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past. On revenues of $1.3 billion they were enjoying profits of around $65 million a
year on average. Not bad, but not good enough.

The boss of the corporation was an autocrat who had been a consultant before he
took on a real job. He decided that hiring consultants would cure what ailed him. He
hired first one, then most, of the large consultancy firms. His car parks were flooded
with consultants’ fancy cars, his top management were called upon to attend a series
of fruitless, frustrating consultant driven meetings that seriously affected their ability to
get any work done. The cost of this consultant mania was $75 million in fees, several
times that in lost executive productivity and the corporation went to the wall. (For
detailed analyses of what went wrong at Figgie and a salutary lesson for consultants
and executives alike you may want to take a look, as suggested above, at Dangerous
Company by O’Shea and Madigan and my own High Value Consulting.)

Ask yourself if you have the time and ability to manage consultants in your business,
because if you haven’t, assigning a big name, or even all the big names, may not be
enough to stave off disaster.

Had the Figgie management had the freedom and the nous to ask the right
questions, the corporation might well have prospered. As it was the questions were
not asked and the results have been well documented.

Danger signs

n Your consultants agree with everything that you say.
n Your consultants disagree with everything that you say.
n Your car park, designed for ten years of rapid business growth is

suddenly full of consultants’ BMWs.
n The consultants who seem to fill every available cubic inch of space

in your premises constantly demand meetings to decide: “where do
we go from here?”
n At every meeting with your consultants there are faces that you
have never seen before.
n The newcomers clearly know nothing about your business, but
they all want to speak at length and all have ideas to express.
n The lead consultant has not been seen for weeks or longer.
n Your consultants make all the presentations and speak mainly to
each other.
n You are receiving and checking so many consultant invoices that
you don’t have the time to check on the status of the project.
n New consultants come and go with such frequency that you never
learn their names.
n Work plans proliferate with such abandon that there is no time to
do the work.

When others have the answers 221