I worked for 15 years as an engineer for 1 organization and Jobs is 100% right. Much of what I learned came as a result of having to live with the decisions I made on behalf of my customer. When it broke, they came to me and I had to fix it. And when I designed it next time during the next iteration, it didn't break. My ability to design good systems increased dramatically as a result.
I think Steve here is too hard on consultants. Of course, I say this as a consultant. I am a civil engineering consultant. Municipalities and States hire me to do design work for them exactly because they don't have the in-house expertise to do what I do, which is very niche. How could they be expected to do what I do? In fact, it would be a tremendous waste of their money and resources to keep someone on staff that solely does what I do for the once-in-a-decade time they need the work done. In this situation, I do work all around the region with my clients when it's time to do those designs. I design traffic signal systems - not the individual traffic lights, but whole systems. I also do individual signals, but mostly systems. This is only comes up in a mid-size municipality every decade or so, therefore it's not financially sensical to keep someone on staff who has this expertise. In this way, I am not the only villain that Jobs says I am. I provide an essential service that Jobs, who I consider a layman in this manner, takes for granted.
@@craigfdavis I think was thinking more along the lines of professional management consulting firms. Not technical/engineering consulting or similar consultants with direct experience & specialists.
This ignores that the consultants a business hires are running their own businesses with risks they have to live with. They offer consulting services, Apple offer phones. To demand consultants take on the risks of their services would be like demanding Apple offer free repairs for products they sell regardless of when it's required. It's all a bit rich given how quickly Apple products degrade to the point of being unusable. I think there's a slightly blinkered view of Jobs in certain quarters tbh
@@jimihendrixx11 That may be the case and it's a good point. I do my job as a consultant as if I am employed WITH the client in their business. Because, at the end of the day, yes, I can't claim ownership of the asset itself, but in lieu of that, my professional reputation is the commodity here, and without that, I have absolutely nothing.
This is honestly applicable to most things in life. You can have all the knowledge and theories about something, but until you experience it yourself you never 100% knew it
True with everything that you read, you try and haven't gotten to the depth of it. IMO SJ has broadly classified consultants, and not touched upon this point. An individual's need, passion and ability to learn is what drives things more so than one being a consultant or not.
I think it's a mixture of internalization, what our takeaways are from the knowledge that's imparted to us, as well as developing our own translation/interpretation of how we express said takeaways that's the third dimension to Jobs's analogy of a picture of fruit. Depth is really a hard concept to express.
Even if we experience things ourselves, there is no way to know every single thing about what is happening and even if we quest towards that, it can distract us from other things that we should be seeing otherwise we are super injured or dead then ultimately we are into the afterlife experience forever. Still though, if the afterlife was indeed better with the deserved rules or not, it would be good people had no idea how to do everything "right" to not have died.
I work in IT. My company decided to spend close to 30 MILLION DOLLARS on consultants instead of hiring more help (which would have been a fraction of that). CIO was an idiot (got fired this last week). Consultants walked away from a fire with their wallets full and left us with the mess. I quit shortly afterwards.
even worse sometimes it's the CIO force their direct report to follow the lead of the consultant when their direct report is more experienced, just because the CIO don't want any trouble
This is more than that tho. Very different from someone like a gary vee type selling platitudes. he's giving actual advice to specific professions on being more hands on in their design approach which is absolutely correct.
I have 20 years in manufacturing and 22 since as a consultant so I've pretty much seen it all. Jobs is right for consultants without significant industry experience. Those of us with arrows in our backs and substantial scar tissue who become consultants are usually better at understanding where our clients are coming from and what issues they may face. So we tend to give them better advice. Beware of the big consultancies; they hire MBAs right out of school and throw them at you for $600/hr. While these kids are smart, they're knowledge-free and are learning at your expense. Make sure you know what you're getting when you hire a consultant.
Interesting. I work with the marketing department of several consulting agencies. Surely this scenario Steve tells, no longer applies to the worlds leading organizations? Beccause those I talk to, all have developers in their organizations. They all have partner programs with their vendors. Its no longer just a case of consulting being purely a sales division? I also happen to work with several of the vendors, none of them would be even half as successfull if it wasnt for consultants. Interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
As a consultant myself, this is very true. I find myself lucky that my current client has kept me around for about 5 years now and I have been able to see the fruits of my labor blossom and some come apart. Prior clients I have zero insight to if I have any lasting impact.
This is what I was hoping to find- consulting to create partnerships and review/refine/own your work over many years for lasting effects with the companies you've partnered with. I feel this is the happy medium between the consulting Jobs speaks about and being internal to the company with needs.
"… not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a faction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better." Ownership is important for setting clear accountability and responsibility to generate better results.
I agree with Jobs’ assessment. Having been on both sides of the consulting equation, however, I found that companies tended to value the ideas of consultants over the ideas of their employees. If push ever cams to shove, the consultant’s advice was taken and the employee’s was ignored or certainly underrated. So, if you have enough experience in an industry, it is far less stressful being a consultant. You also have the advantage of being above the fray when it comes to office politics. And this, in spite of the inherent depth and value of loyal employees’ ownership of systems, problems and issues.
Haha, that’s why I decided to do tech consulting for a period of time. I would give the exact same advice and suggestion but if it didn’t come from a consultant, my management wouldn’t buy it. I’ve always felt that since consultants don’t have skin in the game, management never feels threatened with someone below them in the corporate hierarchy to potentially know what to do.
What you are describing is actually a quite known bias. If you pay money for a recommendation or guidance you are far more likely to follow it (I know employees get paid as well but their payment isnt linked as directly to a result). That is why so many people still buy so many books about business and money. The knowledge is in the internet but many people can follow advice out of books easier that advice they got for free
It's weird because in non-profits it's almost the opposite. The employees have no ownership and typical tenure is like 6 months. So the consultants are often the longest running people, so the responsibility gets dropped on them for basically everything.
I’m a tech consultant and trust me when I say this, we bullshit and re-contract a lot. Cannot wait to launch my own business and quit, I have realized that the corporate world is not for me.
By their very nature consulting companies don't want your "problem" to go away. It's like pharmaceutical companies being more than happy to develop "treatments" but they're reluctant to develop a "cure" because it would be a one-time thing.
He articulated his thoughts so well here. I will always remember this message from Steve. The fruit analogy has persuaded me to pursue my own business idea and own my recommendations instead of taking a safer route in consulting. It’s funny that he mentioned a banana before an apple. I’ll let you know what the fruit tastes like when my time is done as well Steve! 🍎 🍌
From a company who can't afford to lose $1 mil, we have lost $20 to $30 million dollars from having a restructure with poor consultants, he's 100% right.
Often it’s the fault of management why you lose money, not from the consultants. Sometimes the management want to change something they do not have a clue of and that’s the result.
After many years in business, I finally learned (from a consultant) that consultants are often hired to cook up and justify whatever conclusions are wanted by the person who has the mandate to hire them. So even worse than pontificating on industry or domain matters where they may have less expertise than their clients, they are used to manipulate or eliminate opponents in organizations. A bit like think tanks or lobbyists ranting about "data". This might explain why many consultants end up working in senior government positions.
That´s what they are paid for, true. The other thing are very specialized consultancies who basically get paid for industry espionage. What else would you want to call it, when they do the 10th implementation of a CRM in the car industry? Oh, could you tell us how ... are doing it? Sure, no problem ;)
As someone working in consulting, I can comfirm this. In my biggest project I had to mediate between the global organization and the local representatives from the different markets where the company operates. "Mediating" here basically meant to push back on what was coming from the local organizations and enable what the global organization wanted to achieve. In this way they achieve what they want but do not put their faces and the consultants have to deal with all the rants, complaints, resistances.
Correct, and the news media selectively interview and quote “experts” in the same way. To voice the interviewer’s own opinions for pay, or in other words, astroturfing.
His hand gestures are phenomenal.... try & do that just by yourself alone..... & then realise he used them fluidly... in " live " presentations to......thousands.... RESPECT !
My Father taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson in life: “The man who’s never made a mistake, has never made anything!” But like the best lessons, it took me years to fully understand his wisdom. Thank you Dad.
So true. I think that I've learnt more in my career than many others exactly, because I experimented and made mistakes. It of course helps to observe others as they are making mistakes. Then you learn from their mistakes as well. 🙂
Consulting is a great career if you do it from within a company that primarily makes a product. For example a consultant in a software company works with the customers to make them successful with the software. The customers don’t go away, just transition to support. You are still accountable long term for the customer’s success.
consulting has always seemed like more of a retirement plan than a career to me. My grandfather worked in labs and institutes for about 40 years before retiring and doing consulting and I intend to follow a similar path.
That's what it should be - or if not a retirement plan, it's the next step up after accumulating enough experience in a field. But these days kids go straight to the big consultancy firms from Uni and all they have to hand is theory and they're next to useless. I'm an independent consultant who spent over a decade in my field working my way up from near the bottom to management level, and I've done another decade in consultancy since. A big part of the reason I went into it was because I was working with consultants who had no idea what they were talking about and were just trying to apply theory. A mix of both is the best solution and I definitely wouldn't call consultancy a retirement plan because the monetary rewards are huge and should be sought earlier.
Worked 10 years in steady jobs and recently swiftched to consulting, but not completely standard as I am fulltime employed in a tech company, and they send me out to customers to consult in short cycles. It’s awesome. As someone else said, learning to listen is key. Often I collect questions that I have to reaerch myself, which means gathering insight from colleagues and building an internal network. I often wonder what happens to the projects that I work on, but sometimes customers do take initiative to come back and say that they were happy. My sense of continuity comes from the fact that because I work with my company’s tech all the time, I gather valuable feedback that I can feed back to the other engineers. That means that if I do my job right, some of the problems that I face this year, I won’t ever have to face again. I expect to do this for a while now, maybe years.
Agreed problemat1que. I've known some great technical SME-type consultants during my career. I've never met a single competent strategy consultant. Not one. Seen millions of dollars wasted chasing shiny new "north stars" that never work out.
So glad I found this….I’ve been saying this to the C levels for years….no one listened. Tens of millions of fees to the consulting companies later, well what have we learned? Exactly the same things we all knew about, albeit packaged in a nicer way and delivered by people in suits and Rolexes.
@@donniea5058 exactly that! The people that have helped built the organisation over the years were given the silent treatment and given the job to simply ‘hand over’ all the vital information to the consultants for them to put their rubber stamps and branding on it.
This always baffles me... consultants at big companies are 24-26, do not have real experience, do not know how to run a business and what they know is on the very scratch surface... what do they consult?
True in the ownership aspect, but I would say that a good consultant is a good listener first, and after having listened to hundreds or thousands of employees and owners, from a multitude of companies and industries, a good consultant can present ideas and perspective that would otherwise be hidden, due to that wider field of experience. It is easy to get tunnel-vision in any field, and great value can be added from a good consultant. If the payment for consultancy service is connected to results of implementation, or stock-options, the ownership, lyability and invested interest can be more connected. I am speaking both as an entrepreneur and consultant, with a father having the same mix..
Agree on the payment part, it feels weird that consultancy firms typically charges one-off project-based payments instead. Guessed it was a way to keep the independent and "professional" image
Makes sense, why pay for a perspective that the people working on the problem already have? Then again, I do believe that a consultant with some prior experience across multiple stages of development and implementation, stands a better chance of perceiving problems and offering solutions. As for the payment reflecting the contribution, what better way to make sure you get what you pay for, just makes sense. Only reason to forgoe that and pay fixed fees, is CORRUPTION. Fixed fees allow a company to hire an outside consultant (for any amount of money, tax deductible as business expense) who is often an ex politician who pushed for bills in favour of the company, perfectly legal. If consulting fees were to be customarily dependant upon the results of the consult, fixed fee cases would stick out. Majority of small companies, tend to adopt practices held by the large ones, believing that they are sound, based on the success of said large companies, while ignoring the fact that their situations are fundamentaly different.
I too am both a software developer and a presales consultant. I think it's just different kinds of ownership. As an engineer, yes you own the product, but as a consultant, you own the customer. If you mess up your recommendations, you are just as liable to the customer, which can often be many times harder to fix. Skillsets required are also different. Consultants need to be very effective at translating technical jargon into laymen concepts and finding cost-effective solutions that fit, whereas engineers can typically afford to babble in native tech-speak. Steve is just pandering to his own ego here - of course it's cool to say, I was part of the team that built the product, and hence I've earned my stripes to consult on it - but not everyone can master the discipline of both engineering and business communication like Steve has. I've seen what happens too many times when you put an engineer in front of a group of corporates in suits.
I’ve worked with many consultants over a very long career in manufacturing management and IT, even hired some myself in spite of my prior experiences. I have never seen one add value.
He was absolutely right here. There is something inherently irresponsible in consulting, because you are detached from what happens to the company in the long run. On the other hand, I must say I have seen the same lack of responsability in many tech start-ups, where people come just to get experience and some fancy title: many poor decision are taken by people who already know that in 1-2 years will be already working somewhere else and not paying for the consequences of their poor decisions. That's unfortunately the world we live in.
I've done both. Product for longer than being a consultant. But consulting is by far my favourite. For pure exposure to variety and awesome people. At least in my experience the types of companies who are self aware enough to hire consultants are usually doing good work. And I'm still very much learning about providing effective feedback. Because you see plenty of know it all consultants who give an opinion without having to see it implemented. It's why I like longer gigs because in a former life I was involved with leading technical teams and going live was the best part of the grind.
Steve was spot on! This was at time when many top tier graduates chose either investment banking or consulting! and today Top Tier chose to go into Tech or startup tech!
With more than 25 years in tech, I have been saying something similar. Most consultants aren't around long enough to learn from their mistakes. Tech consulting should be an area experienced, battle hardened professionals move into - not graduates imo.
reminds of skin the of the game by Nassim Taleb...same thesis. point could be made about politicians and not having to be accountable for their actions since they're not usually stakeholders in what they vote on. great point from Jobs
I've done both. Consulting and sitting around maintaining the project long term. Consulting came second. In Engineering you get tired of knowing the decisions you are forced to make are bad. The people you work with aren't very skilled or don't care. The company wants to save money and so they hire inexpensive Engineers lacking experience. You get sick of it. And Consulting allows you to break away from these bad decisions. If companies stuck to Jobs advice to "Hire smart people so they can tell us what to do", I'd work for them. They don't. They cut costs. They cut corners. And the Engineer gets blamed. No thanks. I'll stick to consulting.
Fix for that is only work for companies that do product methodology. Projects lead to a lot of waste and quite a bit of orphaned and unsupported tech that maybe shouldn’t even exist. My past 2 companies have been product team based and it’s honestly a totally different experience than typical lumbering corporate America.
Amazing that people knew about Skin In The Game before the term got coined. This reinstates how elemental the idea of SITG is. Should be taught in every MBA class to enTrEprEneUrS
This is the real loss in tech companies not paying their internal promotions equal to their external hires. It encourages young developers and engineers to bounce around different companies, where you don't get to see things through
Agreed that execution experience is key. You get that also by auditing bad situations in consulting. The accumulated experience is incomparable to learning execution mistakes by doing them.
Consultants often have 100 employers, not one and not subject to the will of 1 set of incompetent managers. In niche areas can gather experience at a rate you cannot get in an corporation. The question is who do you want on your team? Someone that read about, seen it, or did it. Hence the real value of a consultant. He is right about a lot of things, but what he doesn’t mention is most companies are not like Apple and don’t have the same resources internally.
I think he is right. I’m just starting off a career in software development and I’m starting my first job at a consultancy, but for me I think it’s a great option because I’m not sure what I want to do yet and I want to learn a broad set of skills before I decide what I like and want to specialise in. So I think working at a consultancy is great for that. But after a couple of years I definitely plan to move onto a product company.
The rough transcript... "How many of you are from consulting? Oh that's bad. You should do something. No seriously, I don't think there nothing inherently evil in consulting, I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a change to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action states and accumulate scare tissue for those mistakes and to picks oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off one learns a fraction of what one can. Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation I think is a faction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better. You do get a broad cut at companies but it's very thin, it's like a picture of a banana, you might get a very accurate picture but its only 2 dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get 3 dimensional, so you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends, I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes, but you never really taste it, that is what I think."
He is of course completely correct, a consultant will never understand a business as well as its own employees. However, I feel he has missed the utility of a good consultant; a good consultant will find inspiration for change through what company employees suggest and build on those suggestions. Sometimes it just takes a fresh perspective/outside view to do what a company knows it should have been doing from the start!
I am not sure. I work for a company with employees who basically never worked somewhere else. It´s a big company and that is really an issue, as they really are lacking inspiration... At least from an organizational point-of-view is is a real shit-show
As a consultant, pay for follow up work and you'll get it. Also after hearing about how you'd rather the bananas be made of cardboard filled with syrup instead of an actual banana to save on cost I don't need to know how it tastes before I bounce.
He's talking about academic consultants. I worked in the field from the very bottom to the top then became consultant. And yes he has a great point, because many consultants are just applying academic knowledge without context.
@@LtW00dy It does. Basically, you are not at the receiving end. If the company fails or things go wrong then you are not at fault and will simply move on to the next company.
@@DanielRomero thats for juniors and mid level who are basically working for managed service consultancies in operations. Very different from being the SME delivering complex projects.
Most of the consultants I know have spent many years working on projects E2E before consulting. I think Job's analogy was in itself 2D in relation to consultants.
Agreed , that's the same exact thing i say about business consultants , i call it fake career , besides they cannot be fully trusted simply because they sell the same ideas to everyone else therefore business consulting companies do play a major role in devastating markets , big firms should have their own private consultants who have the real experience it takes for it
Funny side story. Many big companies started doing exactly this during the last decade. This is especially a thing in car manufacturing. They started consulting firms within their organisation with highly educated people in all disciplines which are consulting exclusively for them. e.g. Mercedes Benz did this.
Im saving these for later: Oftentimes companies listen more to consultants than their own employees. I agree with Jobs’ assessment. However, I found that companies tended to value the ideas of consultants over the ideas of their employees. If push ever came to shove, the consultant’s advice was taken and the employee was ignored or certainly underrated. So, if you have enough experience in an industry, it is far less stressful being a consultant. You also have the advantage of being above the fray when it comes to office politics. And this, in spite of the inherent depth and value of loyal employees’ ownership of systems, often creates problems and issues. I've done both. Consulting and sitting around maintaining the project long term. Consulting came second. In Engineering you get tired of knowing the decisions you are forced to make are bad. The people you work with aren't very skilled or don't care. The company wants to save money and so they hire inexpensive Engineers lacking experience. You get sick of it. And Consulting allows you to break away from these bad decisions. If companies stuck to Jobs advice to "Hire smart people so they can tell us what to do", I'd work for them. They don't. They cut costs. They cut corners. And the Engineer gets blamed. No thanks. A good consultant is a good listener first, and after having listened to hundreds or thousands of employees and owners, from a multitude of companies and industries, a good consultant can present ideas and perspective that would otherwise be hidden, due to that wider field of experience. It is easy to get tunnel-vision in any field, and great value can be added from a good consultant. If the payment for consultancy service is connected to results of implementation, or stock-options, the ownership, lyability and invested interest can be more connected. I am speaking both as an entrepreneur and consultant, with a father having the same mix..
I think Job was right when he said it. But it's no longer true now and it's partially his fault. You no longer have any ability to maintain things long term. You might get a year down the line on a project if you're lucky. Then someone way up the food chain decides things aren't going the way they want, and there's a new idea, a new direction, and of course a new buzzword. This self styled Steve Jobs, who is actually more Robert California, has the one idea that will save the company, at least for the next 9-12 months. After that the board or someone higher up the food chain gets a whiff that things aren't going well, this new buzzword hasn't saved the day. After much disruption and much reorganization (or disorganization) an unceremonious email 'Robert California's' last day is today. And in comes a new savior, with a new buzzword, another self styled Steve Jobs ready to be disruptive to the marketplace, but in reality only to be disruptive to employees. And the pattern repeats, over and over again, across industries, across companies, across borders.
The biggest problem woth companies are engineers themselves mostly..I worked for a science company and frankly they listened too much to engineer types who often have absolutely zero practical experience in their field..but they're tasked with designing a system with zero idea of the practical application of it.. products should never be given solely to an engineer.. projects have to include hands on people..I have said since Moses wore short pants that the education and design
I think about the worst form of consultant is the management consultant. What greater failure in an organisation than the fact that those managing it believe they're not competent to do so, so call in people to help them do their job. Anyone else not competent at their job would simply be fired - the correct course of action. Of course, the other reason to bring in consultants (and I've seen it done) is to pay them to legitimise what you already wanted to do anyway. Ie, by having an 'independent expert' third party say what it is that you want to do, you can say that the course of action is not merely your whim, but based on 'expert advice'.
Or, arguably the most common reason, to get broader industry insights that just can't be found inhouse. Like Steve points out they have many "pictures on their wall" that management can use as additional data and reference point to form their own opinion.
@@dhirajmeenavilli5508 If they were, wouldn't they be the most credible person to speak on the matter instead of everyone shitting on each other over something Steve Jobs said? I've worked for various companies and some of them swear management consultants are the devil's spawn (for the same complaints above - only offer advice but don't have accountability, only there to fire people, etc.) while others repeatedly go back to management consultants year after year. Management consulting is very broad - cost optimization where people get laid off is only 1 type of work they do. A lot of the time firms want to enter markets, analyze productivity, analyze profits, plan branch opening, etc. they will rely on management consulting firms. The shitty projects where you bring in McKinsey to fire 10% of your workforce, or the type where you bring in suits only for them to relay to management what employees have been trying to say for years - are just shitty projects pitched by shitty managers. Same can be said about many other industries like real estate development and gentrification. You can't just make blanketed statements and sneer at people who work in the industry like that. If Hazir is knowledgeable, you should be interested in what they have to say
One-dimensional and shallow analysis. You are failing to acknowledge factors such as lack of resources, lack of time, lack of skills, lack of culture and so many more. If what you said was true, no company would ever go bankrupt or fail to implement any strategy because they would simply "be good at their jobs". Extrapolating your analogy, does this apply to science as well? No need to co-authoring or peer-reviewing since scientists should just be competent to do science right! Because by the way, that's precisely the scope of some engagements (co-authoring in house strategy work, peer reviewing in house strategy and so on). Now I do think Steve Jobs has a point and it's very much true. Consultants who exit to the Industry often have hard times "adapting to reality" and getting things done at first. The same way "Pure Industry" people might have hard times looking at unexplored broader scenarios with incomplete information and high uncertainty for example. We all need each other one way or another.
The very last sentience is especially true. I’ve been suddenly let go 3 times from 3 different consultancies. The first time I was in denial, the next two times I realised it comes with the job.
Steve isn’t wrong. There is a big risk hiring pure strategy consultants. What he didn’t address, and I see few, if any comments mentioning it, is there are consultant firms that do strategy and implementation. I’m lucky enough to be in one of these firms where I have the opportunity to practice what I preach. He’s right though, because I see it too, it’s important to have implementation experience.
There's implementation, and then there's You Build It You Own It-style operation where the solution collides with the real world, where you have to live with the real-world consequences of the many micro- and macro-decisions that were made in the implementation. That is where the real lessons are learned.
Also, working for companies like ***, you lose your mind and your soul. Then they'll kick you out once you're broken and you'll have nothing to show for. That's the most dramatic part of this "2D picture" problem.
If you come from a field such as manufacturing and become a consultant wouldn’t you have already tasted the “fruit”? As a consultant you’re just sharing the “fruit” so others and experience what you know.
As long as the consultants are on implementation side of work meaning basically a product. though as an outsider their holistic angle is still limited for example the business planning part. No company will share too much secrets!
If you're a management consultant, or a change consultant, or a consultant who specialises in an essentially established product, sure. The answer is 'yes'. But with a company such as Apple, the "fruit" is constantly changing. The development of every new product is an opportunity to dive into and experience fully as an engineer or developer, or it's an opportunity to experience just a 2D picture of it as a consultant.
I don't think Jobs said that you should not use consultants. It is great if they have an idea, but tell you how to implement the idea, I don't think that they are suited to do that.
I agree with him but that is actually a strength that an outside consultant brings to a company. They aren't affected by the corporate culture, they don't have scar tissue from past failures at the company so they won't be biased toward one thing. They also aren't swayed as much by corporate politics. (Yes a different set of politics, but not the usual ones.) When used effectively they can work quite well in identifying new things you should do, things you should not do, and even when they agree with management, there is a benefit. Less risk.
I like consultants because they are able to frame data in a way that provides optimal clarity to the course of actions. That said, competent people in management should be able to make effective decisions based on their own due diligence, or not be in the job. Reliance on external consultants is ludicrous because those are not the people accountable for outcomes. Steve is right. Too often ‘strategy’ is a cookie-cutter mold with no experience of prior context.
That’s not always true, as some ideas scale and others don’t. Though you might say that an individual has a limited pool of knowledge and that they’re able to pull from, which creates a more narrow range of solutions they might arrive at.
It's a generalization. Yes, there are going to be specifics that don't apply in one area that do apply in another, but due to ideological constraints, schooling constraints, capital constraints, etc. It's close enough to say that the solution they sell is like an off the rack suit. Yes there are many different types of off the rack suits, some small, some blue, some pinstriped, but due to the nature of the beast, it's standardized. There are going to be small changes, but it's in the service of homogeneity, not against it.
I worked for 15 years as an engineer for 1 organization and Jobs is 100% right. Much of what I learned came as a result of having to live with the decisions I made on behalf of my customer. When it broke, they came to me and I had to fix it. And when I designed it next time during the next iteration, it didn't break. My ability to design good systems increased dramatically as a result.
I think Steve here is too hard on consultants. Of course, I say this as a consultant.
I am a civil engineering consultant. Municipalities and States hire me to do design work for them exactly because they don't have the in-house expertise to do what I do, which is very niche. How could they be expected to do what I do? In fact, it would be a tremendous waste of their money and resources to keep someone on staff that solely does what I do for the once-in-a-decade time they need the work done. In this situation, I do work all around the region with my clients when it's time to do those designs.
I design traffic signal systems - not the individual traffic lights, but whole systems. I also do individual signals, but mostly systems. This is only comes up in a mid-size municipality every decade or so, therefore it's not financially sensical to keep someone on staff who has this expertise.
In this way, I am not the only villain that Jobs says I am. I provide an essential service that Jobs, who I consider a layman in this manner, takes for granted.
@@craigfdavis I think was thinking more along the lines of professional management consulting firms. Not technical/engineering consulting or similar consultants with direct experience & specialists.
Good point
This ignores that the consultants a business hires are running their own businesses with risks they have to live with. They offer consulting services, Apple offer phones. To demand consultants take on the risks of their services would be like demanding Apple offer free repairs for products they sell regardless of when it's required. It's all a bit rich given how quickly Apple products degrade to the point of being unusable. I think there's a slightly blinkered view of Jobs in certain quarters tbh
@@jimihendrixx11 That may be the case and it's a good point. I do my job as a consultant as if I am employed WITH the client in their business. Because, at the end of the day, yes, I can't claim ownership of the asset itself, but in lieu of that, my professional reputation is the commodity here, and without that, I have absolutely nothing.
This is honestly applicable to most things in life. You can have all the knowledge and theories about something, but until you experience it yourself you never 100% knew it
True with everything that you read, you try and haven't gotten to the depth of it. IMO SJ has broadly classified consultants, and not touched upon this point. An individual's need, passion and ability to learn is what drives things more so than one being a consultant or not.
Marys room experiment
I think it's a mixture of internalization, what our takeaways are from the knowledge that's imparted to us, as well as developing our own translation/interpretation of how we express said takeaways that's the third dimension to Jobs's analogy of a picture of fruit.
Depth is really a hard concept to express.
Even if we experience things ourselves, there is no way to know every single thing about what is happening and even if we quest towards that, it can distract us from other things that we should be seeing otherwise we are super injured or dead then ultimately we are into the afterlife experience forever. Still though, if the afterlife was indeed better with the deserved rules or not, it would be good people had no idea how to do everything "right" to not have died.
yep. business professors who haven't started or managed a business are all too common.
"like having a picture of food on the wall...but never having tasted it." great analogy.
P
Food is a metaphor
I found his analogies here rather clumsy. Not the most well spoken moment for him
Surprised he didn’t reference apples :P
You don't need to taste a banana to know that this is a banana. A picture it's enough for me
Bananas, peaches, grapes. This guy should start a fruit company
Yep, like an apple company or something like that
@@webstime1 Oh boy you're in for a treat 😂😂
How much can one banana cost?
Ever heard of APPLE phones? Jeez, some people just don't know pop culture...
@@budgetbot1118 bro he’s just JOKING of course he knows apple
The problem is not Consultants taking money for Powerpoints, the problem is Managers giving away money for Powerpoints.
I work in IT. My company decided to spend close to 30 MILLION DOLLARS on consultants instead of hiring more help (which would have been a fraction of that). CIO was an idiot (got fired this last week). Consultants walked away from a fire with their wallets full and left us with the mess. I quit shortly afterwards.
even worse sometimes it's the CIO force their direct report to follow the lead of the consultant when their direct report is more experienced, just because the CIO don't want any trouble
CIO might have had mates at the consultanty firm too, or took a backhanded commission
What is the name of the company ? What do they do ?
This man knew decades ago that a era of social media "gurus" were coming.
yeah... cause he sold them laptops ;)
This is more than that tho. Very different from someone like a gary vee type selling platitudes. he's giving actual advice to specific professions on being more hands on in their design approach which is absolutely correct.
I have 20 years in manufacturing and 22 since as a consultant so I've pretty much seen it all. Jobs is right for consultants without significant industry experience. Those of us with arrows in our backs and substantial scar tissue who become consultants are usually better at understanding where our clients are coming from and what issues they may face. So we tend to give them better advice.
Beware of the big consultancies; they hire MBAs right out of school and throw them at you for $600/hr. While these kids are smart, they're knowledge-free and are learning at your expense. Make sure you know what you're getting when you hire a consultant.
This! Hire consultants that have walked a mile in your shoes.
You missed the point.
Interesting. I work with the marketing department of several consulting agencies. Surely this scenario Steve tells, no longer applies to the worlds leading organizations? Beccause those I talk to, all have developers in their organizations. They all have partner programs with their vendors. Its no longer just a case of consulting being purely a sales division? I also happen to work with several of the vendors, none of them would be even half as successfull if it wasnt for consultants. Interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
You still work?
@@StenoTimmy sounds like it was actually you that missed the point
They way he puts together words in a sentence , my brain chemistry changes
That's a really fancy way of saying," He made me think". Haha
As a consultant myself, this is very true. I find myself lucky that my current client has kept me around for about 5 years now and I have been able to see the fruits of my labor blossom and some come apart. Prior clients I have zero insight to if I have any lasting impact.
This is what I was hoping to find- consulting to create partnerships and review/refine/own your work over many years for lasting effects with the companies you've partnered with. I feel this is the happy medium between the consulting Jobs speaks about and being internal to the company with needs.
What do you do day to day?
@@charleskavoukjian3441system architect/developer/data analyst in commodities
"… not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a faction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better." Ownership is important for setting clear accountability and responsibility to generate better results.
Thats a consultants goal. Bleed the contract and keep you wanting just a little bit more... forever.
I agree with Jobs’ assessment. Having been on both sides of the consulting equation, however, I found that companies tended to value the ideas of consultants over the ideas of their employees. If push ever cams to shove, the consultant’s advice was taken and the employee’s was ignored or certainly underrated. So, if you have enough experience in an industry, it is far less stressful being a consultant. You also have the advantage of being above the fray when it comes to office politics. And this, in spite of the inherent depth and value of loyal employees’ ownership of systems, problems and issues.
If the employees were adequate, the consultants would never be called.
@@conservativeasiatic9752 Unless budgets needed to be spent. Or management was not as sharp as it should be. Or any of a myriad of other reasons.
Haha, that’s why I decided to do tech consulting for a period of time. I would give the exact same advice and suggestion but if it didn’t come from a consultant, my management wouldn’t buy it. I’ve always felt that since consultants don’t have skin in the game, management never feels threatened with someone below them in the corporate hierarchy to potentially know what to do.
What you are describing is actually a quite known bias. If you pay money for a recommendation or guidance you are far more likely to follow it (I know employees get paid as well but their payment isnt linked as directly to a result).
That is why so many people still buy so many books about business and money.
The knowledge is in the internet but many people can follow advice out of books easier that advice they got for free
It's weird because in non-profits it's almost the opposite. The employees have no ownership and typical tenure is like 6 months. So the consultants are often the longest running people, so the responsibility gets dropped on them for basically everything.
I’m a tech consultant and trust me when I say this, we bullshit and re-contract a lot. Cannot wait to launch my own business and quit, I have realized that the corporate world is not for me.
As a (Junior) consultant I totally agree. I don’t understand how the customer companies still buy the bullshitting!
By their very nature consulting companies don't want your "problem" to go away. It's like pharmaceutical companies being more than happy to develop "treatments" but they're reluctant to develop a "cure" because it would be a one-time thing.
Not all of us. Long term contracts see it through to the end.
Here in UK our NHS spend/waste so much money on consultants for management/tech.
@@670ramy bullshitting makes money
He articulated his thoughts so well here. I will always remember this message from Steve. The fruit analogy has persuaded me to pursue my own business idea and own my recommendations instead of taking a safer route in consulting. It’s funny that he mentioned a banana before an apple. I’ll let you know what the fruit tastes like when my time is done as well Steve! 🍎 🍌
Apple was forbidden fruit for Steve in those years 😂
Good look Rohan. I started my own business many years ago and this advice in the video is so so so good.
Steve was so articulate it blows my mind.
Not really. When you know nobody in the room would dare challenge you, you suddenly become a poet. This is completely unrealistic for 99% of humanity.
@@kendallwi this point you made absolutely has nothing to do with the original poster, absolutely nothing. Steve Jobs was articulate, that’s it.
Respect to anyone who got into this room. This guy was pure gold.
such a good metaphor, effortless for him
The legend has it that every consultant in that room left their job after the speech and started their own businesses.
Doing what?
@@gilberttorres8 consulting
@@uzairfarooqui3995 😂😂😂😂
Consulting: If you can't be part of the solution, there's great money in prolonging the problem.
@@robertwalkley4665 for sure you worked with a companies like Accenture, Infosys, Cognizant, bu it's not always like that.
From a company who can't afford to lose $1 mil, we have lost $20 to $30 million dollars from having a restructure with poor consultants, he's 100% right.
Liar
@@bigdog2432 What a strange person you are.
If you lost 20 to 30 and are still running then surely you could afford to lose more than 1 mil lol
Often it’s the fault of management why you lose money, not from the consultants. Sometimes the management want to change something they do not have a clue of and that’s the result.
But can you restructure without consultants/advisors?
It's a blessing having subtitles in this
He describes exactly why I like consulting. No responsibility for big money and when I’m off I’m free.
The definition of selfish
@@andybaldman
Exactly!
@360 noscope spoonclank When people are selfish it ultimately hurts others.
@@andybaldman Congrats bro you just defined a word and added nothing
@@robco1727 I'm sorry you don't understand my point. But that's ok.
After many years in business, I finally learned (from a consultant) that consultants are often hired to cook up and justify whatever conclusions are wanted by the person who has the mandate to hire them. So even worse than pontificating on industry or domain matters where they may have less expertise than their clients, they are used to manipulate or eliminate opponents in organizations. A bit like think tanks or lobbyists ranting about "data". This might explain why many consultants end up working in senior government positions.
That´s what they are paid for, true. The other thing are very specialized consultancies who basically get paid for industry espionage. What else would you want to call it, when they do the 10th implementation of a CRM in the car industry? Oh, could you tell us how ... are doing it? Sure, no problem ;)
As someone working in consulting, I can comfirm this. In my biggest project I had to mediate between the global organization and the local representatives from the different markets where the company operates. "Mediating" here basically meant to push back on what was coming from the local organizations and enable what the global organization wanted to achieve. In this way they achieve what they want but do not put their faces and the consultants have to deal with all the rants, complaints, resistances.
Correct, and the news media selectively interview and quote “experts” in the same way. To voice the interviewer’s own opinions for pay, or in other words, astroturfing.
You people are awful
this is so true. I went from a product company to consulting firm, although it is very high paid, I want to go back to product company now.
His hand gestures are phenomenal.... try & do that just by yourself alone..... & then realise he used them fluidly... in " live " presentations to......thousands.... RESPECT !
At the end, when he paused and took a drink of water, I seriously thought he was going to ask, "So, when's lunch?"
My Father taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson in life: “The man who’s never made a mistake, has never made anything!”
But like the best lessons, it took me years to fully understand his wisdom. Thank you Dad.
So true. I think that I've learnt more in my career than many others exactly, because I experimented and made mistakes. It of course helps to observe others as they are making mistakes. Then you learn from their mistakes as well. 🙂
Consulting is a great career if you do it from within a company that primarily makes a product. For example a consultant in a software company works with the customers to make them successful with the software. The customers don’t go away, just transition to support. You are still accountable long term for the customer’s success.
That sounds more like sales or something else.
It is sales and unfortunately they get called as consultants
consulting has always seemed like more of a retirement plan than a career to me. My grandfather worked in labs and institutes for about 40 years before retiring and doing consulting and I intend to follow a similar path.
That's what it should be - or if not a retirement plan, it's the next step up after accumulating enough experience in a field. But these days kids go straight to the big consultancy firms from Uni and all they have to hand is theory and they're next to useless.
I'm an independent consultant who spent over a decade in my field working my way up from near the bottom to management level, and I've done another decade in consultancy since. A big part of the reason I went into it was because I was working with consultants who had no idea what they were talking about and were just trying to apply theory.
A mix of both is the best solution and I definitely wouldn't call consultancy a retirement plan because the monetary rewards are huge and should be sought earlier.
Amazing analogy. Love it.
Great points
Worked 10 years in steady jobs and recently swiftched to consulting, but not completely standard as I am fulltime employed in a tech company, and they send me out to customers to consult in short cycles. It’s awesome. As someone else said, learning to listen is key. Often I collect questions that I have to reaerch myself, which means gathering insight from colleagues and building an internal network. I often wonder what happens to the projects that I work on, but sometimes customers do take initiative to come back and say that they were happy. My sense of continuity comes from the fact that because I work with my company’s tech all the time, I gather valuable feedback that I can feed back to the other engineers. That means that if I do my job right, some of the problems that I face this year, I won’t ever have to face again. I expect to do this for a while now, maybe years.
We're talking strategy consultants here, not technical subject matter experts.
Agreed problemat1que. I've known some great technical SME-type consultants during my career. I've never met a single competent strategy consultant. Not one. Seen millions of dollars wasted chasing shiny new "north stars" that never work out.
Do we work at the same company? 😮
😉
A definition I was given of a consultant was "you lend them your watch for them to tell you the time".
This is incredible thank you for sharing !
So glad I found this….I’ve been saying this to the C levels for years….no one listened. Tens of millions of fees to the consulting companies later, well what have we learned? Exactly the same things we all knew about, albeit packaged in a nicer way and delivered by people in suits and Rolexes.
I say this all the time. Management brings in consultants to tell them what they refuse to hear from their own people.
@@donniea5058 exactly that! The people that have helped built the organisation over the years were given the silent treatment and given the job to simply ‘hand over’ all the vital information to the consultants for them to put their rubber stamps and branding on it.
Consultants are there to protect managements’ asses.
This always baffles me... consultants at big companies are 24-26, do not have real experience, do not know how to run a business and what they know is on the very scratch surface... what do they consult?
Gross generalization
True in the ownership aspect, but I would say that a good consultant is a good listener first, and after having listened to hundreds or thousands of employees and owners, from a multitude of companies and industries, a good consultant can present ideas and perspective that would otherwise be hidden, due to that wider field of experience. It is easy to get tunnel-vision in any field, and great value can be added from a good consultant. If the payment for consultancy service is connected to results of implementation, or stock-options, the ownership, lyability and invested interest can be more connected. I am speaking both as an entrepreneur and consultant, with a father having the same mix..
Agree on the payment part, it feels weird that consultancy firms typically charges one-off project-based payments instead. Guessed it was a way to keep the independent and "professional" image
Makes sense, why pay for a perspective that the people working on the problem already have?
Then again, I do believe that a consultant with some prior experience across multiple stages of development and implementation, stands a better chance of perceiving problems and offering solutions.
As for the payment reflecting the contribution, what better way to make sure you get what you pay for, just makes sense.
Only reason to forgoe that and pay fixed fees, is CORRUPTION.
Fixed fees allow a company to hire an outside consultant (for any amount of money, tax deductible as business expense) who is often an ex politician who pushed for bills in favour of the company, perfectly legal.
If consulting fees were to be customarily dependant upon the results of the consult, fixed fee cases would stick out.
Majority of small companies, tend to adopt practices held by the large ones, believing that they are sound, based on the success of said large companies, while ignoring the fact that their situations are fundamentaly different.
I too am both a software developer and a presales consultant. I think it's just different kinds of ownership. As an engineer, yes you own the product, but as a consultant, you own the customer. If you mess up your recommendations, you are just as liable to the customer, which can often be many times harder to fix. Skillsets required are also different. Consultants need to be very effective at translating technical jargon into laymen concepts and finding cost-effective solutions that fit, whereas engineers can typically afford to babble in native tech-speak. Steve is just pandering to his own ego here - of course it's cool to say, I was part of the team that built the product, and hence I've earned my stripes to consult on it - but not everyone can master the discipline of both engineering and business communication like Steve has. I've seen what happens too many times when you put an engineer in front of a group of corporates in suits.
I’ve worked with many consultants over a very long career in manufacturing management and IT, even hired some myself in spite of my prior experiences. I have never seen one add value.
He was absolutely right here. There is something inherently irresponsible in consulting, because you are detached from what happens to the company in the long run. On the other hand, I must say I have seen the same lack of responsability in many tech start-ups, where people come just to get experience and some fancy title: many poor decision are taken by people who already know that in 1-2 years will be already working somewhere else and not paying for the consequences of their poor decisions. That's unfortunately the world we live in.
yup. you summed it up perfectly
But what about their résumé? bad decisions will take a toll on references won't they?
Such a beautiful mind
I could not agree more...
I am a consultant...and I approve of this message.
Jobs was the master of analogies and metaphors.
To me, Steve Jobs is a true genius. He articulates his ideas so well.
I've done both. Product for longer than being a consultant. But consulting is by far my favourite. For pure exposure to variety and awesome people. At least in my experience the types of companies who are self aware enough to hire consultants are usually doing good work.
And I'm still very much learning about providing effective feedback. Because you see plenty of know it all consultants who give an opinion without having to see it implemented. It's why I like longer gigs because in a former life I was involved with leading technical teams and going live was the best part of the grind.
often I have seen companies needing to be told by consultants what their employees have been telling them.
Steve was spot on! This was at time when many top tier graduates chose either investment banking or consulting! and today Top Tier chose to go into Tech or startup tech!
Brilliant video.
With more than 25 years in tech, I have been saying something similar. Most consultants aren't around long enough to learn from their mistakes. Tech consulting should be an area experienced, battle hardened professionals move into - not graduates imo.
reminds of skin the of the game by Nassim Taleb...same thesis. point could be made about politicians and not having to be accountable for their actions since they're not usually stakeholders in what they vote on. great point from Jobs
Great video.
Truer words have never been spoken.
I've done both. Consulting and sitting around maintaining the project long term. Consulting came second. In Engineering you get tired of knowing the decisions you are forced to make are bad. The people you work with aren't very skilled or don't care. The company wants to save money and so they hire inexpensive Engineers lacking experience. You get sick of it. And Consulting allows you to break away from these bad decisions. If companies stuck to Jobs advice to "Hire smart people so they can tell us what to do", I'd work for them. They don't. They cut costs. They cut corners. And the Engineer gets blamed. No thanks. I'll stick to consulting.
Fix for that is only work for companies that do product methodology. Projects lead to a lot of waste and quite a bit of orphaned and unsupported tech that maybe shouldn’t even exist. My past 2 companies have been product team based and it’s honestly a totally different experience than typical lumbering corporate America.
Consulting is a great racket. You don’t have to risk anything.
🤔 yes your reputation is on the line.
Only your health and time?
@@gilberttorres8 "yes your reputation is on the line." Nah. "My advice was fine, your implementation was faulty."
Great Video! Love it!
Great knowledge
Amazing that people knew about Skin In The Game before the term got coined. This reinstates how elemental the idea of SITG is. Should be taught in every MBA class to enTrEprEneUrS
This is the real loss in tech companies not paying their internal promotions equal to their external hires. It encourages young developers and engineers to bounce around different companies, where you don't get to see things through
Companies care more about control as long as they make money
Agreed that execution experience is key. You get that also by auditing bad situations in consulting. The accumulated experience is incomparable to learning execution mistakes by doing them.
Man I miss him. Died too young but left one hell of a legacy.
He brilliantly summed it up. Without implementing and owning anything, one cannot learn stuffs.
But you *can* learn almost anything. It's just a very inefficient process.
Great advice
pure gold.
Bananas, peaches, grapes... Apples perhaps?
Consultants often have 100 employers, not one and not subject to the will of 1 set of incompetent managers. In niche areas can gather experience at a rate you cannot get in an corporation. The question is who do you want on your team? Someone that read about, seen it, or did it. Hence the real value of a consultant. He is right about a lot of things, but what he doesn’t mention is most companies are not like Apple and don’t have the same resources internally.
Good video.
Wow. I needed to hear this today
I think he is right. I’m just starting off a career in software development and I’m starting my first job at a consultancy, but for me I think it’s a great option because I’m not sure what I want to do yet and I want to learn a broad set of skills before I decide what I like and want to specialise in. So I think working at a consultancy is great for that. But after a couple of years I definitely plan to move onto a product company.
The rough transcript...
"How many of you are from consulting? Oh that's bad. You should do something.
No seriously, I don't think there nothing inherently evil in consulting, I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a change to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action states and accumulate scare tissue for those mistakes and to picks oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off one learns a fraction of what one can.
Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation I think is a faction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better.
You do get a broad cut at companies but it's very thin, it's like a picture of a banana, you might get a very accurate picture but its only 2 dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get 3 dimensional, so you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends, I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes, but you never really taste it, that is what I think."
Excellent transcript. Correction: *scar tissue.
Thanks a lot 👍
this is the best argument against backseating
Woww, thats soo true.. truly a legend
He is of course completely correct, a consultant will never understand a business as well as its own employees. However, I feel he has missed the utility of a good consultant; a good consultant will find inspiration for change through what company employees suggest and build on those suggestions. Sometimes it just takes a fresh perspective/outside view to do what a company knows it should have been doing from the start!
I am not sure. I work for a company with employees who basically never worked somewhere else. It´s a big company and that is really an issue, as they really are lacking inspiration... At least from an organizational point-of-view is is a real shit-show
As a consultant, pay for follow up work and you'll get it.
Also after hearing about how you'd rather the bananas be made of cardboard filled with syrup instead of an actual banana to save on cost I don't need to know how it tastes before I bounce.
He's talking about academic consultants. I worked in the field from the very bottom to the top then became consultant. And yes he has a great point, because many consultants are just applying academic knowledge without context.
This just changed everything for me.
Very inspiring individual, always has something to teach or a new way to look at something
I’m getting into consulting…
BRAVO!!!
"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practise. In practise there is."
You can be a consultant, make recommendations AND see them through too.
Yea. It makes no sense what he just said
@@LtW00dy It does. Basically, you are not at the receiving end. If the company fails or things go wrong then you are not at fault and will simply move on to the next company.
@@DanielRomero thats for juniors and mid level who are basically working for managed service consultancies in operations. Very different from being the SME delivering complex projects.
Most of the consultants I know have spent many years working on projects E2E before consulting. I think Job's analogy was in itself 2D in relation to consultants.
Thank you LSD!
-I´ve worked in bananas, peaches, grapes.
-So, you don´t know how apples taste.
🤣🤣🤣
Agreed , that's the same exact thing i say about business consultants , i call it fake career , besides they cannot be fully trusted simply because they sell the same ideas to everyone else therefore business consulting companies do play a major role in devastating markets , big firms should have their own private consultants who have the real experience it takes for it
Funny side story. Many big companies started doing exactly this during the last decade. This is especially a thing in car manufacturing. They started consulting firms within their organisation with highly educated people in all disciplines which are consulting exclusively for them. e.g. Mercedes Benz did this.
Im saving these for later:
Oftentimes companies listen more to consultants than their own employees.
I agree with Jobs’ assessment. However, I found that companies tended to value the ideas of consultants over the ideas of their employees. If push ever came to shove, the consultant’s advice was taken and the employee was ignored or certainly underrated. So, if you have enough experience in an industry, it is far less stressful being a consultant. You also have the advantage of being above the fray when it comes to office politics. And this, in spite of the inherent depth and value of loyal employees’ ownership of systems, often creates problems and issues.
I've done both. Consulting and sitting around maintaining the project long term. Consulting came second. In Engineering you get tired of knowing the decisions you are forced to make are bad. The people you work with aren't very skilled or don't care. The company wants to save money and so they hire inexpensive Engineers lacking experience. You get sick of it. And Consulting allows you to break away from these bad decisions. If companies stuck to Jobs advice to "Hire smart people so they can tell us what to do", I'd work for them. They don't. They cut costs. They cut corners. And the Engineer gets blamed. No thanks.
A good consultant is a good listener first, and after having listened to hundreds or thousands of employees and owners, from a multitude of companies and industries, a good consultant can present ideas and perspective that would otherwise be hidden, due to that wider field of experience. It is easy to get tunnel-vision in any field, and great value can be added from a good consultant. If the payment for consultancy service is connected to results of implementation, or stock-options, the ownership, lyability and invested interest can be more connected. I am speaking both as an entrepreneur and consultant, with a father having the same mix..
I think Job was right when he said it. But it's no longer true now and it's partially his fault. You no longer have any ability to maintain things long term. You might get a year down the line on a project if you're lucky. Then someone way up the food chain decides things aren't going the way they want, and there's a new idea, a new direction, and of course a new buzzword. This self styled Steve Jobs, who is actually more Robert California, has the one idea that will save the company, at least for the next 9-12 months. After that the board or someone higher up the food chain gets a whiff that things aren't going well, this new buzzword hasn't saved the day. After much disruption and much reorganization (or disorganization) an unceremonious email 'Robert California's' last day is today. And in comes a new savior, with a new buzzword, another self styled Steve Jobs ready to be disruptive to the marketplace, but in reality only to be disruptive to employees. And the pattern repeats, over and over again, across industries, across companies, across borders.
The biggest problem woth companies are engineers themselves mostly..I worked for a science company and frankly they listened too much to engineer types who often have absolutely zero practical experience in their field..but they're tasked with designing a system with zero idea of the practical application of it.. products should never be given solely to an engineer.. projects have to include hands on people..I have said since Moses wore short pants that the education and design
I know exactly what he means. I have done both and I agree with him 100%
It’s wisdom, with a hearty side of opinion.
I think about the worst form of consultant is the management consultant. What greater failure in an organisation than the fact that those managing it believe they're not competent to do so, so call in people to help them do their job. Anyone else not competent at their job would simply be fired - the correct course of action. Of course, the other reason to bring in consultants (and I've seen it done) is to pay them to legitimise what you already wanted to do anyway. Ie, by having an 'independent expert' third party say what it is that you want to do, you can say that the course of action is not merely your whim, but based on 'expert advice'.
Or, arguably the most common reason, to get broader industry insights that just can't be found inhouse. Like Steve points out they have many "pictures on their wall" that management can use as additional data and reference point to form their own opinion.
@@HazirMagron Are you in management consulting? Hmmmmmmmmmmm
@@dhirajmeenavilli5508 If they were, wouldn't they be the most credible person to speak on the matter instead of everyone shitting on each other over something Steve Jobs said? I've worked for various companies and some of them swear management consultants are the devil's spawn (for the same complaints above - only offer advice but don't have accountability, only there to fire people, etc.) while others repeatedly go back to management consultants year after year.
Management consulting is very broad - cost optimization where people get laid off is only 1 type of work they do. A lot of the time firms want to enter markets, analyze productivity, analyze profits, plan branch opening, etc. they will rely on management consulting firms.
The shitty projects where you bring in McKinsey to fire 10% of your workforce, or the type where you bring in suits only for them to relay to management what employees have been trying to say for years - are just shitty projects pitched by shitty managers. Same can be said about many other industries like real estate development and gentrification. You can't just make blanketed statements and sneer at people who work in the industry like that. If Hazir is knowledgeable, you should be interested in what they have to say
Funny to label as 'independent expert' when in a lot of cases its the mentored work of a fresh graduate
One-dimensional and shallow analysis. You are failing to acknowledge factors such as lack of resources, lack of time, lack of skills, lack of culture and so many more. If what you said was true, no company would ever go bankrupt or fail to implement any strategy because they would simply "be good at their jobs". Extrapolating your analogy, does this apply to science as well? No need to co-authoring or peer-reviewing since scientists should just be competent to do science right! Because by the way, that's precisely the scope of some engagements (co-authoring in house strategy work, peer reviewing in house strategy and so on).
Now I do think Steve Jobs has a point and it's very much true. Consultants who exit to the Industry often have hard times "adapting to reality" and getting things done at first. The same way "Pure Industry" people might have hard times looking at unexplored broader scenarios with incomplete information and high uncertainty for example.
We all need each other one way or another.
The very last sentience is especially true. I’ve been suddenly let go 3 times from 3 different consultancies. The first time I was in denial, the next two times I realised it comes with the job.
i worked at McKinsey and joined Apple this past year. This is so incredibly true.
in simple words : experience and feeling it will give you complete information
Steve isn’t wrong. There is a big risk hiring pure strategy consultants. What he didn’t address, and I see few, if any comments mentioning it, is there are consultant firms that do strategy and implementation. I’m lucky enough to be in one of these firms where I have the opportunity to practice what I preach. He’s right though, because I see it too, it’s important to have implementation experience.
There's implementation, and then there's You Build It You Own It-style operation where the solution collides with the real world, where you have to live with the real-world consequences of the many micro- and macro-decisions that were made in the implementation. That is where the real lessons are learned.
Also, working for companies like ***, you lose your mind and your soul. Then they'll kick you out once you're broken and you'll have nothing to show for. That's the most dramatic part of this "2D picture" problem.
well... you've got all the cash they paid you for the work you did lol
spot on
Love you Steve
If you come from a field such as manufacturing and become a consultant wouldn’t you have already tasted the “fruit”? As a consultant you’re just sharing the “fruit” so others and experience what you know.
As long as the consultants are on implementation side of work meaning basically a product. though as an outsider their holistic angle is still limited for example the business planning part. No company will share too much secrets!
If you're a management consultant, or a change consultant, or a consultant who specialises in an essentially established product, sure. The answer is 'yes'. But with a company such as Apple, the "fruit" is constantly changing. The development of every new product is an opportunity to dive into and experience fully as an engineer or developer, or it's an opportunity to experience just a 2D picture of it as a consultant.
Great performance by Ashton Kutcher here
A consultant came up with the Ipod which helped provide revenue for everything else at apple to occur.
I don't think Jobs said that you should not use consultants. It is great if they have an idea, but tell you how to implement the idea, I don't think that they are suited to do that.
Miss him so much.
I agree with him but that is actually a strength that an outside consultant brings to a company. They aren't affected by the corporate culture, they don't have scar tissue from past failures at the company so they won't be biased toward one thing. They also aren't swayed as much by corporate politics. (Yes a different set of politics, but not the usual ones.) When used effectively they can work quite well in identifying new things you should do, things you should not do, and even when they agree with management, there is a benefit. Less risk.
we get scarred
Steve is his own consultant. As such, he was able to ride above it all.
Generally i think they are pretty useless in terms of being good at any expertise. They do have value as an arbiter...
Scar tissue from past failure is an asset not a liability
I like consultants because they are able to frame data in a way that provides optimal clarity to the course of actions. That said, competent people in management should be able to make effective decisions based on their own due diligence, or not be in the job. Reliance on external consultants is ludicrous because those are not the people accountable for outcomes. Steve is right. Too often ‘strategy’ is a cookie-cutter mold with no experience of prior context.
Well said
Absolutely! Skin in the game.
Great
One point to remember about a business consultant is they are selling the same solutions they sold your competitors.
That’s not always true, as some ideas scale and others don’t. Though you might say that an individual has a limited pool of knowledge and that they’re able to pull from, which creates a more narrow range of solutions they might arrive at.
It's a generalization. Yes, there are going to be specifics that don't apply in one area that do apply in another, but due to ideological constraints, schooling constraints, capital constraints, etc. It's close enough to say that the solution they sell is like an off the rack suit. Yes there are many different types of off the rack suits, some small, some blue, some pinstriped, but due to the nature of the beast, it's standardized. There are going to be small changes, but it's in the service of homogeneity, not against it.