Lunch isn't for wimps

 

But perhaps the question also deserves to be taken literally. Seriously: what is the value of your weight in gold? I just checked mine and, on today’s gold prices, it’s £2,025,000. Crikey! That’s some value! And I’m a fairly average-sized bloke. I saw a consultant the other day who looked like he could well be pushing £3m. On which basis perhaps Gordon Gekko (back in cinemas this week after a 25-year absence) was wrong –  lunch isn’t for wimps. Lunch-dodging consultants may seem dedicated, but if they can get the value of their weight in gold down to, say, £1.5m, that might make all the difference in the world to how hard they have to work. It also puts the average female consultant at an enormous advantage over her male colleagues. She might be able to deliver the value of her weight in gold by lunchtime and spend the afternoon with friends. Or, even in the gym working off a few more pounds.

 

Of course the slightly trickier part to work out is the value that consultants deliver to clients, but Source co-Founder Fiona Czerniawska has already gone some way to tackling that question at an overall project level with her recent piece of research 'The value of consulting' for the MCA. All that’s needed now is a formula which allows you to calculate the value delivered by each individual consultant on a project, and the MCA’s judging process could be a simple case of punching a few numbers into a spreadsheet. It might show that some consultants are, in fact, only worth their weight in silver. Or that others are worth their weight in platinum. At any rate, spare a thought for any portly old consultants as they wheeze their way up the steps to collect their awards next year. Theirs will be the more richly deserved.