I have spent just about 25 years of my working life as a consultant. Who then is a consultant? I should know. Or do I? I started young in the wonderland of consulting. I quit a corporate job at the age of 30 and decided to go it alone as an independent consultant. And then, I slowly built a firm. In an era where respect for the monthly salary slip was big and personal insecurities even bigger, this was a big move. Twenty-five years later, people are still asking me what a consultant does. I am wondering as well. All this against the backdrop of consulting fast becoming the biggest value-generating profession globally, with a compounded annual growth of 10.2% forecast between 2022 and 2031.
The most delightful definition of a consultant then (albeit a disparaging one) is what many of us have heard in the past. Your client wants to know what time it is, so you grab their wrist, take a look at their watch and tell them what time it is. You create affirmations. You bill the client. A disparaging take for sure. But is there truth in this at all? Let’s explore this a little in detail.
For a start, the world of business is full of challenges. One of the most basic challenges is the deployment of resources, including land, labour, capital and technology. Basic challenges balloon over time as well. But once the basic challenges are overcome, the superior ones arrive: The external environment, governments, policies, philosophies, pricing issues, marketing strategies, restrictions, tariffs and, more importantly, the ever-changing business environments. Add geopolitics to it. Even a dash of politics. Garnish it with an act of God or a force majeure clause that daunts every business all over the world. And you have the need for a consultant now.
Yes, she is the same character of yore. She is still grabbing your wrist to tell you the time, but this time round, the issues are just too many to grapple with. VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) in full blast. You reach out to a consultant. In fact, you reach out to a consultant when you believe strategic mind resources within the company are just not enough to tackle the problem at hand. A moment of truth.
As I explore the need for this rather amorphous character called a consultant, I personally do believe that consulting is a language. A language of thought leadership. In a world where every brand and business is but a thought, thought leadership is what all organisations big and small seek. Thought leadership creates differentiation. Consulting creates this with cutting-edge clarity.
The consultant seems to float and flourish in this domain. A consultant, apart from everything else, is a strategy specialist who uses the language of consulting to create the future. This language is really the ultimate tool. To paraphrase Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari, the operating system of the human is language. The human creates with language, and the consultant creates with this very language. The consultant creates stories. While a fintech firm is a set of powerful fintech stories that are well conceptualised, implemented and used, a healthcare firm is about healthcare stories well told. Every business is a story well told. A consultant is the facilitator and the ‘sutradhaar’ of this story. And this certainly is an art, a science and a philosophy as well.
Having explored what a consultant possibly does and contributes, let me identify some traits of a good one. Traits I have outlined after working with scores of them both within and outside my consulting firm, and after studying 114 companies across the world I have personally interacted with.
The Sensorial Animal: Mr Big Ears, i.e., an active listener, is a good consultant. Add Ms Big Eyes as well. Listening alone is not important. The power to observe and get that little market insight is a very important trait for sure. Ms Big Nose as well. More often than not, what you hear and what you see are just not all there is. You need to smell the sector. A good consultant is, therefore, a very sensorial animal. Someone who is totally alert to the signs in everything they involve themselves in.
The Insight Hunter: Insight is such a simple yet such a complex word. The good consultant is really a miner of good insight. She is forever looking for it. A trend spotter who is ahead of the curve. And what you do not see is more important than what you see. Here as well.
The Super Moderator: You need to be a good dialogue-creator. A collaborative entity who adds one plus one and arrives at 11 with a logic that tells you clearly why it is 11.
The Idea Cauldron: The really good consultant is an idea machine. An idea machine with the clear and important ability to wipe the slate clean of previous knowledge from the numerous other projects she has handled in the past. The consultant who believes in applying what she knows from past experience on clients in a new project is possibly a complete failure. The one-size-fits-all approach is possibly one of the worst attributes to have. And every consultant knows this.
The Rock of Gibraltar: A good consultant is a one-stop shop for every problem there is to tackle for the client. The business environment today is a permacrisis. The consultant is your go-to rock.
The Helicopter and the Worm: A good consultant needs to be both. Be that high-flying helicopter with an aerial view of global issues, but at the same time, be that worm in the gutter who can deal with the ground-level issues at the marketplace. You must have the ability to marry both these realities to combine those winning, market-busting strategies together.
In sum, I have always believed that reputation means nothing in the realm of consulting. It opens the door but does not close it. A consultant is only as good as the work she puts into her current project. What she has done in all those closed projects of yore is not as important as what she does in the current one.
You are only as good as your current piece of work. You build your reputation one interlocking brick at a time. If your latest brick was a miss, you have left a hole there. A consultant can leave anything else behind, but not that.
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)