COACHING THE COACHES,
PART 14
by Jon Rappoport
Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport
I’d be remiss if I didn’t write a few words about conventional high-end business consulting. I’m talking about consultants who can easily demand $1000 an hour for their work.
This is the way it usually works, if the program is really serious. The consultant and his team meet with the CEO of a corporation (or his COO) and do an in-depth interview about all aspects and departments of the business. They analyze the company systems as well.
Then they draw up a master plan to correct and improve all phases of the operation, from accounting to production to sales to marketing. They find areas of waste and propose ways to eliminate it. They suggest specific upgrades in internal communications. They cover the waterfront.
Then they work with the CEO and his top executives to implement the plan, which has been broken down into a long series of steps.
It works. Yes, it certainly can work. To a degree.
But questions remain.
What are the key steps for improving advertising? What creative moves will make ads have real impact with consumers? It’s not just a matter of throwing more money at the problem.
How will the consulting team help improve relationships among company executives? After all, they are humans and they have to relate.
What about the company’s internal communications? Is upgrading it just a matter of selecting a better computer interface? Or is there a human factor there as well? And if so, what do you do about it?
In every company, there are people who shine and produce and carry the load and innovate and improvise. Without them, the business would experience a sudden downturn. How do you nurture these key players? Suppose they sometimes (or often) achieve their success by going outside the company’s inhibiting rules? Do you try to rein them in? What system, if any, can be applied to them?
Conversely, what do you about employees who know how to pretend they’re competent, but actually derail every major project by inaction and buck-passing? How do you detect these human roadblocks—and if you could, what would you do about them?
What about the company’s hiring policies? How do you actually find people who will somehow make the business move forward faster? Whom are you looking to employ? What happens when you discover that normal tests and scales and behavior profiles are actually counterproductive in evaluating a kind of talent you need? For example, how do you identify designers and engineers who can invent new products that exceed the current standards of the market?
And how do you train the bulk of your employees? Do you just give them the odd seminar now and then to make them feel as if you care? How do you train them to do their jobs? Do you want to teach them to become mechanical androids? If not, what are you aiming for?
In the area of customer relations, how do you train people who will talk to the people who buy your products? Are you simply looking for employees who follow company policy in this regard, or do you want employees who can show customers that the business actually cares about them? And if so, how do you find such customer-service people, and how do you train them to go the extra mile? Is going the extra mile a system?
When you add up all these factors that are often ignored or shortchanged by the consultant team, you discover you’re looking at the difference between succeeding and failing as a company, over the long haul. And in each case, better systems aren’t the answer. There is an X-factor.
If the CEO and his top executives, and the consultants they’ve brought in, are all systems people, how will they ever perceive what they’re missing? How will they even see the X-factor?
Over and above all this, suppose the CEO is a hard-driving type who made his bones by pushing, pushing, pushing—but now that his company has grown to a considerable size, he’s out of his depth. He doesn’t know how to manage the structure. He can’t deal with people in a way that will make them want to work better and more creatively. He has the opposite effect. What does the consultant team do about him?
Or: the CEO is a bean counter. He’s won his job by default, because his predecessors were sloppy and averse to handling details. But the bean counter is inherently cautious. He keeps such a tight lid on things the company falls behind in bringing new products to the market. And the products they do make are dull and unattractive, artless. How do you handle this type of CEO?
It turns out a real consultant or coach would have to be able to access his own imagination, in order to find these key factors I’m mentioning, and he would have to use an extraordinary amount of imagination to actually fix what he finds.
A whole raft of newer and better systems isn’t going to carry the day.
Many consultants are in the business of manufacturing the illusion that their systems are the full answer. That’s what they really do. That’s their skill. Selling the illusion.
And it isn’t that hard to sell, because businesspeople (the clients) tend to already believe, with full faith, in systems. That’s their background and training. That’s their predisposition. That’s their fall-back position. That’s what they think and hope a corporation is totally composed of.
But they’re wrong, and they pay the price for being wrong.
To return to an example I’ve used before, in the 1950s the American automobile industry was propelled by brilliant designers who were out on the edge, working from vision and imagination and trusting that what they were conceiving could be turned out on the assembly line. They were backed up by tremendous engineers, who saw their own task as a creative enterprise as well, and they invented technology that could carry the visionary load.
But soon enough, all that spirit, talent, imagination, passion, and futuristic thinking were dampened by a corporate sense that success had to be CONSOLIDATED. Essentially, rote formulas for success were inserted to replace the talent that had really created the victories in the first place—because the men in charge had a fatal blind spot. They couldn’t see imagination, because they had buried it deep within themselves. So they stood on their past and they stood on their profit margins, and they watched helplessly, as their companies went down the drain.
Try to consult and coach THAT with a system.
Jon Rappoport
A former candidate for a US Congressional seat in California, Jon has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. He has written articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. The author of The Ownership of All Life, Jon has maintained a consulting practice for the past 15 years. He has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, and creativity to audiences around the world.