Consultants as Traffic Police

Consultants are arguably the most hated bunch of professionals around. While the financial engineers have stolen that crown momentarily, it won't be long before the trophy is passed back. Not just because the crisis will be forgotten, but also because every minute, consultants are coming up with ludicrous recommendations. Ludicrous when you look at them with 20/20 hindsight that is.

Every manager worth his salt hates to employ a consultant for it is a tacit admission of his own incompetence. Yet, the consulting profession continues to thrive and remains the most sought after career option for management graduates. What gives?

I was crawling in Mumbai traffic when it hit me. In front of me was a Santro sandwiched between a truck and a BEST bus. Now truck and bus drivers believe in extreme precision. They will drive by within an inch of your vehicle without skipping a beat. In this case though, both of them were generous enough to spare a couple of inches, but the Santro guy got all worked up. He kept nervously peering over the bonnet and looking through the side windows to make sure he was okay. I, of course, clearly saw that he just had to maintain his line and he was fine. For a minute I was amused, but soon realized it happened to me as well. Several times, in fact. Sitting inside the car, I find it incredibly difficult to accurately estimate the space available around the vehicle be it when making a sharp turn or parking in a tight spot. And that is what happens to organizations as well. People within find it difficult to clearly see the external environment. And their calls might result in a traffic pile up, or worse, a crash. The former causes organizations to lose its direction and momentum while the later pretty much kills them.

Time for your friendly neighborhood consultant to step in. He is not a Santro expert – you are – but he knows enough about it to guide it out of traffic. Which is what consultants often do; they bring in simplicity and clarity. In other words, the value added by a consultant comes from his perspective and not so much his competence. If he is a good one from McK, he will know the shortest route to the expressway. In that sense, he is no different from a traffic policeman. Of course, the recommendations would fail if something else comes up on the suggested route - another traffic snarl, for example. Or you ignore his idea and stick to your route and by some freak chance the traffic clears up. And when that happens, organizations ensure consultants dont go unpunished.

I have taken artistic liberties to make the analogy work and sincerely apologize if it caused offense to traffic policemen.

Tailpiece: It is much more difficult to estimate navigate sharp turns if you are driving a big car like Accord or Corolla. That explains whylarge organizations react sluggishly to changes in environment.

Outliers and Hofstede

MBA is a great leveler. The heady excitement of macroeconomics, finance and marketing is tempered by the fatal boredom of HR and OB. And one topic that inevitably gets raised in HR and OB is the Hofstede’s Index.

Geert Hofstede, a Dutchman, profiled the behavior of people in various countries and concluded that cultural differences can be explained on a four-point scale: Power Distance, Individualism vs. Collectivism, Masculinity vs. Femininity and Uncertainty Avoidance. B-schools and academia adore such neat models and, next to Porter’s Five Forces, Hofstede’s Index has to be the most frequently used tool to explain away the failures of MNCs. It makes you sound intelligent and gets you points for class participation. Beyond that, it seemed useless. Until I read Outliers.

Gladwell’s latest book attempts to search beyond the obvious traits of successful people – that is intelligence, hard work and perseverance. They are important, he agrees, but claims there is a little something, called luck, which actually catapults them into a different league. Like his previous books, Outliers makes for interesting reading, but what made me sit up and take notice was his analysis of plane crashes.

Here is a chilling recount of the 1990 Colombian Avianca plane crash in New York. The aircraft is desperately running out of fuel, but has not been given permission to land. The captain asks the first engineer to contact ATC and tell them it’s an emergency. The first officer contacts ATC, and among other things, mentions they are running out of fuel. Planes are expected to be low on fuel as they reach the destination so ATC doesn’t give this much weight. But rather inexplicably, the first engineer doesn’t push.

The situation makes no sense, until one looks at it through Hofstede’s index. Colombia is a country with relatively high power distance, where people are more respectful of authority. Hence, no questions were asked. If the first engineer was an American, Gladwell claims, the conversation would have taken a different course. Reading this sent a chill down my spine, but it seems airlines world over have recognized such manifestations of cultural differences in everyday interactions, and have taken measures to train their pilots and crew.

Jai Hofstede!