[widgeon13]

I've done some consulting since I retired four years ago. Consultants can fill a useful role if you get the right consultant and an organization that is truly interested in making some changes.

I worked for a company for 30 years and we had too many consultants come and go, spent bundles of money and really changed nothing, most of the time we fired the consultants and went back to the old way of doing things.

Most of the good ideas are within the minds of the people within the organization, it's just a matter of allowing those ideas to grow. An environment that tolerates mistakes is also very important. Many things can be learned from evaluating errors along the road to success but penalizing someone for making a mistake and not understanding where they went wrong in their thinking is the biggest error. When you realize someone has made a mistake it makes sense to go back and analyze the decision. Most of the time it will lead to a better process and bring value to the organization.

One of the goals of an organization should be to make decisions based on all available information, sounds easy. The problem is that most decisions are made based on history, how it was done in past cases. That obviously leads to repetition, some good decisions and some bad decisions. The objective needs to be different decisions that lead to improved results.

Once people in the organization see that errors are analyzed and they are not penalized they will become more risk oriented, that is what really drives creativity.

The right consultant for an organization can help create that environment but senior management has to be willing to foster that risk oriented environment.

Bottom line is that I hate consultants because most of the time they try to milk an organization to death, they don't want to leave and keep finding things to fix. The best consultant is the one that teaches good process and decision making skills and then leaves to let the employees make the decisions. No magic to it at all, it's called ownership.

I love this subject but as I said, I hate consultants.