How One Consultant Sleeps at Night

 
Every few months, I read or hear another reformed management consultant come clean about their experience in the business and what it’s really all about. The shocking revelation actually follows a fairly predictable script, involving some combination of the following confessions:

1. Lavish spending on travel and accommodations: Consultants rack up travel and accommodation expenses to no apparent benefit of the client.
2. Shady billing practices: They bill by the hour and aren’t accountable to their results.
3. Playing politics: They give their stakeholder the answer they want to hear, not the correct one.
4. No leg to stand on: They know less about the company they’re working with than the executives who hire them.

I first came across these in college while thinking about pursuing a career in consulting. They were eye-opening. The projects seemed interesting, but the lack of accountability pushed me off of consulting entirely.
After a while, when I realized the tell-alls weren’t the first of their kind and wouldn’t be close to the last, they started to bug me.
If I could figure it out as a college senior after reading a couple of memoirs, how were the authors only realizing this 20 years into a consulting career? Had they never heard the “consultants borrow your watch to tell you the time,” jokes, or seen the absurd (but I must admit, very entertaining) Showtime series House of Lies? Were they really that naïve?
The truth is, it’s an open secret that traditional consulting suffers from a crippling lack of accountability due to misaligned incentives. Consultants know it, and the executives who hire them know it. They participate for the mutual benefits, and then deprecate the business once they’ve left. It’s all part of the show.
So if I’m part of that show, and I’m not retiring, why am I writing this?
The simple answer is that I’ve never really considered myself a consultant, and few of us working here really do. Yes, our projects, at a high level, are pretty much identical to an HBS case study. But I don’t feel the same lack of accountability that permeates the confessions. Our ownership stake in the companies we consult won’t allow it.

Why I Will Never Be Able to Write a Traditional Management Consultant “Tell-All”

Here’s how that structure nullifies each of the first three items the typical reformed management consultant writes about in his or her post-retirement confession:

1. Travel and accommodations: Modern marvels of science such as the telephone and the internets have allowed us to do most of our work remotely, so we don’t often need to rack up travel expenses.
2. Billing practices: We don’t bill by the hour, so it’s never in our interest to make a mountain out of a molehill. We do have a quarterly service contract, but it isn’t a profit center for the company.
3. Politics: We’re literally invested in the companies we work with and don’t make a profit on our consulting engagements, except in that they make our ownership stakes more valuable. That dynamic removes the pressure to be a yes-man just to satisfy the client. We give our honest opinion and don’t agree to projects unless we think they’ll make an impact.

Which brings us to #4, the admission that no consultant tell-all would be complete without: Consultants know less about the clients they’re paid millions to consult than those clients themselves.
This actually isn’t wrong. In fact, it’s the definition of consulting.
I can’t pretend to be as knowledgeable about the API ecosystem as the industry veterans at Mashery, or as in-tune with cloud backup technology as my counterparts at Intronis. I’m not any smarter than they are, and I don’t always have better industry contacts.
What I do have are a very particular set of skills, acquired from executing a similar market research process in rapid succession with a number of our portfolio companies. With each iteration, I’ve absorbed a different perspective from the stakeholders involved and had a chance to tweak the process. In my short year and a half at OpenView, I haven’t had nearly enough time to become an expert at all things marketing, sales, or business development. But I have had the chance to learn the horizontal slice of each of them that concerns primary and secondary research.

The True Value of a Good Consultant

That’s really what a consultant brings to the table: the ability to become an expert at something that happens too seldom at a single company to develop an expertise. It’s not magic or genius. It’s just reps and focus.
As long as there is management consulting, there will be ex-management consultants writing confessions on their way out. They’ve been so busy exaggerating their impact and expertise over the course of their career, that they’ve never had time to stop and think about how a consultant can actually add value for their clients.
If that helps them sleep at night, confess away.
I, for one, don’t plan on writing one and I’ll still get in eight solid hours.