Solutions Factory , livre ebook

Arun Maira

The Solutions Factory
A Consultant’s Handbook for Problem-solving
CONTENTS
Preface
PURPOSE AND ETHICS
1. WHO IS A CONSULTANT?
Consultants are of many kinds and consulting companies provide manifold services. If you want to be a consultant, be sure you know what you really want to do before taking the plunge into consulting
2. SHOULD A FOREIGN CONSULTANT ADVISE A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT?
Consultants often have conflicts of interests. They must be guided by their values; not get swayed by public opinion
3. COACHES, CONSULTANTS, FACILITATORS AND LEADERS
A great leader of people is a coach to the people; not their boss
4. WHEN THE JOB IS DONE
Consultants cannot count how well they have served a client by counting the amount of money the client continues to pay for the service
5. WHEN CONSULTING BECOMES A BUSINESS
When consultants measure their success by the amount of money they earn and the success of their company by its size, they risk losing sight of the purpose of their profession
6. EARNING RESPECT
Workers want respect from their managers, their fellow citizens and from consultants too
7. WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY
Many young people today want to measure the worthiness of their lives not by how much money they earn but by the improvement they can make to the conditions of the environment and society
8. WHEN WILL YOUR LIFE’S WORK BE DONE
Let your internal vision guide you through life, not the goals set for you by others
LEARNING, LISTENING, SYSTEMS THINKING
9. AN ODD CONSULTANT
Consultants can help their clients better by listening to real people, in real places, than by analysing spreadsheets of numbers
10. SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE
Even young consultants can learn to be great coaches to clients
11. A CONSULTANT IN THE ROOM
Consultants listen carefully to their clients; good consultants enable their clients to listen to others; and the best consultants helps their clients to listen to their own hearts
12. REAL PEOPLE, REAL PLACES, REAL THINGS
Be curious and listen to people, especially those who are not like you
13. ALL FOR ONE AND NONE FOR ALL
Systems thinking and collaboration, even amongst competitors, are essential for solving complex problems
14. LOOKING OUT OF THE BOX
Management consultants must have their feet on the ground in the world of action, and at the same time, their heads in the clouds in the world of knowledge, to help their clients find innovative solutions to their tough problems
15. DROPPING A BOMB
Change-makers should understand the combination of forces shaping the system they want to change before they implement their solutions, or else their fixes could backfire
16. WANTED: NEW SOLUTIONS
Good consultants enable their clients—companies and even countries—to learn to find and implement their own solutions
17. REDESIGNING THE AEROPLANE WHILE FLYING 153
The best consultants are lifelong learners, searching for better ways to make the world better for everyone
18. WHAT DO CONSULTANTS REALLY DO?
Good consultants are coaches and catalysts who enable others to produce the results they want. They don’t ‘do it’ for them
19. WHAT FACTS CAN’T TELL YOU
We must listen to ‘people not like us’ and understand why they believe what they do
20. COOKIES AND LEARNING
The pace of development of technology has run too far ahead of the development of human wisdom
21. STORIES TO THEORIES
Beliefs, which may even be unfounded, cause people to act in the ways they do, and their actions founded on those beliefs cause things to happen
CREATING A BETTER WORLD
22. THE VISION THING
It is not what a vision is, but how it is shaped that gives it the power to transform an organization
23. THE HARLEY TEST
Employees should shape their vision and feel it; not be told what the company’s vision is
24. THE HORSE BEFORE THE CART
People come first; implementation follows
25. THEORIES TO STORIES
Economic policies are being driven by theories; not founded on how human beings actually think and behave
26. THE DOUGHNUT AND THE HOLE
Social enterprises require an architecture based on the principles with which nature organizes itself
27. LEARNING TO LEARN
The solution clients want from consultants in VUCA times is how to find their own solutions
Epilogue
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PREFACE
Business schools provide a fast elevator for students who want to earn high salaries quickly. Management consulting provides them with a bridge high up in the sky between the world of education and the world of business.
The Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur was the tallest building in the world from 1998 to 2004 when it was overshadowed by another building, Taipei 101. However, the Petronas Towers remain the tallest twin towers in the world. The two towers are connected by a double-decker skybridge 170 metres above ground, which is the highest two-storey bridge in the world. It enables people at the uppermost levels of the towers to cross over without bothering to come down to the ground at all.
In the world of business, one tower is the education tower with business schools at the top, the other is the corporate tower with C-suites of the largest multinational firms at its apex. The best students from the best business schools are picked by marquee international consulting companies, such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company. They cross the skybridge frequently to support the firms’ partners in advising chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief experience officers (CXOs) in their offices at the top of the other tower. While the young consultants, though very well paid, earn much less than their partners and their partners’ clients, they stick around to participate in the world of ideas high up there at a very young age. It is a great attraction for them to observe how important business decisions are made.
Big business ideas began to dominate the world since the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, a dissipation of ideological opposition to the sway of private capital in the governance of economies. ‘Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,’ Ronald Reagan had declared. Nevertheless, everywhere there is a government, including in the USA where Ronald Reagan himself was perched atop one. The problem is that government is not efficient, he said. It wastes resources, whereas the private sector, with its drive for efficiency and profits, knows how to use public resources better. Thus, with the spread of ideas of the ‘Washington Consensus’ since 1990, a global drive has gathered momentum to sell off government-owned companies, privatize public services and apply business management methods to governments’ own ministries. This drive has expanded the market for management consultants beyond business into government. With that, opportunities for young management consultants to serve public causes has expanded further, making careers in management consulting even more attractive.
The incestuous mingling of the worlds of businesses, governments and management consultants has become increasingly visible every winter at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the ski resort of Davos up in the Swiss Alps. Meanwhile, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and representatives of environmental and human rights movements gather more humbly at sea level at Porto Alegre in Brazil at the World Social Forum (WSF). The distance between the amount of wealth earned by those on top and those sweating below has increased fast. In fact, every year, Oxfam presents a report to the WEF about how much richer the rich have become. At the last count in 2020, less than fifty persons in the world owned as much wealth as half of the world’s population, i.e. over three and a half billion persons!
I came into the world of management consulting from ‘the other tower’—the world of business corporations, having taken twenty-five years, in a slow elevator, to get to the skybridge of consultancy. When I stepped on to it, I found it was crowded with young consultants from management schools, who had come up very fast through the other tower.
The young consultants and I often saw the world through different lenses. When I began to consult in the USA, as a rookie in consulting, I earned about the same amount as the young consultants who were hired from the best business schools. When I had been consulting for less than two years and had established the value of my experience for CXOs in companies, a young colleague asked me a personal question, comparing my earnings with those of the young consultants, ‘How come you are not rich if you are so good?’ he asked. I sensed he was not sure whether I could be good, if I was not rich.
I believe that my long experience of working at lower levels in the organizations, close to the people on the ground, has given me a more grounded perspective of the worlds of business and consulting. In the twenty years of consulting, I wrote five books on my reflections on business transformation, the future of India and the future of democracy. The fifth, Transforming Capitalism: Business Leadership to Improve the World for Everyone, was published in 2008 just before I hung up my boots as the chairman of the Boston Consulting Group (India) Private Ltd.
Lately, objections from the masses against the go-go capitalism that became ascendant since the 1990s with its philosophy ‘business of business is only business’, and which has infected government policies too, have raised questions about the ethics of business.
During my twenty years with international consulting companies, I visited business schools often—to teach, to recruit young people for jobs, and even as a member of the boards of governance of some schools. Business schools which provide managers for businesses, and where professors provide ideas for business management, have come under pressure l