Or More specifically, the daft phrases dreamt up by them. It shouldn’t be, but the origin of one particularly silly phrase has been nagging me for days.
“Thinking outside the box.”
Can anyone tell me which daft ha’porth (or partnership or corporation thereof) came up with that little gem?
Managment consultants are the worse. Synergy, paradigms, right-sizing, continuous quality improvement. It’s all crap. My company was about 3 weeks behind the place where a friend of mine worked. I picked up the new words and the concepts over beers ahead of everyone else, and got into the habit of playing spoiler. My cow-orkers thought it was funny, but there were some upper-management types who were, impressed, annoyed, or frightened, depending on whether they bought into it or not. I start letting all my coworkers know the new lingo/concepts as soon as I did, and it sort of filtered upward. Eventually they stopped spending so much money on the bastard consultants, 'cause they weren’t telling them anything new.
IIRC, the “thinking out of the box” thing comes from the puzzle with 9 dots in three rows of three. You have to connect them using only four straight lines, never lifting your pencil. It is only possible if you extend the lines way outside of the “box” made by the dots.
There is also a book by a consultant called something like “The Spring and the Box.” It’s a story about a spring who is trapped in a box (which in the illustration looks like a cubicle) who only knows what’s in his box. One day he bounces up above the wall and sees all the other boxes, which allows him to do brilliant things. Truly inspiring. The little board-book comes with a spring to play with too. Truly inspiring. Probably made the author a fortune.
I don’t think that consultants are the only ones guilty of such euphamisms & expressions. In my experience, I see more of it coming from the upper management, business, and finance folks.
I agree, Phobos, but they are an impressionable group and they pick it up when playing with the damn managment consultants. The only difference is that some of the upper management folks believe it.
There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him. In my experience, promotion to executive management is not made on the basis of intelligence.
Everybody who is selling something tries to sound like they know what they are talking about. Consultants do it but so to Bible preachers, political groups, car salespeople…
A while ago I saw some feminist woman being interviewed on TV. As usual the TV was on and I wasn’t paying attention but this caught my ear because of the way she was repeating empty catchphrases that boiled down to nothing. “empowering women” was repeated way to often.
Politicians do it all the time. They gather a bunch of code words and repeat them until you’re sick of them. What in the F***ing world does “compassionate conservative” mean? It means he wants you to vote for him, that’s what it means.
I do not totally share the view that management consultants are absolutely useless. They can bring some outside views to people who are too immersed in their daily business. The problem is they have to sell their services and so they become salesmen before consultants.
So many negative responses. You all should realize that by maximizing indidvidual contributions you can leverage core compentencies over managed interacting partners, maximize synergistic collaborations, and create holistic intelectual mergers resulting in greatly optomized team deliverables accomplished, as well as personal upsizing of the self-effectualizing confidence components nesasary for realization of advancement potential for corporate stratagy goals as they pertain to the base values of the provider-client relationship interacting harmoniously with the team assigned requirements, so as not to create non-advancemental barriers that detrimentally effect the anticipated localized group through-puts as they interact with single-contributer interests.
Sounds like y’all have had some terrible experiences with bad mgt consultants, but they do have a role to play. Too many folks get stuck in a rut which results in bad service, bad products and that rants/raves that are so frequent in the SDMB Pit. A good consultant, if you know how to use their expertise, can provide a good kick start to improving service and productivity, but it is up to you to actually do it. An excellent consultant will give you concrete specifics and not the nambie-pambie psycho babble.
I’ve dealt with consultants for the last blahblah years - most have been technical rather than mgt oriented. Some have been terrific and others basically reinforced the message…some have been real babysitting nightmares. You need to know how to pick and choose among the messages in order to benefit from consultants.
I don’t mean to be rude to the above posters in my following comments: I have found that those who resist hardest are those who feel that they are already perfect, no room for improvements, see no need to improve. They have also tended to be real airheads, arrogant, insecure and afraid of change. Generally they have been the worst managers who in turn treat their “subordinates” as “subordinate slaves” and, ergo, their depts are the worst run, less productive and with significant employee problems.
Bottomline: a consultant will help you define what you want and need to improve, provide some seeds for thought and direction for you to think about while bringing in a fresh and new perspective, will provide concrete ideas [the more specific the better] but finally it is up to you to take the responsibility of proving the best that you can do. Sounds like a minister/priest/therapist/parent/confident, right?
It’s the wildest of WAGS, but I actually have some experience in the field. Maybe 15-20 years old the old nine-dot puzzle was making its rounds in team-building (another great consultism) workshops. You’ve seen this old chestnut; you put nine dots in a box pattern:
X X X
X X X
X X X
and ask people to connect them with four straight lines without lifting pencil from paper. People tend to fail the quiz because they unconsciously won’t draw a line outside the external boundary of the puzzle. You can connect it with four straight lines without stopping if you draw a line straight through three outer X’s, go “outside the box,” come back in to nail two on a diagonal… well, I’m sure we’ve all seen this puzzle. The lesson; you have to think outside the box! Shift your paradigms! Give me money!
I cannot help but notice that the term “thinking outside the box” became really popular when this puzzle was really popular. Coincidence? Maybe. This was around the time when “paradigm shifting” was the super-popular management blather of the day.
kiffa is right; there are good consultants out there who won’t waste your time with this nonsense.
That said:
Q: Why do they call consultants “gurus”?
A: “Charlatan” is harder to spell.
Which is what many of my clients were heading towards. I have found in my 15 years in this field that the “Peter Principal” is alive and well in America. Folks regularly get promoted to their level of incompetence, otherwise known as middle and upper management. No slick terms needed to say that!
A guy goes into a pet store to buy a monkey. The owner says, "I have three that you might be interested in!
"The first one costs $500; he knows how to program in C.
"The second costs $1,000; he knows object-oriented programming, C++ and Java.
“The third costs $10,000…”
The guy exclaims, “$10,000!? What does he know how to program in?”
The owner replies, “I don’t know, but he calls himself a ‘consultant.’”
About ten tears ago I attended a company class tought by a consultant called “Internal Consulting” to teach us how to be better employees. The box puzzle was given to us. It was the first time I saw it. I thought about it, solved it quickly by “going outside the box”, and was the only one in the class to get it. I was also the first person in the class to get laid off.
Here are some buzz-words I have become highly cynical about in the past five years: paradigm, team, empowerment
My firm has been engaged in this indoctrination of its staff since the mid nineties. Alas for them, ambo’s (EMT’s)are a cynical bunch of people, and only the most gullible have been completely taken in. The really sad thing is that many of our executive management preach the message but don’t practice it themselves. “Do as I say, not as I do.”
I have long said that “team” is just the latest fad in staff indoctrination, and will be ditched when the next great idea comes along. I am yet to be proven wrong…
Like I said before, how you use a consultant is key. Don’t hire a consultant if you don’t plan to change how you do business. Those upper mgt types who bring in a consultant or decide to “re-engineer” and then proceed merrily down their old path ARE POOR MANAGERS. They have wasted company resources, personnel time, made it much harder for anyone really interested in change to improve service/productivity ergo increase profits.
I’ve gone thru re-engineering with a consulting firm providing technical assistance - in a third world country no less. It was wonderful especially for the nationals working in the organization - they were being consulted and brought into the process of how to run the business which operated in their own country. Unfortunately I was still on board during the time top leadership changed; within months everything collapsed inward thru horrible old fashion tight fisted micro-managing. Of course, the new leadership could not fathom why performance fell, mistakes sky-rocketed, and the organization was blasted for piss poor performance… …sigh.
Sorry you work for such poor quality executive mgt; it’s important to remember the next time you think about changing your job - look not just for the job itself but look seriously at the environment and folks that you will be working with.
“A consultant is a man who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.”
Mark Twain
The one that disgusts me is when the HR person says:
[smarmy voice]
"There is no “I” in the word “team”.
[/smarmy voice]
I always retort, “Oh yes there is. It stands for ‘Individual excellence’.” (Without which, of course, most teams are worth shit.)
I realize this thread has gotten a little off into ranting about consultants, I thought I’d throw my two cents in:
consultants : businesses :: self-help books : individuals
They make you feel better, give you a few insights that you usually forget, and don’t help most people.
I don’t think this is a coincidence either – from what I see at work, most poor management results from the same sorts of personality problems that cause people to turn to self-help books.
Among the things I see a lot of: procrastination; expectation of instant gratification; wishful thinking; excessive optimism; mania; over-sensitivity; and taking things too personally.
As anyone who has gone on a diet knows, it is very difficult to change the emotional habits of a lifetime.
But there is a “m” and “e”
A consultant is one who will, for a price, tell you how to make love to your wife despite having never been on a date himself.
Well, as a consultant myself, I feel obliged to distinguish between those consultants who actually THINK and force the clients to THINK, and those who just wave the latest jargon around, Dilbert-like.
It aint different for academics or researchers in almost any field. There are those who arouse your curiosity and intelligence and interest, and there are those who spout jargon. I love the story about how the cartoonist who does Dilbert give speeches to business audiences, all jargonized nonsense, and watches them nod their heads in approval or applaud wildly.
I like to think that I (and good consultants) help clients to think through problems that they would not have been able to think through on their own. Not because they’re not bright, but because they aren’t experienced in the field, they don’t know what questions to ask, they don’t know what others have tried that has worked or failed. So the good consultant can add value to the process.
CKDextHavn, Amen to that