Thinking About Nuts And Bolts and the Nature of Consulting, or Why “Nothing New” Is a Good Thing
The other day I was thinking about logos, which got me to thinking about nuts and bolts, which got me to thinking about consultants and why sometimes nothing new is a good thing. That’s how free association works.
So you don’t think I’m completely daft, here’s how I got there. I don’t have a logo or a symbol or even a fancy corporate name, a point you probably missed and certainly don’t care about. Companies spend a lot of money developing these sorts of things—deep into seven figures if they retain one of the high zoot branding shops. I’m sure it matters. Still, and I’ve been involved with marketing for over two decades, I feel compelled to point out that the only two logos I can consistently remember—the Nike swoosh, and the Wells Fargo stagecoach—just sort of appeared. Nike, as is well recounted in about a zillion other places, paid less than the Dutch paid for Manhattan for its logo. Wells Fargo owned stagecoaches long before it put them on its signs and business cards.
Anyway, I started thinking about logos and whether or not I wanted one, which got me thinking about nuts and bolts as a potential icon. They’re incredibly useful as evidenced by the fact that about 62% of everything is held together by some version of same, and they have been around since about the first century BC when they were made out of wood and used in such useful items as wine presses.
A bolt, or something like that, might make a nice logo I thought. Useful. Tested. Can’t get by without them. Been around forever but someone is always thinking up new uses for them. Communicating what I do, am, or stand for in theory is the purpose of logos and brands and such. Why not a nut or bolt or both (besides the obvious unintended implication about my mental state)?
So what do I do and what did I really want to say? My first thoughts turned to consulting, which is mostly what I’ve done lo these many years. Lot’s of people make a living as consultants. When you cut through all the high-tone language, methods, frameworks, and mysterious ways, it just means doing projects for clients. Customers (I see no earthly difference between the words customer and client) hire consultants for two reasons that I can see.
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Expertise and horsepower for hire. They don’t have the time or expertise to do something that needs doing. Rather than half-step their way through it, press unqualified or otherwise occupied employees into doing it, or not doing it at all—whatever it is—they hire an outsider to get the job done.
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Perspective, insight, and validation. They’re looking for “outside perspective” which is code for a lot of things. It could be that they really do want an outsider, preferably one with credentials, to take a look at what is or isn’t happening. It could also be code for helping drive an agenda or create consensus. It could mean putting a stamp of approval on something they’ve already decided to do. None are bad, they’re just different.
The first category is pretty straightforward. It’s work for hire. You have a non-recurring need—like buying a company, hiring an ad agency, finding an executive, studying a new market, installing software, whatever—so you hire a consultant and get it done. Assuming the project is scoped properly, staffed properly, the scope doesn’t change, and the consultants know what they’re doing, you should be all set. Screw bolt “A” into nut “B”.
The second category is often more problematic for both consultants and clients. The assignments aren’t any less important and no more or less difficult to scope. It’s the output that’s the issue. How do you really know when the work is done, and what do you do with it once you have it? This is the kind of scenario that gives rise to hoary chestnuts like:
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A consultant is anyone more than fifty miles away from home with a briefcase.
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A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.
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A consultant is like a pigeon: he/she flies in, poops all over the place, and then flies out.
There are others, but why labor the point? Clichés like those don’t just come out of nowhere, so let’s not dodge this point: there is plenty of consulting work product out there that is little more than a well-packaged regurgitation of what customers already know, followed by advice customers already thought of. There are also keen insights and sparkling recommendations that sometimes get implemented and sometimes don’t.
In some cases the work just isn’t that good or useful. The nut doesn’t fit the bolt, or what they really needed was a welding rig. No excuses there. Bad work, if that’s what it is, is bad work.
In other cases, the work is good and the observations, conclusions and recommendations are right on, if perhaps a bit familiar sounding. The familiar part is what leaves you wondering what the client really expected when he or she hired a consultant to provide some “outside perspective.” The hard truths are these:
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Truth is truth, and there isn’t a lot of new truth out there. People have been thinking and writing about human and organizational dynamics for as long as there have been cave walls to paint on. That doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been anything good done or written lately. But let’s face it, any good pre-Christian Hellenistic philosopher could tell you the secrets to more motivated employees and higher performing organizations. It’s all about the nuts and bolts. That’s why God created philosophers. It’s why consultants created best practices.
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Just because something is obvious or familiar—like nuts and bolts—doesn’t mean that it’s not worth talking about. Just because someone has heard of or thought of something before doesn’t mean that they’ve internalized its meaning or done anything thoughtful, mindful, or innovative to apply it. It’s the way in which you screw obvious ideas together that creates truly innovative solutions. Or as a colleague of mine, Peter Flatow (brilliant innovation consultant) says, it’s what you stop doing, start doing, and stay doing—and knowing what falls into what bucket—that matters.
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Not every client wants to hear the truth, and not every consultant wants to tell the truth. The popularized form of the Hippocratic oath—to do no harm—is often twisted into a hypocritical pact of mutual see no evil, hear no evil, the bill is due and payable by the fifteenth of the month no evil.
So back to the nuts and bolts. One of the odd things about the “new economy” that has apparently gone off in a funk was the presumption that the rules of business and common sense had somehow been suspended. Nuts and bolts were out, eye balls and cyberwhatsits were in. Good management didn’t matter, only good exit strategies. Good human resources practices didn’t matter, only stock options did.
Oops, turns out nuts and bolts still matter. The obvious apparently wasn’t all that obvious, leading to a massive incineration of phantom wealth and a collective, “What just happened?”
Reading Jim Collins latest book, Good to Great, burned this “nuts and bolts” thinking even further into my psyche. Collins was the co-author of the justly praised Built to Last, a book that introduced the novel concept of research and rigor to the process of telling tales about excellent companies. Good to Great is in many ways the prequel.
Don’t take this next comment as a shot, because it’s not. It’s a terrific book. From what I can tell, his research is beyond rigorous and his conclusions have been vetted and argued to a fine point. What’s interesting is how nuts and bolts familiar his key points are. Good to great companies have these things in common:
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Level 5 Leadership. Not heroic, outside leaders, but self-effacing, humble, and completely dedicated to the success of the enterprise. More like Lincoln than Patton.
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First Who . . . Then What. First get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and everyone in the right seats. Then figure out where to drive the bus.
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Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith). Speaks for itself.
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The Hedgehog. Build your business at the intersection of three circles: what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be the best in the world at, and something that drives your economic engine.
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A Culture of Discipline. Disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action.
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Technology Accelerators. Technology for technology sake gets you nowhere but poorer and more exhausted. Yet the right technologies, properly applied, create terrific acceleration.
I’ll admit, any of those points could be argued. They also have a note of familiarity that could lead many of us to pass them off as too simple or simplistic. As Collins points out, the good to great companies—and these firms have big-time financial returns to justify inclusion in the book—didn’t pass them by. Consciously or not, the leaders in these firms attended to what anyone would agree are the nuts and bolts of creating the necessary elements for a great organization.
In the end, I decided to eschew a logo, though I felt even more committed to resist, and help my clients resist, the search for the new, new thing. Whether it’s Collins' list, my list, or your list, in the end it comes down to doing simple things well. As someone that makes a living telling people what to do, I wish it were more complicated that that, but it’s not. The good thing is that if simple were simple to do, everyone would be doing it. Therein lays the opportunity to move from okay to good, and good to something really worth being proud of.
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Kevin Hoffberg
Last modified:
05/03/06