The Problem With Consulting
From my daily blog
Recently I came across a short clip from Steve Jobs where he shared his view on consulting. In essence, bright individuals are limiting themselves in their learning opportunities because of lacking ownership of one’s recommendations. Let’s dive into it.
When you are in consulting, you most likely are a brilliant young mind with excellent analytical skills combined with impressive communication skills. You know how to dive into topics quickly, contextualize a situation, and express recommendations to address key challenges eloquently. Throughout your work at consultancies, you get a view into many different firms working in a broad range of industries. Something that many aspiring consultants call a “unique” learning curve.
The problem with this project-based recommendation-oriented work is that you never truly own something over an extended period of time. You are jumping from project to project hoping your recommendations are successful. But rarely will you get a chance to see how your work plays out over a time horizon of three or more years. By not taking real responsibility for your work and facing defeat and picking yourself up again after things do not work, you only learn a fraction of what you could learn to get better. You are simply not doing it but rather just talking. Don’t get me wrong, I believe there is great value in deliberate action and profound analytical reasoning. But the purpose of all this in the end is to be applied and actually make a change in the real world. Thinking and talking for the sake of thinking and talking will not get anyone anywhere.
The great analogy Steve Jobs gives is that consulting is like having a picture of a banana. Perhaps, you also got pictures of peaches, and strawberries as you worked on different projects. But you are always limited by this 2-dimensional view of the world. You never get to taste the real thing. You never get to taste the banana. So the question I believe is important is this: Do you want to experience the world in pictures, or do the real thing?
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