The Perfect Consultant, Part 1 - Analytics or Creativity?

Mike: 00:00:03

Welcome to Consulting for Humans, a podcast all about the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a life in consulting.

Mike: 00:00:20

You're with Mike and Ian, and in each episode, we'll be shining a light on a new topic that that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and successful.

Ian: 00:00:32

That's right.

Ian: 00:00:33

We are going to try and bring you insights from our own careers in this fascinating industry of consulting and examine the thinking, the ideas, old and new, that underpin and inspire our work and the people that we work with.

Mike: 00:00:49

Now, we think that this job consulting gets easier the more human you are.

Mike: 00:00:56

So on the Consulting for Humans podcast, it's our mission to add just a little bit more humanity to the life of consultants.

Mike: 00:01:04

If your focus is on your own success as a consultant, then trust us.

Mike: 00:01:09

Even though we know if your focus is on success, probably saying trust us makes you trust us less, but being more human is going to make you more successful and decrease your effort level significantly.

Ian: 00:01:24

Absolutely.

Mike: 00:01:25

Yeah.

Mike: 00:01:26

We'd love to bring some of these consulting skills and perspectives to human lives, too.

Mike: 00:01:33

So that's our mission.

Ian: 00:01:34

It really is.

Ian: 00:01:36

So if you're a consultant who's trying to be more of a human, or a human who's trying to be more of a consultant, or you might say more consultative, then please stick around with me and Mike.

Ian: 00:01:48

We think you are just our kind of person.

Ian: 00:01:52

Now, Mike, let's get on with today's episode.

Ian: 00:01:54

We're going to be talking about what it takes to be absolutely, completely, 100% the perfect consultant.

Ian: 00:02:04

Now, we're going to take this topic by topic, and in the regular show, the regular show that you're listening to now, we'll talk about headlines, we'll talk about the big ideas.

Ian: 00:02:14

We'll throw out some of our own thoughts.

Ian: 00:02:16

Each time there's a regular episode, we're also going to do a deeper dive.

Ian: 00:02:21

You can join us for the deep dive by signing up for our Luminaries program.

Ian: 00:02:24

We'll talk to you more about the luminaries tier later on in the show.

Ian: 00:02:29

But, Mike, let's start out with the idea of what it takes to be a perfect consultant.

Ian: 00:02:35

You might say this is our inaugural show.

Ian: 00:02:37

We're beginning with the end in mind.

Mike: 00:02:39

Right, right, right.

Mike: 00:02:41

And if we're talking about perfection in show number one, it's only going to go downhill from here.

Ian: 00:02:46

Yeah, yeah.

Ian: 00:02:49

Maybe we set the store a little too high here.

Ian: 00:02:51

We'll see.

Mike: 00:02:52

Right.

Ian: 00:02:53

Well, we're going to have to test out the idea that a perfect consultant even exists.

Ian: 00:02:58

So, Mike, I feel an Analytical framework.

Mike: 00:03:02

Coming on well, and that's not at all surprising because we all know there are only two types of consultants, right?

Mike: 00:03:09

Those who use analytical frameworks and those who don't.

Ian: 00:03:12

Oh, touche.

Ian: 00:03:13

I feel seen, Mike.

Ian: 00:03:14

That's terrible.

Ian: 00:03:18

So analytical frameworks, we love them.

Ian: 00:03:20

It's easy to get called out on.

Ian: 00:03:22

This practice leader once called me out.

Ian: 00:03:24

A senior partner came to me and said, you're using the wrong kind of analytical frameworks.

Ian: 00:03:29

It's too basic.

Ian: 00:03:30

He said, I was trying to spend too much time analyzing the world in two by twos.

Ian: 00:03:36

And every consultant knows that two by twos are the basic bread and butter of analytical frameworks.

Ian: 00:03:41

And I wondered why he was so down on my two by two frameworks until I saw his presentation.

Ian: 00:03:47

He had, get this, Mike, he had a three by three.

Mike: 00:03:51

Now that'll encompass the whole world.

Ian: 00:03:54

So, Mike, think way back to being hired into consulting jobs.

Ian: 00:03:59

What did your employers seem to be looking for?

Ian: 00:04:02

What kind of things, if any, were they looking for you to show perfection in right at that early stage?

Mike: 00:04:09

Well, it's interesting, Ian, because I kind of came sideways into consultant.

Mike: 00:04:13

But I will tell you my first brush with consulting.

Mike: 00:04:16

I was.

Mike: 00:04:17

I was working in an organization.

Mike: 00:04:18

The organization hired some consultants.

Mike: 00:04:21

I was, you know, very young, you know, very.

Mike: 00:04:24

Pretty much right out of university.

Mike: 00:04:26

And I became the business liaison to these consultants.

Mike: 00:04:30

They were trying to build an online system.

Mike: 00:04:33

They wanted to know about the business rules and things there.

Mike: 00:04:36

And I was fascinated by what they did and how they did it.

Mike: 00:04:41

So much so that, you know, I was spending so much time with them, and I started asking them about the life of being a consultant.

Mike: 00:04:49

And as it turns out, they had been very favorably impressed with me and were thinking about asking me to perhaps become a consultant in their firm.

Mike: 00:04:59

But then I found out that there was a major litmus test for them.

Mike: 00:05:03

They said, hold on, hold on.

Mike: 00:05:04

Before we go any further, are you married?

Mike: 00:05:09

And I said, well, actually, I am.

Mike: 00:05:11

I am married.

Mike: 00:05:12

And this was back in the day when you could ask a question like that.

Mike: 00:05:15

And they said, then we can't hire you.

Mike: 00:05:18

And I was a little shocked.

Mike: 00:05:20

I was waiting to hear a lot of other things to find out whether we'd be a good fit.

Mike: 00:05:24

But that one, according to them, was an absolute rule.

Mike: 00:05:28

You know, it's just a deal breaker because they said their divorce rate in their consultants was above 90% because of all the on the road work that they did back then.

Mike: 00:05:39

So that was a big shocker for me, although I now had the consulting.

Ian: 00:05:45

Bug right well, Mike, I was trying to think about the same thing from my side.

Ian: 00:05:51

I guess it ages each of us a little when I say I'm 100% sure that they would not have asked that question exactly when I was getting hired.

Ian: 00:05:59

And it's funny, I had seen a recruitment ad, and I was amazed that you could get paid to do the kind of stuff that was described in the alpha.

Ian: 00:06:05

That sounds like fun, but it's funny.

Ian: 00:06:08

I was asked simultaneously to be a generalist and a specialist.

Ian: 00:06:11

Show us how you can do almost anything.

Ian: 00:06:13

Like, you know, the very broadest sense of problem solving, which I absolutely loved.

Ian: 00:06:18

But then I was also kind of under pressure to be a specialist, and I kind of got the impression they were expecting to me to be able to do two things at once, to be broad and deep.

Ian: 00:06:28

And maybe that got me started with the idea that there are dichotomies.

Ian: 00:06:32

I don't think there's any one thing that they were looking for to be perfect in, but they were expecting me to be able to stretch my character in two directions at once.

Ian: 00:06:41

So maybe, Mike, that gets us to some of the dimensions of our framework for what makes a perfect consultant.

Ian: 00:06:49

Let's see.

Ian: 00:06:50

It seemed to me that they were trying to find out whether I could be both analytical and creative, whether I could alternately be confident and also humble, whether I could be really certain of my facts, but also okay with ambiguity.

Ian: 00:07:11

Good news.

Ian: 00:07:12

I think I was pretty good with ambiguity.

Ian: 00:07:13

I was pretty good at adding ambiguity to any situation.

Ian: 00:07:16

And also, maybe this wasn't explicit, but I think part of what they were looking for and what I've been looking for, as I've had people in my career, is somewhere between being hardworking and lazy.

Ian: 00:07:30

I think there's not very many yards between being entrepreneurial and being lazy.

Ian: 00:07:34

So maybe we can take those four, Mike, and maybe those can be our story of what it takes to be the perfect consultant.

Ian: 00:07:42

Analytics versus creativity.

Ian: 00:07:44

Confidence versus humility.

Ian: 00:07:47

Certainty versus ambiguity.

Ian: 00:07:49

Hardworking versus laziness.

Ian: 00:07:51

How does that sound?

Mike: 00:07:53

I love that.

Mike: 00:07:54

Ian.

Mike: 00:07:54

As we were talking about this, I was thinking about hiring and staffing out global practices and building consulting firms and thinking, oh, my God, how many times have I done this to people?

Mike: 00:08:06

The same way, thinking about, what am I looking?

Mike: 00:08:09

I want somebody that absolutely nails the detail, but I want them to be strategic thinkers.

Mike: 00:08:13

And these kinds of opposite pairs of both ends can't happen over and over again.

Mike: 00:08:22

I think we boiled them down here to some real key ones.

Ian: 00:08:26

Well, maybe we can take them one at a time.

Ian: 00:08:31

This first episode let's spend some time thinking about analytics versus creativity.

Ian: 00:08:36

For a perfect consultant, do you need to be the ultimate commander of all of the quantitative details, or do you need to be the ultimate off the wall, beanbag sitting creative?

Ian: 00:08:50

I can think of situations where it's felt like I've needed to be both.

Ian: 00:08:55

How many folks anyway are actually good at being both analytical and creative?

Ian: 00:08:59

How many folks are even good at being just one?

Mike: 00:09:02

Yeah.

Mike: 00:09:03

How many times do we hear innovative innovation, all of this firing, firing, firing, which absolutely requires both, right?

Ian: 00:09:11

It's funny.

Ian: 00:09:12

I've got a feeling that the more consultants and clients yell about in being innovative, the more it means they actually want anything but creativity.

Ian: 00:09:20

I've got a feeling that people yell about innovativeness because they want us cover for the fact that they know everything they do is reductive and pragmatic.

Ian: 00:09:28

Yeah.

Ian: 00:09:29

So I've lost count of the number of times I've stood around with people in highly paid consulting jobs around the same flip chart with a marker pen going, so who has an idea?

Ian: 00:09:44

And there's the noise of crickets.

Ian: 00:09:46

I've also lost count of the number of times, at least in my generation, in my era of consulting, the number of times I and my colleagues have made a really, really elementary screw up.

Ian: 00:09:55

At some point in the future of the show, Mike, we've got to dig into the topic of consultants and numbers.

Ian: 00:10:00

But suffice it to say that even with the really highest quality grads coming out of, you know, economics programs, science programs, B school programs, we still managed to be a little bit less than perfect about the way that we handle numbers.

Mike: 00:10:12

It's weird, right?

Mike: 00:10:15

I can't tell you how many times we were looking at from the client side, huge ticket projects.

Mike: 00:10:22

And we would all kind of sit there on the board and look at each other and say, well, it's so and so consulting firm again where the rubber meets the clouds.

Ian: 00:10:36

Dear me.

Ian: 00:10:36

I was talking to somebody the other week about analytics and numbers and we reminded ourselves of a swag.

Ian: 00:10:41

You know what a swag is?

Mike: 00:10:43

Oh, yes.

Mike: 00:10:44

Oh, very well.

Ian: 00:10:46

A wag is a wild ass guess.

Ian: 00:10:47

A swag is a scientific wild ass guess.

Ian: 00:10:49

But we should talk about that.

Mike: 00:10:51

Oh, interesting, because we called it sophisticated wild ass guesses because I think none of us were scientific enough.

Ian: 00:10:59

So it's funny, I know that clients often want us to sort of let the analytics let the numbers fall away and help them find out what to do, find the root cause of their problems and make a decision, but we still seem to really bend ourselves in all kinds of shapes, trying to make logic stack up and trying to make numbers stack up.

Ian: 00:11:19

Of course, the best of our work, the best work that I've ever seen, some of the most convincing work that we've done for clients, has got a really, really interesting counterintuitive, analytical nugget in it.

Ian: 00:11:32

And I think that's one of the reasons why we hire people, as with one of our raw criteria being intellectual horsepower.

Ian: 00:11:40

You know, consulting is a place where you get in easiest and most readily when you can show that you've got raw smarts.

Ian: 00:11:47

And sometimes that means numerical smarts, and sometimes it means something else.

Ian: 00:11:51

But I also can think of plenty of people whose careers kind of tailed off after just a year or two because smarts alone wasn't going to cut it and commanded the numbers and spreadsheets and pivot tables alone wasn't going to cut it right.

Ian: 00:12:06

I can also think of plenty of people who've persisted all the way into their careers who are still a pretty dab hand at pivot tables.

Ian: 00:12:12

Me not included.

Mike: 00:12:15

True, true.

Mike: 00:12:18

So we've started to examine the creative and analytical sides of a mythical perfect consultant.

Mike: 00:12:24

Yes, our working hypothesis already says that perfection is mythical, but let's see what else our analytical framework turns up.

Mike: 00:12:33

Let's pause for breath and tell you a little bit more about the show.

Ian: 00:12:41

Each week we're going to be covering a topic that we think should get us and you thinking about our lives as consultants, human consultants that could be.

Mike: 00:12:53

About consulting tools and processes, how we manage our work and our clients, how we find new business, or how we take care of ourselves along the way.

Ian: 00:13:04

If you're enjoying the show so far, please subscribe on your podcast app and think about giving us a review.

Mike: 00:13:10

You'll find us on LinkedIn.

Mike: 00:13:13

Follow the consulting for Humans podcast group, and if you look hard enough, you'll find Ian and Mike there too.

Ian: 00:13:22

You can follow us on Instagram at Learn.

Ian: 00:13:25

Consulting is our account and we love it when you follow us.

Ian: 00:13:28

Send us a DM or just reply to something that we post.

Mike: 00:13:31

You can even use plain old email.

Mike: 00:13:34

Reach out to us at ConsultingForHumans Consulting and tell us what's on your mind.

Ian: 00:13:47

Now here's the cool part.

Ian: 00:13:49

We have our deeper dive coming out alongside our regular episodes, especially for those luminaries that we talked about.

Ian: 00:13:56

And we think you're going to love it.

Ian: 00:13:58

Being a luminary means that you get great additional content.

Ian: 00:14:01

If you want to subscribe to the luminary tier, then we are here for you.

Ian: 00:14:05

If you'd like Ian and Mike to answer your burning question on consulting.

Ian: 00:14:10

The Luminary subscription is where you need to be.

Mike: 00:14:13

You'll also get access to episodes ahead of the regular schedule.

Mike: 00:14:17

So if you want to hear our second show right now, then head over there and join the community.

Mike: 00:14:24

You can subscribe directly to the Luminary tier in many mainstream podcast apps, but you can also Visit us at consultingforhumans p31-consulting.com and sign up there.

Ian: 00:14:50

So, Mike, Luminaries, this week we're going to be talking about analytics and creativity.

Ian: 00:14:55

What do you think could be coming up there?

Mike: 00:14:58

Well, I think we're going to get some great insights from books and articles that perhaps are not on the top of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal reading list here.

Mike: 00:15:09

I think it's not going to be the answer that we think it is.

Mike: 00:15:13

Right.

Ian: 00:15:14

And I think it's going to need us to dig into some interesting places to get there.

Ian: 00:15:17

Mike, we have to think about the bane of every consultant's life, the case interview.

Ian: 00:15:22

We're going to have to think about where you go for vacation in the summer.

Ian: 00:15:25

Who would have thought that would be a challenge?

Ian: 00:15:27

We're going to think about thinking fast and slow, which is maybe a phrase some of you might recognize.

Ian: 00:15:32

And we're going to talk about really, really, really thinking outside the box.

Ian: 00:15:36

No, no, Mike, I mean it.

Ian: 00:15:37

Really outside the actual box.

Mike: 00:15:39

I love it.

Mike: 00:15:40

I love it.

Ian: 00:15:41

So, Mike, let's just talk about benchmarking the analytical skills of consultants.

Ian: 00:15:46

I think the whole industry blows hot and cold on this.

Ian: 00:15:49

On the one hand, you're talking to the guy who failed the analytics recruitment test for a certain firm that is now part of the big four, you know, mid career, with allegedly all of my consulting jobs well up to speed by then.

Ian: 00:16:02

But I also remember working with somebody who had been hired as an analyst to do exactly these jobs.

Ian: 00:16:08

And we left this poor analyst, I'll call him John.

Ian: 00:16:12

We left Analyst John in the side office at the firm where I used to work.

Ian: 00:16:16

6:00pm the partner in charge of me.

Ian: 00:16:18

We went out for a beer and we said, why don't you just finish off this simple little model forecast, spreadsheet thing.

Ian: 00:16:24

We laid out what the six rows in the forecast were going to be.

Ian: 00:16:26

You do that and we'll come pick you up tomorrow morning and we'll go down to the client for the update meeting and tell him how the model's working out.

Ian: 00:16:32

And he went, okay.

Ian: 00:16:35

And me and the partner went out to the pub.

Ian: 00:16:37

And time went by and we both showed up back at the office at 7:30 the next morning and there was John the consultant in the same clothes in the same side office, now smelling a little whiffy with individual post its for individual cells written up on the wall of the side office.

Ian: 00:16:56

And we went, how's it going John?

Ian: 00:16:57

You look terrible.

Ian: 00:16:58

He went, I think, I think it's nearly done.

Ian: 00:17:00

He says, I've checked out every single cell and I've done.

Ian: 00:17:02

And he had handwritten all of the formulas for like 100 columns worth of this spreadsheet month by month for five years anyway.

Ian: 00:17:10

Poor kid.

Mike: 00:17:11

Wow.

Ian: 00:17:12

And then the partner, who was the least Excel savvy out of anybody I've ever worked with, but did at least know this, reached over to one cell and grabbed a little symbol, little ticker in the bottom right hand corner and dragged the formula along.

Ian: 00:17:24

And I have never seen anybody who simultaneously so badly wanted to A burst into tears and B hit somebody so poor guy.

Ian: 00:17:32

We should have done a better job.

Ian: 00:17:34

But we clearly didn't hire this person for raw Excel skill.

Ian: 00:17:40

He clearly had the problem solving skill to lay out this spreadsheet and he clearly knew what the forecast was going to be for.

Ian: 00:17:47

But I don't think it's really fair to say that all we ever hire are analytics ninjas.

Mike: 00:17:52

Well, I love that.

Mike: 00:17:54

Analytic skills, creative ninjas, you know, what do we have here?

Mike: 00:17:58

So I remember working on a massive E business strategy project and tons and tons of analytics and we were trying to tie some of this stuff up, not just raw numbers because it was all new and we were reaching far and wide to be able to do this.

Mike: 00:18:17

And we were up pretty much of the night trying to think of analytical frameworks that we're talking about.

Mike: 00:18:23

And now we're into not just deep numbers, which we didn't have a lot of at that time because it's early days, but a lot of creativity to try to wrap around that.

Mike: 00:18:33

So we ended up kind of just brainstorming, handful of us.

Mike: 00:18:39

And we decided that adoption and a lot of implications were going to come from course two axes, you know, discretionary time and discretionary income.

Mike: 00:18:51

And we laid it out and then we started filling it in and talking about implications.

Mike: 00:18:55

And so of this massive report what we found was that was a hit.

Mike: 00:19:03

That was a hit.

Mike: 00:19:04

You know, I forget all the numbers and analytics, you know, we, yeah, useful, got that.

Mike: 00:19:08

But that was, boy, that was going to drive where we went.

Mike: 00:19:12

Interestingly follow on to the end of the year and at a big conference of various Firms touting what they've been doing in this realm of various people speaking on major ideas and breakthrough thinking.

Mike: 00:19:27

And I find an industry luminary up there shining bigot across the screen saying, as everybody knows who works in this industry, the two key drivers of all of this are discretionary time and discretionary income.

Mike: 00:19:45

And up comes our chart with all sorts of bravado.

Mike: 00:19:51

And I wanted to say.

Mike: 00:19:52

And the footnote should say Mike and two analysts at about 3:00am with absolutely no analytics behind it, but glad to see it's making the rounds, though.

Ian: 00:20:07

Oh, it's great.

Ian: 00:20:08

Now, it's funny how those are the things that you remember.

Ian: 00:20:11

People don't remember that the market size was 34.7 billion.

Ian: 00:20:15

What they remember is that little one link between two ideas, which is where we, you know, we said that we wouldn't, but we're finally going to make a connection.

Ian: 00:20:23

You know, the creativity comes in spotting the patterns, but the patterns come from having seen the data.

Ian: 00:20:31

I've got another thing that I want to just kind of air a pet peeve about consultants.

Ian: 00:20:36

We all say, to be honest, most of us say, oh, gee, I'm not the creative one.

Ian: 00:20:40

You know, reach for somebody else's expertise when we're creative.

Ian: 00:20:43

But we all love breaking the rules of PowerPoint templates.

Ian: 00:20:46

Yeah.

Ian: 00:20:46

How many times have I helped consultants who want to go, oh, yeah, my headline sentence is a little bit too long.

Ian: 00:20:51

I'm going to reduce the type phase.

Ian: 00:20:53

How many times have we said, well, yeah, the template says I should have, you know, an inch and a half of white space around the edge, but I can't be asked without.

Ian: 00:21:00

So I'm going to fill the corners of the thing and I'm going to put extra footnotes.

Ian: 00:21:05

People who know for darn sure that they're not creative geniuses nonetheless think that they're better designers than the folks who develop their corporations.

Ian: 00:21:12

PowerPoint templates.

Mike: 00:21:14

Absolutely.

Ian: 00:21:18

I mean, if we were that good at design, we'd all be working for folks making PowerPoint templates.

Ian: 00:21:22

Right.

Ian: 00:21:22

But we're really not.

Ian: 00:21:25

Never mind.

Ian: 00:21:26

A career in graphic design awaits everybody who's ever tried to mess with a template in PowerPoint.

Mike: 00:21:31

Well, we've looked at analytics versus creativity, and I think next time we'll think about another pair of attributes in our perfect consultant framework.

Mike: 00:21:44

Confidence versus humility, Mike.

Ian: 00:21:48

I think that's going to be a great one.

Ian: 00:21:49

I don't know which of us is meant to be the confident one and which of us is meant to be the humble one.

Mike: 00:21:55

Well, we'll have to circle around to our imposter syndrome conversation one of these days.

Ian: 00:22:00

I think we will for sure.

Ian: 00:22:01

Meanwhile, though, we've both been doing some digging on the topic of analytics and creativity, so we've got more to share.

Ian: 00:22:09

Join our Luminaries tier and jump straight into our deeper dive on analytics and creativity if you want to hear more about that.

Ian: 00:22:18

If you can't wait to get into our episode on confidence and humility, then join the Luminary tier.

Ian: 00:22:25

Otherwise, stick around till next time.

Ian: 00:22:27

And we love to have you with us again, joining us, consultants and humans all on the Consulting for Humans Podcast.

Mike: 00:22:41

The Consulting for Humans Podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting.