What do management consultants actually do?
Have you ever wondered what management consultants, also known as strategy consultants, actually do? An image search might leave you chuckling at the parade of memes, buzzwords, and comical, yet “glamorous” clichés involving suits, airport lounges, and boardrooms. While these images are somewhat entertaining, they are actually misleading and don't help with understanding a consultant's trade. It's quite challenging to capture the versatility of the role and articulate it in a way that avoids confusion or raised eyebrows. In this blog post, two industry professionals will attempt to do so with the help of some metaphors.
Where Business Meets Biology
At the heart of consulting are clients: corporations spanning industries and maturity levels. Fun fact: the term “corporation” derives from "corpus," the Latin word for “body.” As such, a corporation is the merging of various functions into a unified whole, much like the human body's intricate systems working together to achieve a common goal: survival!
Zooming out from individual corporations, a broader canvas comes into view. Within the context of the broader economy, corporations find their markets and niches, mirroring species in the natural ecosystem. It’s Darwin’s survival of the fittest - a metaphor for businesses that strategically adapt to their market and the overarching economy.
Now back to the example of a single company. We see its departments as specialized players in a larger orchestra. For example, the organizational structure mirrors the skeletal system, providing stability. Legal and risk departments resemble the immune system, protecting against threats. Operations act like the digestive system, turning inputs/food into products/energy (let’s just not take our metaphor to the waste by-products). Finally, leadership is akin to the nervous system, orchestrating all efforts and providing vision and purpose.
When Something Goes South
When ailments disrupt our bodies, symptoms arise, signaling the need for expert intervention. Although we feel symptoms vividly, we cannot peer into the inner workings of our bodies. Similarly, the intricacies of a corporate organism can be hard to understand from within. Just as individuals turn to skilled physicians for their health, businesses seek the guidance of consultants to diagnose organizational problems.
When you visit a physician, they listen to your symptoms and run diagnostic tests: blood tests, X-rays, spirometry, etc. You name it. Similarly, consultants listen to inputs from leadership and employees and deploy their own clever tools to diagnose problems: benchmarking, market assessment, competitive analysis, etc.
Based on the outcomes of this assessment, the doctor prescribes a treatment plan. The consultant, on the other hand, provides the company with a strategic roadmap and initiatives to steer the ship back on course.
Much like doctors are experts of the body’s anatomy, consultants are experts of corporate anatomy. Much like good healthcare is supposed to “care” for patients. Consulting, when done right, cares for organizations.
When to Consult a “Corporate Anatomy” Expert?
Just like in healthcare, it is highly beneficial (and recommended) for businesses to regularly consult with experts for preventive purposes to sustain their growth and stay ahead of the game. This includes benchmarking performance, assessing competitive strengths and weaknesses, devising risk mitigation plans, and ensuring a well-balanced portfolio. In practice, consultants often hear from clients only when they find themselves in crisis mode.
Crises can occur for various reasons, but the most common ones are related to stagnant growth, rapid expansion that exceeds the current structure's capacity, the need for organizational restructuring, or merger and acquisition scenarios. Crises also tend to coincide with a scarcity of resources, be it time or money, and the realization that the established modus operandi is no longer yielding optimal results.
Bringing It All Together
So, there you have it. The parallel between consulting and healthcare lies in a shared process—diagnosis, treatment planning, and recovery. Consultants excel at objectively dissecting complex business issues. Through meticulous analysis, they identify root causes and propose effective solutions. If a corporation is grappling with more symptoms than it can handle alone, if it's observing symptoms but is uncertain of their significance, or if the known treatment is no longer yielding results, seeking professional business counseling can be a wise choice.