The Perfect Consultant, Part 4 - Hard work vs. Laziness

Ian: 00:00:05

Welcome to Consulting for Humans, a podcast all about life.

Ian: 00:00:10

In consulting.

Mike: 00:00:17

You'Re with Ian and with.

Ian: 00:00:19

Mike, and the two of us in each episode will be shining a light on a new topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and successful.

Mike: 00:00:31

We think this job that is consulting gets easier the more human you are.

Mike: 00:00:36

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

Mike: 00:00:43

And we'd also like to bring some of the skills and perspectives of consulting to non consultant human lives as well.

Ian: 00:00:52

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, then welcome.

Ian: 00:00:58

You are just our kind of person.

Ian: 00:01:02

Now, Mike, in today's episode, we're going to be continuing our conversation about what it takes to be a completely 100% perfect, in air quotes, perfect consultant.

Ian: 00:01:16

We've already explored analytical skill and creativity.

Ian: 00:01:19

We've debated humility versus confidence and whether consultants should prize certainty or be comfortable with ambiguity.

Ian: 00:01:27

And this time, we're going to be talking about whether consultants need to be hardworking or lazy.

Mike: 00:01:33

That's going to be a really interesting one.

Mike: 00:01:36

Clearly, one of the reasons we stay in consulting is that the hard work and the extra hours often puts us in close contact with new ideas and new context, new people, new industries, new approaches.

Mike: 00:01:51

And we have to do a lot of hard work to get up to speed.

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It's necessary.

Mike: 00:01:56

Necessary.

Mike: 00:01:57

It's good.

Mike: 00:01:58

And we need people who are able to do it well.

Ian: 00:02:01

Right.

Ian: 00:02:01

And that's obviously one of the reasons that we look for the ability to work hard as a signifier of what gets people hired.

Ian: 00:02:07

And looking back on the origin of folks that I hired, I noticed a preponderance of people from college programs in engineering, in physical sciences, biological sciences, even liberal arts, even business administration.

Ian: 00:02:21

And I think one of the things that people from those kind of academic backgrounds bring is they've had the skills and you might say, the resilience to absorb lots of new factual information and learn the key elements quickly enough that you can regurgitate them convincingly.

Ian: 00:02:38

So we're already selecting people in who've got the ability to drink from a fire hose of data and come up with a few drips of something that sounds useful and relevant, right?

Mike: 00:02:48

Absolutely, absolutely.

Mike: 00:02:50

And I can also see where this topic, or this dichotomy, if you will, came up.

Mike: 00:02:55

Back on my career, I remember coming into the office, or more often, coming into a client site where we're working and listening to each of us on the elevator talking about how late we worked the night before, how little sleep we're getting, how much we worked over the weekend.

Mike: 00:03:11

And hard work expressed in terms of infinite hours became a form of what we might say today, virtue signaling.

Mike: 00:03:18

I think for me then it was a form of kind of knuckle dragging Neanderthalism.

Mike: 00:03:23

But a great consultant was one who never slept.

Mike: 00:03:26

Burnout was a real problem back then.

Mike: 00:03:29

So there's a dark side to this too.

Mike: 00:03:32

One of my mentors watched me get sucked into this vortex, pulled me aside and said, mike, nobody else in this company is ever going to say no on your behalf.

Mike: 00:03:40

You need to set your own boundaries for what you're committing to do and be much smarter about the time you invest in getting it done.

Ian: 00:03:48

Already we've got this dichotomy between show off hard work and, and smart efficiency.

Ian: 00:03:55

And we need to dig into this a little bit.

Ian: 00:03:58

I think that this is something that every generation is a bit puzzled about.

Ian: 00:04:03

Every generation thinks that the generation before made some really crazy mistake.

Ian: 00:04:06

And I suspect that today's youngest generation of folks in our consulting industry scratch their heads a little bit and say, you know, why did all you Gen Xers and boomers kind of think it was such a great signal of, you know, virility to work long hours?

Ian: 00:04:20

And of course you mentioned setting boundaries.

Ian: 00:04:22

People are much more conscious these days about setting boundaries.

Ian: 00:04:25

By then, Mike.

Ian: 00:04:26

I hear people of my generation and now maybe your generation saying, oh, you know, kids these days, kids these days can't stick it.

Ian: 00:04:32

Kids these days aren't willing to put the hours in.

Ian: 00:04:35

And I don't think either of those positions is quite right.

Ian: 00:04:38

And more importantly, I don't think either of those positions is going to help us to do good work and to be successful and to work well with our clients.

Ian: 00:04:45

Now, I suspect that this knuckle dragging hours investing thing is not unique to the consulting industry, is it?

Mike: 00:04:54

No, certainly not.

Mike: 00:04:55

I mean, I remember growing up and hearing my parents to your generational conflicting talk about, if you will, walking to school through the snow, five miles uphill, both ways.

Mike: 00:05:06

But yeah, that was apocryphal a little bit.

Mike: 00:05:09

But it's kind of say, you know, that virtue of hard work.

Mike: 00:05:12

But even still looking around temporarily with me friends in legal, in medical, all the time.

Mike: 00:05:20

I mean, crazy, crazy hours, crazy performance.

Mike: 00:05:24

And I remember working in our office in Japan where it was not only this consulting ethos, but there was also the cultural ethos of everybody that came in by virtue of hierarchy and left by virtue of hierarchy.

Mike: 00:05:39

And fascinatingly, didn't matter that some of those people who came in hours and hours early after a two hour commute to get to the office fell asleep at their desk waiting for the day to get started, or fell asleep at their desk at the night waiting to leave.

Ian: 00:05:55

Mike I think the instinct to keep pedaling hard and keep working hard is partly a social one.

Ian: 00:06:01

Like we get it from the competitive environment in the office.

Ian: 00:06:04

Maybe we get it from the apprenticeship model that we've all been raised in.

Ian: 00:06:07

Consulting is a little bit like medicine in that it's learned socially rather than purely academically.

Ian: 00:06:13

So you learn alongside somebody.

Ian: 00:06:15

And if that somebody is a partner in consulting or as a consultant in, in medicine or surgery, they'll be saying things like, well, I had to work hard in my day and I don't see why you young apprentice should have it any easier, so I'm going to give you an even harder time.

Ian: 00:06:28

We have this tendency to pass down this kind of boot camp mentality and.

Mike: 00:06:34

I'd like to think some of this stuff that hard work and sacrifice, you know, symbolic sacrifice by the form of being in the office, as I mentioned, a little bit toxic, that maybe I thought this idea of working smarter, not harder came as an anecdote for this.

Mike: 00:06:52

Maybe that's where this came from.

Mike: 00:06:53

But I was surprised to learn that it didn't.

Ian: 00:06:56

No, tell us about work smarter, not harder.

Ian: 00:06:58

That's one of those phrases that's become a truism.

Ian: 00:07:00

Even Dilbert's boss in the Dilbert cartoons used to talk about working smarter, not harder.

Ian: 00:07:04

And if Dilbert was mocking it, then there's a very good chance that it's a bit of a hollow idea.

Ian: 00:07:08

What do you think?

Ian: 00:07:08

Where does it come from?

Mike: 00:07:09

It's: 1930

Mike: 00:07:11

Alan F.

Mike: 00:07:12

Morgenstern, an industrial engineer, the creator of the work simplification program.

Mike: 00:07:17

Morgenstern coined the phrase to encourage people.

Mike: 00:07:19

Yeah, he say, produce more with less effort by simplifying your workload and prioritizing essential tasks.

Mike: 00:07:28

And in my mind I thought, yeah, maybe that's what being a good lazy consultant is all about.

Mike: 00:07:35

Ian, what about this idea of lazy in consulting here?

Ian: 00:07:40

Well, it's funny, the word itself is a problem because it sounds like an insult.

Ian: 00:07:45

But being able to be lazy, if we can put a more virtuous spin on it, maybe that has something to offer.

Ian: 00:07:52

Maybe it's even a bit more rational than just trying to out compete the next person by staying longer in the office.

Ian: 00:07:58

We looked into this a little bit.

Ian: 00:07:59

And there are some great ideas that we found about what it could mean to be virtuously lazy or judiciously lazy.

Ian: 00:08:06

But first of all, what came to my mind was that in the world of business development, one of my old bosses, one of my favorite old bosses, used to say that the best business developers in our firm, he thought, were generally lazy.

Ian: 00:08:19

And the first time I heard him say this, I thought he was being rude, but actually he was being admiring.

Ian: 00:08:24

He said there's something about the decision making and the way people invest hours in bringing through their personal pipeline of new opportunities that rewards a kind of laziness.

Ian: 00:08:32

And I started to look for this.

Ian: 00:08:34

And how you express your laziness in business development is a topic we should come back to another day.

Ian: 00:08:40

Because I think it has a really strong core of truth that smart business developers don't just keep churning out activity and meetings and calls for no good reason.

Ian: 00:08:49

But that's business development.

Ian: 00:08:50

Let's talk about in delivery, in actually executing client work.

Ian: 00:08:54

Let's say we can set aside the social and competitive side.

Ian: 00:08:57

Let's say we could be a little bit more enlightened.

Ian: 00:08:59

I think there is a case for exhibiting a little bit of what you might call laziness.

Ian: 00:09:05

And I think the instinct that we ought to have is to be efficient in the way that we do client work.

Ian: 00:09:12

And that would look like, for example, pushing paid work down and delegating it down so that it's done by the lowest cost resource.

Ian: 00:09:21

And I always used to think once I'd seen a task, a consulting task undertaken the same way on two or more successive consulting projects, a little light bulb, a little niggle used to go off in my brain.

Ian: 00:09:34

There ought to be a way of doing this task faster and cheaper because we've repeated it at least once.

Ian: 00:09:40

Now it might look virtuous to look like it's causing us to work hard.

Ian: 00:09:45

The budget that we have of fees from the client might maybe on some days be able to afford it.

Ian: 00:09:50

But that still doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking hard for ways to make it a little cheaper and a little bit more efficient.

Ian: 00:09:56

So we call this internal laziness, which is a phrase that means trying to proceduralize or even automate repetitive consulting tasks.

Ian: 00:10:07

And this is, by the way, one of the reasons that consulting firms are really keen to look into the use of AI.

Ian: 00:10:13

But the whole AI topic is another thing that we'll come back to another day.

Ian: 00:10:17

A payoff.

Ian: 00:10:18

If we can be good at proceduralizing things and making them more efficient, is that we ought to be able to conserve energy for critical thinking and problem solving, the things that clients really, really want us to do.

Ian: 00:10:31

Some firms are good at this, Mike.

Ian: 00:10:33

Some firms I think, maybe not so good.

Mike: 00:10:37

Yeah, Ian, which.

Mike: 00:10:38

Which kind of firms come to mind for you in terms of the ones perhaps not so good?

Ian: 00:10:43

Well, I think there's a big chunk of our industry, like the IT and implementation consulting, the accentures of the world, that actually have been very good at proceduralizing all the tools that they use and making the delivery, the execution of projects really consistent.

Ian: 00:11:00

I think those of us who've worked more in the kind of diagnosis and planning world, in what you might call the strategy world, we're probably a little bit addicted to the idea that our ideas for today are special and unique and can't or shouldn't be repeated.

Ian: 00:11:13

There is even so, even in that part of the industry, there's a big economic prize on the table.

Ian: 00:11:19

And if you're a partner or a project manager, then you should be thinking about this.

Ian: 00:11:23

There's a big economic prize on the table if you can help your teams be a little more efficient.

Ian: 00:11:27

Of course, there are some risks hidden in the money bag too, but I think there's a big prize at stake here.

Mike: 00:11:34

Well, maybe we need to go to that consulting guru, Scrooge McDuck for a little advice around this topic.

Mike: 00:11:42

Hardworking and lazy.

Mike: 00:11:44

So Scrooge McDuck famously said to his nephews in giving them a little advice about their future work.

Mike: 00:11:51

Smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies.

Mike: 00:11:54

So Scrooge is probably telling us, be lazy and be hardworking.

Ian: 00:11:59

Well, in cartoon world, you can have all of those things.

Ian: 00:12:03

It's funny that lots of the memes about consulting that I've seen online feature the cartoon of Scrooge McDuck skiing down a big pile of gold coins.

Ian: 00:12:10

I think that's supposed to represent the client's perspective on what we do.

Ian: 00:12:14

So there's a big economic incentive to be lazy.

Ian: 00:12:18

Some of us are good at this, some firms are not.

Ian: 00:12:21

Some of the reasons why are not entirely straightforward.

Ian: 00:12:24

Like parts of our psychology, some of our hang ups and our ambitiousness and our competitiveness, I think, get in the way.

Ian: 00:12:31

And for me, that's one of the big things that holds us back from being willing to balance our hard work ethic and our laziness is that feeling that we're being watched and that we're being judged and that the raw amount of hours that we put in is still even today in the 21st century seen as a bit of a signifier even.

Ian: 00:12:49

So, like we said at the beginning that there is hard work there that needs to be done.

Ian: 00:12:54

This is a profession that people come into to do interesting consequential work.

Ian: 00:12:58

So I'd like us to be able to do both.

Mike: 00:13:00

The more we kind of wrestled with this thing, I think the more we start to see opportunities to do this smartly, to get the benefit out of working hard without falling into the toxic effects.

Mike: 00:13:12

I think we're going to dive deeper on this in Luminaries.

Ian: 00:13:16

We absolutely are.

Ian: 00:13:17

We want to dig deeper into some of the how to's.

Ian: 00:13:19

What are the other kinds of laziness that we can constructively use on consulting projects?

Ian: 00:13:24

What are the kinds of hard work that are actually going to benefit us?

Ian: 00:13:27

And we're going to discover on the Luminaries episode that those are not always the ones that we use when we're on the clock doing work for clients.

Ian: 00:13:34

We're going to talk about the author, David Meister and his model for Dynamos, Cruisers and Losers.

Ian: 00:13:40

What else are we going to talk about in the Luminaries episode?

Ian: 00:13:42

Mike?

Mike: 00:13:43

Well, I was fascinated.

Mike: 00:13:44

One thing that you dug up this idea that evolution has rewarded the survival of the laziest, perhaps.

Mike: 00:13:52

So here's one to dig into and then talk about ways of being creatively lazy, strategically lazy, by bringing our clients into the picture.

Ian: 00:14:04

Fantastic.

Ian: 00:14:04

And we can't ignore the dark side.

Ian: 00:14:08

So the final thing we're going to talk about in our Luminaries episode is what are the downsides of this hardworking ethos?

Ian: 00:14:14

What happens when the get it done mentality turns into the do yourself in mentality?

Ian: 00:14:21

We'd love you to join us for our Luminaries episode.

Ian: 00:14:23

Don't forget that a seven day free trial of Luminaries is available.

Ian: 00:14:27

Head over to our show site.

Ian: 00:14:28

We'd love to have you with us on the Luminaries program.

Ian: 00:14:32

Mike, I think we've just about got to the end of our review.

Ian: 00:14:36

First of all, our review today of hard work and laziness.

Ian: 00:14:39

We've got to the end of our journey through the different ways that you could make a perfect consultant.

Ian: 00:14:46

We'd love to hear from the listeners.

Ian: 00:14:47

We'd love to hear what you think.

Ian: 00:14:49

So please head over to our LinkedIn group or email us at consultingforhumansthirty one-consulting.com tell us what's on your mind and tell us what questions you like us to talk about.

Ian: 00:15:02

And Mike, that brings us to next episode, right?

Mike: 00:15:06

It does.

Mike: 00:15:07

Next time here on Consulting for Humans.

Mike: 00:15:09

We're going to be doing a review of some particularly germane news and trends from across the consulting industry, and we would love it if you could join us then on the Consulting for Humans podcast.

Mike: 00:15:28

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