I’m big on the idea that consultants don’t have to be really smart people, or that they have to have an incredible amount of experience around the subject matter they are tackling. It’s helpful of course, but it’s actually not the core competency for consulting.
First, I’m a huge advocate of liberal arts college educations. The reason for this is not anything to do with small colleges or personal relationships you build with professors. It’s about how they teach and what they teach. At small liberal arts colleges, you don’t necessarily learn a “trade” like accounting or engineering or IT. More often than not, people come out of small colleges with largely “unusable” degrees like anthropology and sociology. Few people who get Psych degrees go on to be psychologists. I am a good example myself with a double in Economics and Asian American studies before getting my Masters in HR. What the small liberal arts colleges teach is a way of thinking, connecting objects throughout the disciplines and throughout the world.
Second, it’s not about how smart you are, but about how you approach the problems that clients give you. Given a solid framework about how your mind approaches a problem and how to solve it, you can figure out just about anything. At its core, consulting is less about your expertise and more about your approach.
Don’t get me wrong, the more you know the better. But there are great HR people in the consulting world, and there are great technologists who are way more knowledgeable than I am that I can out solution any day, only because I can approach a problem with more discipline and connect more dots than most other people. When we get into topics like HR service delivery or data governance, are you getting an organization who has a particular “best practice” model they will inevitably try to fit you into? Or do you have someone who knows all that and will tailor something that works for your organizational parameters instead within the context of the industry’s leading practices?
(And no, this is not an advertisement. Please note that the great majority of you still have no idea who I am.)
3 responses to “Makings of a Consultant”
As it happens, I have a broad liberal education, taking my major in English Lit and minor in Natural Sciences at UPenn. In those days, all of the major banks/insurance companies/etc. were hiring Ivy League/Seven Sisters liberal arts grads for their programmer training programs for the same reasons you say they make great consultants. Add a lot of experience, great communication skills, personal discipline, and a passion for doing what’s best for the client, and voila!
Dubs, my undergraduate degree is in Technical Theatre, my graduate degree is HR management (10 year gap between degrees).
You are so right about the importance of learning how to think and solve problems.
When I got my first job in HR it had as much to do with my “real life” experience as it did with my degree, which was newly minted at the time (I was recruited at graduation).
Teach people to think, to question and how to tackle problems and the rest is just “book larnin’ “. Great column.
Ron
Thanks Naomi and Ron. You guys are both great examples of what I think it takes. The future of the U.S. economy is about innovators and problem solvers, not just about learning a trade and applying knowledge.
(and I should admit I have a masters from BU – quite a large school)