Have you noticed that nearly everyone you meet nowadays is a consultant, or at least pretends to be? Top theologians at the Harvard Business School (that august seminary for the corporate priesthood) are predicting that in a few years time the entire business world will consist of consultants. With characteristic prescience they are preparing graduates for the fast track in consultancy with special courses in apologetics and oenology. A pundit of my acquaintance (a high-caste consultant from Bangalore) attributes what he calls the ‘consultant explosion’ to some arcane synergism wrought by the world recession and the warm weather.
Some behavioral scientists theorize that consultancy is the modern executive’s way of ‘dropping out,’ of exercising what the psychologists call a ‘sense of primary retroactive deprivation’ as a way of compensating for the lavish self-determination of today’s young people.
Others talk about the primeval yearning of Corporate Man for authority without accountability. A state of grace which is best achieved in a top staff job at the corporate Kremlin, politics, investment banking, or as a consultant. (See Guratsky’s Zen and the Art of Strategic Forecasting.) It’s safer to be a guru than an entrepreneur, a risk taker.
Or it used to be. Nowadays, many companies are changing from centralized functional types of organization into decentralized, divisional ones made up of profit centers. There is today a discomforting emphasis on ‘entrepreneurship.’ Fifty percent or more of staff people can be casualties of a major reorganization.
But, whatever the reason, there’s no doubt that if the trend continues, the corporation as we know it today will disappear as more and more executives take refuge in consultancy.
Of course, the best way to become a consultant is to be fired. (I recommend Stanley Zilch’s seminal handbook, The Art of Getting Fired. Or for the philosophically minded, Arnold Fishmouth’s Beyond the Peter Principle.)
Time was when the firing maneuver was quite a pageant, with a brass band playing slow, martial airs, a twelve-gun salute and press releases unleashed in thousands of multicolored balloons. The freshly fired vice president would gather up the 22-carat shards of his career and depart gratefully to his tastefully furnished consultant’s suite. In these democratic times one can dispense with a good deal of the ceremony. Nowadays, any executive with a reasonable sense of occasion, a severance check, a little black book and a couple of credit cards can become a consultant.
In fact it’s becoming hard to tell the difference between a consultant and an unemployed executive.
There’s a kind of poignancy in the sight of a recently fired tycoon at a dinner party ill at ease in his new social role. Take the other evening, for example. I was sitting next to a turkey-necked crone who was the owner of the ex-tycoon in question. Reacting to a snide rejoinder from her neighbor, she sprang to her husband’s defense, knocking over several wine glasses as she landed on the other side of the table.
‘Of course, George always felt he could make so much more of a contribution if he went on his own, didn’t you, George? And then after we turned down the presidency and they made this wonderful offer of early retirement we just had to take it, didn’t we, George? No, he’s still looking around for clients. George thinks one must be selective. It’s a question of values, isn’t it George?’
There’s no doubt that the proliferation of consultants is getting out of hand. The trouble is that consultant’s beget consultants. This results in a daisy-chain of primary, secondary and tertiary consultants. (A useful guide here is Mel Silverman’s Who Consults Whom?) Few consultants these days have any direct contact with the client, who is becoming an endangered species as more and more clients become consultants.
This is seriously upsetting the ecological balance of international business. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if any day now the United Nations sponsored ‘International Client’s Year’ as a way of drawing attention to the consultant explosion in the over-developed countries of the world.
Roger Collis 1984 If my boss calls make sure you get his name… 1982 BBC World Service
Tags: BBC