![“Our Heads Are Round so our Thoughts Can Change Direction” [Francis Picabia]](https://foodforthought.barthel.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Picabia-Francis-Round-Heads.jpg)
I lately got involved in discussions about the need for consultancies and how that market suffers the first from the financial crisis.
German top-consultant Roland Berger was quoted saying “You cannot push-start a car from the inside”. Which I found valuable. But it reminds me of a major shortcoming of todays managements: I have not needed to push-start a car for decades. The view is rather rare on the streets. But I need to confirm: The job of a consultant in most cases is to have an unbiased look at the company, speak to the people, listen to their advise, organize it and present it to the company. At that level, some creative suggestions on how to solve the identified shortcomings helps to make you a good consultant.
Another cause is the discouraging of creativity by the bean counters. “Do your job, don’t think” is very common in larger companies with strict hierarchies. Mostly these companies are “managed” by bean counters, thinking of staff only as a little wheely in the machine – a “human resource”. Exchangeable, not valuable. In such cases I either can make these managers understand the value of a reevaluation of their values and the advantages of motivation of creativity, but more often I can only help them by voicing what they overheard for too long from their own people.
So the job of a truly good consultant (but they are rare) is to listen. To gain the trust from the people. To qualify, summarize their needs, consider solutions and present the findings to the management. The best ideas on the job are usually not mine. My experience only helps me to qualify them and put them into a structure and present them to management in a way they understand. Being the moderator…
Food For Thought.
First the financial market in the United States failed. Constructs where a single person is responsible for the loss of 50 Billion US$ are just the top of an iceberg. That ice berg turned and we all feel it’s repercussions.
Our industry is like the opposite to the car industry, but not any better: Where they focus to build the big cars for big money and ignored the growing demand for low-consuming cars, our managers seek quick revenue at any cost…? Load factors and market share at the cost of yield and income.
German Rail – remember Lufthansa…
And even if you rely on it, German rail sure saved a few hundred Euros not investing on a cache memory for the train guidance system that would have saved them from major train delays…
Friends called raising a discussion related to my 
Yes, I know gloating is not nice. But a report last week on Nokia is a case that does make me smile. Nokia in 2007 shut down their plant in Bochum from one day to the other to replace it with a newly built plant in Romania. The result: Nokia’s reputation went through the floor (they became “the example” in Germany), their sales dropped, the Romanian plant only employs less than half of what they planned for. So the bean counters were miserably wrong with their previous assessments about the advantages for Nokia.
I am recently faced with the question, if I shall take up a very challenging position, asking the best of my abilities, thus meaning fun, but at high risk of a temporary assignment … Or play it save and go for a job I can do good, but which does not pose any real challenge but routine work – in return for a safe job?
Some of you have already read the 
If you don’t know what Six Sigma is about, read this 
There are many such jobs in any company, but that’s the jobs, most often the first ones being cut by Six Sigma disciples. Service, support. They are cost factors, they do nothing but cover for the mistakes done up front. As there must be no mistakes, there’s no need for service and support. It’s a very typical trend for any company where managing responsibility is transferred from the entrepeneur to the finance, money driven folks.
Having linked 
An Inuit chief once compared the human life on Earth with cancer. Instead of looking after the world and trying to live in balance, we exploit its resources, extinct other life-forms, farm life, even kill and eat other intelligence, such as whales. No symbiosis but parasite. Like vampires.