Peter Flatow is one of the smartest people I know, though he would blush that I write this. Before becoming a dreaded consultant, he covered himself with glory at some of the biggest and best marketing organizations in the world.
His client list is even more impressive, as are his accomplishments since throwing off the corporate coat and tie and donning a permanent "consultant casual."
Up From Consulting's Ashes
By Peter Flatow
Executives constantly repeat various axioms about innovation. The problem, however, is not lack of repetition or sincerity. It’s lack of application. Managers deny the undeniable call.
Ironically, the worst practitioners of business-as-usual are the purported change agents themselves -- consultants and their corporate clients. Both parties must accept traditional consulting – and by extension, traditional marketing services – as outmoded. A new model is required – one that bridges from what a company already knows it needs to do, to actually doing it. This new model, this bridge, is Innovation Coaching.
Three factors evidence why consulting is no longer an effective instrument for innovation.
Economics and timing. Consulting, with its often large, expensive and lengthy projects, is out of step with the tight budgets, smaller staffs and compressed timing that constrain contemporary managers. Companies cannot afford to pay and wait for a six-month study, only to receive a final “book” that is as inscrutable as it is overstuffed. A current IBM commercial makes this very point.
The commercial depicts a big-name firm that has just bankrolled a $2 million consulting assignment. The main character (presumably the CEO) and his “board” are psyched about the report. But “the team” doesn’t believe the recommendation is doable. How could this, or any, executive spend $2 million before being certain the recommendations could be enacted? How could consultants deliver a report without clear, feasible means to execute it?
The characters are fictitious; but the story isn’t. Numerous times clients have hired my firm to “make sense” of a just completed study by one of several major consulting firms. Each time, the client had to invest incremental time and money so the initial investment was not in vain.
Vested interest. Too often the consultants making the recommendations do not and cannot share the client’s vested interest in executing the plan. As sincerely as a firm might want its recommendations implemented, consulting is at heart about recommending not realizing the plan. A consulting firm can walk away. The client cannot.
Clients suffer from a lack of vested interest, too. In the traditional model, a consulting firm is hired to independently gather and analyze information and to then recommend a solution for the problem. The client may help the firm gather the info (provide interviews, share information, etc.). But for the most part, the consulting firm is expected to operate independently.
The problem with this distant, at best passive, model is that nobody at the client owns the ultimate recommendations and their execution. That the recommendations “weren’t made here” and the pressure to continue fighting daily fires make it all too easy (and too common) for clients to shelve recommendations, especially if they threaten the status quo. Frequent turnover within the client teams managing consulting projects only exacerbates matters.
Managerial abdication. In my forty years working with and studying over 150 companies, business people appear paralyzed over what is required to execute decisions. It’s not that business people don’t know what needs to be done. Much of the time, they do (which further argues against traditional consulting projects). But knowing what to do is not the problem, nor is it a competitive advantage. The issue – and the resultant advantage – resides in knowing how to get something done and then actually doing it. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton document this very issue in their book, The Knowing-Doing Gap.
A recent UPS commercial captures, albeit satirically, how consulting companies and their clients foster this knowing-doing gap – the consultants, by not facilitating execution; and the clients, by trying to abdicate it. In the UPS spot, two consultants glibly tick off recommendations to a senior client. After pausing, the client decisively commands, “Great, do it.” The consultants are forced to confess they don’t actually do what they propose, and the client faces the fact that he lacks the resources to execute the recommendations he just bankrolled. The commercial, though exaggerated, strikes a chord.
Innovation Coaching reinvents consulting to directly address these issues. The reformed discipline recognizes the value that a seasoned external viewpoint can bring, particularly by importing best practices from across industries. But it also recognizes that most valuable of resources already exist within the client (e.g., money, knowledge, skills). Instead of an external consulting team researching, analyzing and generating solutions, the new model calls for an experienced outsider to manage an internal team through the process.
This is less costly and more effective because it requires fewer senior outsiders, and because it capitalizes on the full breadth and depth of the client’s knowledge, which would take months for any consulting firm to approximate.
Forming an internal rather than external team ensures a vested interest in executing the final recommendations. Putting final recommendations into action is less negotiable when internal resources have been committed, and execution is more convicted and efficient when solutions are homegrown.
By shifting focus from consultants and the process of recommending, to clients and action – which is the goal of all marketing services – clients and their coaches can collaborate more productively in a business environment that demands efficiency, ownership of ideas, and convicted, consistent execution.
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Kevin Hoffberg
Last modified:
07/24/05