Deciphering consultants

The one feature of LinkedIn that closely resembles the excitement-inducing miscellany of Facebook is "See who visited your profile". At the recruitment firm I worked for a couple of weeks, it was customary to check profiles of candidates we were trying selling jobs to. A finicky colleague would exercise great caution in visiting LinkedIn profiles, especially when she suspected that the candidate had hired others to help him with the job search. "I don't want him to think of me as desperate," she explained.

Indeed, the feature is a big tease. Out of every five people who visit your profile, it tells you who in only one or two cases. For the others it offers a veritable spread of slow-building suspense: "Someone from the financial services industry in Hyderabad" or "A student of Management Development Institute in Gurgaon". Ooh, playing Sherlock, are we? Bring it on.

Bathetically, most of these profile visits happen via drab old connections and do not, as one would like, possess even a hint of romance. I use romance not, well, romantically but to hint at the possibility of someone reaching my profile serendipitously. And then, being impressed enough to offer me a million-bucks job.

Okay, I am getting carried away. I have a right to, after all. Ravi, my roommate who works in consulting, uses LinkedIn not only to make contacts but also to source project information. Uncommonly cheerful, he revealed to me the other day that he had made contact with a senior marketing manager of a paints company on LinkedIn. "He is a friend of a colleague from B-school and his company needs help with implementing a matrix system of reporting," said Ravi.

For the uninitiated, a matrix system is a cross-functional reporting structure where an employee has a direct as well as a dotted reporting since the system works on pooling resources under different heads based on project requirement. I can explain more, but you'd be better off going to a management school. Since passing out of one, I have been out of touch with the lingo. One, I don't have a typical corporate job and besides, my friends are all non-MBAs. Living with Ravi, in fact, is my only chance to revisit the jargon.

"So what exactly does a consultant do?" I asked him, fully aware of the job description but hankering to hear once-familiar terms.

"Well, once he has received the problem statement, he analyses the company and its position in the industry on the basis of Porter's 5 Forces model."

"Threat of new competition, threat of substitute products, bargaining power of customers, bargaining power of suppliers and the intensity of competitive rivalry…"

"Right. For instance, if I am a commercial glass company and I want to get into architectural glass, I will need to look at how competitive that space is before I do anything else."

"Yes. Do you remember the BCG Matrix?"

"That too. We figure out if a particular division is a cash cow, a star, a dog or a question mark."

"I know the star is the best, and the cash cow is ok, too, but which of the dog or the question mark is the worst?"

"The dog's the worst, since it implies both a low market share and a low growth. Question marks are divisions whose market share is low but growth is good, which is why companies don't know what to do with them."

"And there was one by McKinsey..."

"The Seven-S Model. But we don't use that since it is non-specific. We do use the Balanced Scorecard."

"Isn't that more HR-related?"

"Yes, but it can also be used to identify gaps when strategising."

"What else?"

"So, we do all this and then we go to the client and tell them to follow our instructions and see things unravel."

That's consultancy which, among the myriad post-B-school options, has assumed a vaunted status. Rightly? I am not sure. Consultants apply models and run multiple iterations on data that is publicly available before they arrive at net present value of the future cash flows that their suggestions will accrue to the client. To me, it sounds hideously like a weight-loss programme. Since I don't have the will or the nous to check my instincts I hire a person with a whip. Hurrah for self-esteem!

Of course, there is the argument that companies often do not have the time or the resources to implement internal change. By hiring a consultant that has dealt with similar cases in the past, they are getting the best bang for the buck. True. But apart from the occasional million-dollar projects that involve genuine strategising, most consultants offer assembly-line solutions with cosmetic changes. Essentially, I pay you to mend my ways and your nifty sleight-of-hand makes my glaring ills vanish. I implement your magical words encased in gleaming PPTs and you laugh all the way to the bank. I move from one crisis to the next and you, Sir, from one big-ticket assignment to the next.

The author has switched too many jobs in the past and hopes he can hold down this one