The Hindu Business Line : The new witch doctors

MANAGEMENT consultants are the soothsayers and magicians of the modern world. They are everywhere in 21st century India; even the socialists favour them, and they find their way into public sector corporations, government departments, and utilities. Nothing escapes their eagle eye in detecting flaws and fixing them - or at least telling others how to. They appear admittedly under various guises and names. Even in relatively sanctified arenas such as cricket, they operate as non-playing coaches, managers and mind-trainers who deal with the psyche of the sportsman, having recently discovered the truth which all good players have known all along - that cricket is a game played in the mind! So they are called upon to pump up the sagging spirits of a batsman on a bad trot, or when he has become the bunny of some fearsome fast bowler who has managed to knock him off his perch repeatedly. Or perhaps restore the morale of a spinner badly mauled into a state of nerves and losing his length, by some aggressive opponent in the slog overs. One wonders whether the popularity of this new breed of witch doctors (as the two associate editors of The Economist John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge called them in a book of that title) is a symptom of the high level of ambient insecurity in the world these days.

In today's business world, at least three species of this animal have been spotted. The most familiar one is the expert who has the knowledge or special access to information such as law or some exotic theory or technique of analysis normally not available within the client-company. Lawyers specialising in company law, mergers and acquisitions, or some specific form of taxation such as excise and import duties are good examples of this kind. They are usually called upon only to answer a question, or tackle an impasse reached by the company. Their response is to the point; and it seldom needs to have a direct connection with the resulting decision made by the manager. Their expertise is not often challenged; indeed, they are accorded the respect traditionally reserved for the family doctor. They are paid by the hour, or often as in the US, by the minute. It is not uncommon for one to have a fifteen-minute conversation with you on the phone on a technical point and promptly fax you a bill for a few hundred dollars.

A wise and chastened senior manager, my boss of many years ago and a veteran of many a legal battle, told me that the awe in which the lawyer is held is utterly misplaced. I had taken to him a written opinion given by our lawyer on an issue of trademark agreements, which had turned out to be not much in our favour. We could not do what we had very much wanted to do for business reasons because his interpretation of the rules stood in the way.

"Did you brief him properly?" was my senior's first question, "I am not so sure, because obviously he has not got the right picture. Look, if you want a lawyer to be of help to you, it depends totally on the briefing; you should make it clear to him what you want," he added. The lawyer, contrary to my naive copybook manager's impression, was not a neutral interpreter but an advocate. So his job was to find a way to make it possible for you to do what you wished to, and help you with `facilitating and enabling' (such felicitous words!) opinions, not put spokes in your wheel. This opened my eyes, as I had all along thought that the expert was a protection from any illegalities we might unwittingly commit. I was soon to learn that the case-hardened tough executive took this stance vis-a-vis any expert - and with good reason!

A regular management consultant, the second type, is more than just a storehouse of special knowledge. He has a bag of tools that help him see more into your situation than you could and thus advise you on the action you should take to sort yourself. He draws upon a greater variety of experiences than you could ever hope to do in one organisation. Alas, there is no guarantee of success - or of having arrived at an exact answer, unlike his highly technical or legal counterpart. Industry analysts, market researchers, economic forecasters, and equity researchers could be close to this definition. Their opinion is valuable but not infallible, but has little internal alternative in a company. Their survival is mainly due to the skill being called for occasionally, so it is not worth any ordinary company's while to keep a tame specialist full-time.

The third type is the one who flourishes today and who is the dream destination of smartly turned-out MBAs, especially with the gift of the gab. This kind gives a recommendation based on a general survey of the field, including opinions culled from your own business associates and employees. This genre is often the most prestigious and expensive one of the three types. It is the butt of all the jokes about consultants that borrow your watch to tell the time - and the expensive ones that walk away with the watch. To their survey data typically are added their own special insights and interpretations, from which the best ones take a strong position - and advise a strategic direction to follow. Yet such advice or conclusions are at times either so banal as to be useless, or so obvious that it would take a lot of obscure jargon to make them seem worth the enormous amounts of money paid for it.

Here is a sampler from a finding from a famous company's research study on what makes change management succeed: Change-management programmes can succeed only if employees at all levels - senior managers, middle managers, and the front line - share the will and the skills to change. Shocking? Well, the report goes on to add (with a straight face presumably!) that they "studied these programmes at 40 organisations and found a connection between good skills for managing change and the value an organisation captures from it. Reassuringly, the companies with the best change-management skills were the most successful at capturing value from such programmes." Reassuring? You mean a tautology just proved itself!

They further go on to look at three levels of management and conclude that companies with above-average change-management skills at only one level failed to reach their targets, while companies with good skills at two beat their expectations by almost a third. The pay-off line is yet another classic, wait for it: Large organisational-change programmes are notoriously difficult to run: they involve changing the way people not only behave at work but also think about work. Now be honest, you wouldn't have guessed that "research finding" on your own and unaided by consultants at $2000 per day, would you?

I came across this gem of a `take-away' as it is sometimes referred to the in the lingo (as if it were a Chinese restaurant) from a Web site. It is so good that I wish to reproduce it in its entirety for you to have a laugh. Quoting other authorities than themselves, the consultants say that psychologists in the fields of child and adult development have made several important discoveries about the preconditions for people to change their behaviour. First, they must see the point of the change and agree with it, at least enough to give it a try. Second, the reward and recognition systems must be in tune with the new behaviour. Third, people must also see colleagues they admire modelling it; and fourth, have the skills to do what is required of them. The punch line is that applying any one of these insights on its own doesn't have much impact. But managers now find that applying all four together greatly improves their chances. I mean four is better than one, what?

(The writer has been a student and observer of markets, people and organisations for over 35 years.)

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