Like every profession, consulting has a rich tradition of humor. Some of it is self-promoting, much of it self-deprecating. If you are a consultant, you have heard, and probably told, most of theses jokes. We are collecting "best in class" consulting humor. Please contribute jokes, cartoons, videos and other ways to let us laugh about our profession - and ourselves.
"The airports authority in charge of the $6 billion Dulles Rail project paid an expert on "change" about $7,000 an hour to lead authority members' discussions at annual board retreats, theWashington Examiner has learned."
The article describes how Airport Authority paid $173K over a three year period for consultant support at board retreats. The article's author calculated that the consultant was paid an average of $7,000 per hour. I suspect that the consultant put more hours in both pre-retreat preparation and post-retreat follow ups, so I think it's a bit unfair to compute the consultant's rate based only on the hours expended to conduct these retreats. But hey, it's nice work if you can get it (and your client values your work!)
Some of you may remember the fantastic cartoons of James Sanchez who was behind BigTimeConsulting. These have now been restored to their former glory and are available at http://www.bigtimeconsulting.org. I hope you will enjoy them and share them with your colleagues.
Posted By Mark Haas CMC FIMC,
Friday, July 01, 2011
Updated: Friday, July 01, 2011
While not purely consulting/consultant related, these humorous org charts show what every consultant knows: there is a lot of hidden information contained in the client's organizations chart, especially how the white spaces are displayed.
Posted By Mark Haas CMC FIMC,
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Updated: Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Perhaps the most sublime expression of the independent consultant’s
heart and soul is haiku,
a traditional seventeen-syllable
verse form of Japanese poetry. Set in three non-rhyming metrical units of 5, 7,
and 5 syllables, the consultant haiku expresses both the profession’s philosophy
and the innermost, unspoken feelings of a consultant pursuing truth, beauty,
and elusive clients.
Perhaps the most aspirational haiku:
My client calls me,
"Six figures if you come now.”
My alarm clock rings.
The attached file has a dozen more haiku - please create and contribute your own.
Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Management Consulting Inc., in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes.
Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM), Management Consulting Inc. helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge, capital and experiences to align the chicken's people, processes, and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. Management Consulting Inc. convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes.
The meeting was held in a park-like setting, enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken's mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. Management Consulting Inc. helped the chicken change to become more successful.
Never forget that there is another world (the "real" world?) that exists outside of consulting and they sometimes do actual research on consulting. Here is an abstract of research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine consulting, with some presumably unflattering things to say about marketing, sales and delivery of consulting services.
Authors: Andrew D Oxman, Researcher, Norwegian Centre for Health Services Research, Oslo, Norway; David L Sackett, Director, Trout Research and Education Center, Markdale, Ontario, Canada; Iain Chalmers, Editor, James Lind Library, Oxford, UK; and Trine E Prescott, Physician, Medical Genetics, Rikshospitalet University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
Correspondence to: Andy Oxman, Norwegian Centre for Health Services Research Pb 7004, St Olavs Plass, 0130 Oslo, Norway, E-mail: oxman@online.no
Background We are sick and tired of being redisorganized.
Objective: To systematically review the empirical evidence for organizational theories and repeated reorganizations.
Methods: We did not find anything worth reading, other than Dilbert, so we fantasized. Unfortunately, our fantasies may well resemble many people's realities. We are sorry about this, but it is not our fault.
Results: We discovered many reasons for repeated reorganizations, the most common being ‘no good reason’. We estimated that trillions of dollars are being spent on strategic and organizational planning activities each year, thus providing lots of good reasons for hundreds of thousands of people, including us, to get into the business. New leaders who are intoxicated with the prospect of change further fuel perpetual cycles of redisorganization. We identified eight indicators of successful redisorganizations, including large consultancy fees paid to friends and relatives.
Conclusions: We propose the establishment of ethics committees to review all future redisorganization proposals in order to put a stop to uncontrolled, unplanned experimentation inflicted on providers and users of the health services.
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Like every profession, consulting has a rich tradition of humor. Some of it is self-promoting, much of it self-deprecating. If you are a consultant, you have heard, and probably told, most of theses jokes. We are collecting "best in class" consulting humor. Please contribute jokes, cartoons, videos and other ways to let us laugh about our profession - and ourselves.
Winner 2012 Acquisition Int'l Magazine Award
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2012 Chair Leadership Awardee