Consulting Services - Our Three Guiding Principles
80% of value in any consulting assignment comes from 20% of the work.
If you can identify the key 20% ahead of time, you can avoid 80% of the work, spend more time on the key issues, and hence deliver a much better and cheaper product. It’s humanly impossible to identify all the key 20% ahead of time, because the process of consulting first has to add fresh insight and perspective. But a really skilled consultant and astute CEO working together at the start can usually get quite close to working solely on the high-leverage issues.
80% of the value in consulting comes from 20% of the consultants
They talk good, they look good, they act good, but they wouldn’t recognize an insight unaided if it banged them over the head. Great consulting is not just about following great ideas --- like the 80/20 principle --- and proven methodologies. It’s all about insight. For insight, you need the ideas and methodologies but you also need the spark of human genius. Some consultants have this. Most don’t.
80% of the value in implementing consulting insight comes from 20% of the clients.
The reason is simple: either the CEO doesn’t want to make the changes, or the CEO’s colleagues don’t want to, or the consultants are ineffective at getting the organization’s people excited and confident about what they should do. It’s usually the latter. And nine times out of ten, this is not because the consultants lack eloquence or patience, but because the key people in the organization don’t really own the insights.
That, in turn, is because they typically haven’t been around when the insights were generated. Unless an insight is generated with the client and by the client as well as for the client, it’s unlikely to live long or make the cash register ring. So we develop insight in real time, with the key client people. We can do this because the basic idea behind our practice the 80/20 principle is so simple, accessible, and powerful. If you want to comment on some of the things I’ve written, please email me:
richardkoch@btinternet.com