Just like most heaps of dung have an ad hoc ecosystem of insects living on or in it, many companies seem to have a few consultants buzzing around feeding and laying eggs. These creatures are attracted to the smell of budget allocations, pending or recent disaster, or the need for highly specialized skills on a temporary basis.
Consultants are almost always highly specialized critters, having highly evolved senses and proboscises for the collection of nectar from deep within the treasury organ of the corporate flower. It is common for consultants to tap into upper level management having budgetary authority.
The infestation stage of their life cycle can begin in many ways. Consultants are not often seen unless they are in the feeding stage of their lifecycle. When they are looking for a blood meal, they can descend on the unwary manager and dazzle her/him with their flashy appendages.
The infestation can be deleteriously parasitic or genuinely symbiotic. Some consultants plant themselves on an artery and pull blood until the host expires. I will include law firms in this savage group, since lawyers really are a type of consultant. Not all lawyers will draw down the resources of the host to a dangerous level. Many are able to sustain their relationship indefinitely through the exchange of useful services in exchange for a draw of blood now and then.
A company can become infested in many ways. Executives at trade shows are particularly vulnerable to picking up consultants on their legs as they muck around in the fetid swamp waters of business development. It is important for business development managers and executives to check one another for puncture wounds indicating the implantation of consultant larvae.
Consultants find their host organism in many other ways. Business associations, fraternal organizations, and chambers of commerce are known venues for infestation.
Having a consultant glued to your leg isn’t all negative. There is occasional need for their services. The trick to using a consultant profitably is to define the need very carefully and work with them to develop a structured plan so that their work product is well defined. Resist the temptation to turn over the keys to the company while they do their work. It is important to manage consultants very carefully since they are usually quite expensive. If executed properly, consultants can be quite useful as highly skilled temporary specialists.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Nasty, nasty comments! Not happy to be back in the office, huh? Calling lawyers “consultants”. Now you have both professions unhappy with you. There’s going to be some serious trouble.
When our longwinded obtuse sales people explain our “business model” to potential new clients (some how “contract R & D” is just to simple to state), they are commonly asked “so you guys are consultants, right?” to which I quickly reply, “No, we work for a living.”
Hi John, I was wondering how long it would take you to comment. Perhaps there is some self-loathing here because I have done a bit of consulting myself. You’ll notice that I made a pitch for redemption in the last paragraph. I have actually worked with some very good and useful consultants.
Gaussling I have been fairly lucky with a few technical consultants but have observed the types infestations you mention. I hate when I hear a “high priced” consultant tell management what it “thinks they want to hear” vs what they need to hear (i.e. plan won’t work). Or worse is that mangement will follow advice because it came from a consultant although in-house people made same recomendation months, or years, before. This may be more a sign of bad managers but they do seem to feed off of and stick together. It’s particlarly tough in a virtual operation where you do need support from consulants as well as vendors to progress a project, both of which are subject to activity creep if not well supervised.
oohh that hurt! Management often hires consultants as a way to settle internal disputes so as to avoid going NUCLEAR on one of their own productive, but misguided employees. Hence the consultant takes the heat for crap that should have been settled internally.
It’s not all downside! You’ve emotionally abused a large segment of the population!
And I’m just tingling from the fun I’m having!
Management can choose to use consultants to do their dirty work and begin cleanup from years of bad executive decision making. A consulting chainsaw is brought in to clear a path for corporate survival and cut excessive headcount so executives can keep the blood off their shirts. They’ll use a variety of tools to justify their choices. “Psychological” profiles can be drawn up to make a case for moving the pawns around. Job descriptions can be redefined to render positions obsolete. You see, they don’t get rid of people, they cancel positions. I’ve seen both meritorious and poor applications of consulting expertise.
CMC- I have seen this phenomenon of management listening to consultants over employees. It’s very discouraging. I like the phrase “activity creep”. It suits the situation well.
Professional management shines when inertia and viscosity rule the day. FEMA, NASA, Detroit… work best when they recycle spreadsheets with 8%/annum cost increments. When the enemy charges you listen to your sergeants not your generals. That way you have field surviviors for courts martial thereafter.
Top-down management in times of crisis has been tried: the Battle of the Somme. “One British battalion was unable to advance because it could not climb over the bodies of the dead and wounded blocking the way.” “General Sir Douglas Haig – 50 miles behind the lines – was still confident. He continued the attacks for 4 more months.”
“When the enemy charges you listen to your sergeants not your generals. That way you have field surviviors for courts martial thereafter.”
I like this comment.
I am a technical consultant, as deferentiated from a business or managerial consultant. It is neigh on to impossible to have a manager admit that his or her organization needs help technically unless it is in a specialty that there is little in-house expertise in of any kind. I am appalled sometimes at how much time, money, and effort is spent on something like an analytical method development by practitioners who are not really experts in HPLC, GC, MS, or whatever technique is being used. Managers would rather just muddle along than admit to the upper-level managers that they cannot do the job more effectively and efficiently. They’d rather fail and blame Nature as being intractable.