BY ART VAN BODEGRAVEN AND
KENNETH B. ACKERMAN
basictraining
A rose by any other name …
IT’S GETTING SOMEWHAT UNSETTLING. ONE CAN
be having a perfectly wonderful time in either a business or
social situation, when it somehow comes out that he or she
is a consultant, or is “in consulting.” Things tend to get quiet,
in an ominous way. Mothers gather their daughters to their
skirts; little boys peek out from behind their fathers’ jackets.
Business peers draw back—recoil might be too strong a
word—and suddenly become distinctly less friendly.
We are guessing that an on-the-spot poll would put consultants somewhere below pedophiles, but still slightly ahead
of members of Congress. Not easy to
accept. One of us has been a professional
management consultant for over 40 years;
the other, nearly a neophyte, a mere 30.
We came of age believing that consulting was (and is) a noble calling, something to aspire to be good enough to do,
an appellation we needed to continually
strive to live up to.
So, what has happened to turn “
consultant” and “consulting” into words that
don’t carry the weight and command the
respect they once did? What do they mean
today? And are there new words that have
taken their place?
flip the switch and turn on enterprise-changing software. Oh, yes. Logistics service providers (LSPs or 3PLs) also have
teams of consultants to recommend supply
chain solutions.
Finally, we have experienced a parade of
honorable and well-meaning people who
have found themselves unemployed and
have called themselves “consultants” while
doing odd jobs during their job searches.
Most often, they have no
idea of how to structure
consulting relationships—and projects—or
how to price themselves
or their projects. They
typically don’t have the
network of resources to
bring appropriate experience to bear on the several pieces of a multifaceted business challenge.
Whatever the cause or
causes, “consultant” and
“consulting” are, it
seems, terms to be avoided in polite society.
EVERYBODY’S A CONSULTANT
For openers, a nation of people who don’t remotely do consulting have adopted the name. We have sales consultants for
everything from used cars to discount electronics. Other
salespeople have become, say, material handling consultants
or supply chain execution systems consultants, depending on
what product or service is being sold. The practice is only a
little short of the kind of language manipulation that has
given us sanitary engineers emptying the wastebaskets on the
night shift.
Then, there are the legendary abuses of teams of information technology design and implementation specialists; their
employers call them consultants, and eventually they come
to believe that they are. But they are technicians, performing
tasks. Never mind that busloads of them, at hourly rates that
look like consulting fees, are apparently needed to be able to
BRANDING AND POSITIONING
A working partner recently confessed to
considering taking “consulting” out of the
company name and off the website, based
on apparently shifting perceptions of and
degrees of acceptance and respect for consultants and consulting. She is not alone
and may be late to the game.
An eventually world-changing readjustment might have begun in 2000 with
Andersen Consulting’s adoption of the
Accenture name, and their creation of a
new brand. The rest of us laughed at the
time, but we aren’t laughing now. Already
split from the mother ship, a totally disen-
