Staying the Course as a CIO: How to Overcome the Trials and Challenges of IT Leadership

CHAPTER 5 Chronic Consultancy Syndrome

“A consultant is someone who saves his client almost enough to pay his fee.”

Arnold H. Glasgow

Consultancy can be chronic—in all senses of the word. East Coast Urban Slang (Urban Dictionary, 2009), for example, curiously defines chronic as “high quality weed with red hairs on it”. Such a delicacy is apparently often laced with cocaine, just to make it more appealing and enduring. Ugh. In more conventional dictionaries such as Merriam Webster however (Merriam Webster, 2013), less “streetwise” definitions are no less appropriate. Webster defines chronic as “marked by long duration or frequent reoccurrence”, or else more prosaically as “always present or encountered; especially: constantly vexing, weakening, or troubling”. I can certainly confess to suffering plenty of vexation at various stages of my career (both as a result of their fault and also mine if I'm perfectly honest). But I've also enjoyed successes which unlike Arnold Glasgow's quote above, have generated very high levels of goodness on whatever axis we were using at the time to measure it. Consultants it seems can be extremely useful, extremely expensive, extremely dangerous and extremely charming, possibly all at the same time.

Some of the skills that consultants are able to bring to bear still mystify me, even after decades of careful analysis. The most amazing story I can recall relates to a time when a selection process was underway for a global, game-changing, process-improvement ...