Was Sir Isaac Newton the world's first management consultant?

We associate him with gravity and optics, the foremost thinker of the English enlightenment and one of the greatest scientists ever. But it’s a little known fact (beautifully narrated by Thomas Levenson's book Newton and the Counterfeiter), that, wearing his other hat (although wig might be more accurate in the context of the 17th century), Newton was Warden of the Royal Mint.

Wanting a change of scene from Cambridge, he took over the Mint at a crucial time in the mid-1690s when England was literally running out of money. In a crisis that puts the recent recession into perspective, a combination of poor quality coins and continental arbitrage meant that there simply wasn’t enough silver for trade to take place (or, for that matter, the war against the French to be funded). The solution was to replace the old coins with new ones, but for obvious reasons the process had to be completed very quickly. When Newton arrived at the Mint, he found that, instead of the planned production rate of 30,000-40,000 new coins per week, there was only the capacity to produce 15,000, meaning that the re-coinage would take almost nine to complete.

In a spectacular example of an early time-and-motion study, Newton examined every part of the production process, changing how people worked and investing in new machinery. By the late summer of 1696, the presses were regularly turning out 50,000 coins a week and, on one occasion, produced 100,000 in just six days: the recoinage was completed ahead of schedule.

His approach represents the gold standard, not just for money, but for consulting. He “meticulously” worked through all the available data, bringing the “rigour instilled by decades of painstaking laboratory work.” By the summer, his “mass of knowledge accumulated into a weapon strong enough to bludgeon” problems aside, allowing him to work out that the perfect pace for the coin presses was just slightly slower than the human heart. He also “got his hands dirty as a matter of principle”: above all else, “it was the Warden’s empirical skill – his ability to observe, measure and act on his data... that made the difference.”

It’s a salutary lesson: however sophisticated the consulting methodologies we develop today, we shouldn’t forget that the best consulting comes down the ability of individuals to see and measure what others have missed or ignored, and to act or persuade others to act on the findings. Consulting may not be a science, but there’s a good case for it being done by empiricists.