sure I need to spend days using test instruments to find that someone is a High D/S8/lunatic expressive/ITNT, when my observation tells me that she is simply unwilling to share resources.
With two different clients, each with an executive who was not performing and was causing them excessive pain and hours of worry and work, I merely suggested that the individual was probably as unhappy as they were and a good severance package would take care of everything. Despite that, they asked me to “coach” the individual for a month, which I did to the best of my ability without achieving a scintilla of change.
When they asked for a second month, I said no. Instead, I crafted a professional severance, gently ran it by the antagonists, found that they thought it represented a beautiful escape, and facilitated that process. Everyone was so happy just a week later that they wondered why they had ever needed to hire me.
Because they needed my common sense.
How Do I Get This Common Sense?
So when people are done asking me about tools and instruments, they want to know where they can learn, buy, borrow, or steal this common sense.
Common sense is merely applied knowledge (which, I think, makes it “wisdom,” though that’s too grand a word for what I do). That means two things: First, you must have a wide and varied knowledge base. I call this “intellectual firepower.” That entails wide reading, maximizing experiences, travel, a coach or mentor as appropriate, synthesis of others’ works, and so forth.
Second, it has to be “applied,” meaning that you need to recall it and use it on the spot, where the rubber is hitting the road (fill in your favorite bromide here). You get the picture. Use it or lose it. You must be light enough on your feet and confident enough in your bearing to suggest commonsensical approaches at the “teachable moment.”
Some music is not perfect for any instrument. That’s where the synthesizer comes in.
Stay in Touch