The case for selective education

I was speaking at a conference on consulting organised by the Danish Chamber of Commerce (Dansk Erhverv) a couple of weeks ago. You can find my presentation on the future shape of consulting here.

One of the points I tried to make was the extent to which the difference between client and consultant has been eroded over the last two decades. Twenty years ago, clients would not have had MBAs; they might not even have been to university. They might only have worked for the one organisation. Consultants were exotic birds by comparison: flitting from company to company, trailing expertise like brilliant feathers.

Not anymore. MBAs are now, especially in these low-employment times, two-a-penny. Most people move jobs fairly regularly, and many senior managers have worked as consultants, either for a firm or on a freelance basis. At the same time, the internet now provides free and easy access to much of the information consultants used to gather. Not surprisingly, do-it-yourself consulting is all the rage.

The problem is not so much that clients have moved on (they should and will), but that consultants haven’t. What I suggested in Denmark is that the consulting industry needs to re-think what it means by expertise, and change the way it nurtures it. We need to re-create that difference.

Part of this comes down to a straight-forward appraisal of the skills clients find in short supply. Analytical skills are a good example: building a spreadsheet is easy, but consulting firms that offer serious modelling skills are never under-utilised, suggesting that consultants simply need to be more numerate and make greater use of evidence-based management techniques. But I think a significant part of the solution lies in content, not process. A remarkable number of firms still base their training around skills: how to do good presentations; how to write better reports; how to sell more business. While these are important, they focus on showing people how to behave, not how to think. The latter can only be done by senior people, those who really know what they’re what they’re talking about, and is best done by a mentoring process, not formal training. The problem is – and perhaps this is why systematic mentoring is not as widespread in the consulting industry as it could be – you can’t mentor everyone. Picking out a small group of people to be mentored may chime with current thinking about talent management, but it goes against the grain of consulting firms who recruit people on the basis of the opportunities they offer. Consulting firms aren’t just flat structures, but are supposed to be meritocracies in which bright people, whatever their background, can make it to partner.Everyone is supposed to have an equal chance, so everyone has to have the same training.

This may be democratic, but it’s never going to differentiate consultants from their clients.