Month: May 2019

There is a fault line that runs through the consulting world. You can find it in every corner of it, from Fortune 100 strategy work and sector or function-specific work to startup-whispering and boutique design agency work.

You can even find it far from big organizations in domains like life coaching for stay-at-home housewives.

The fault line is live. It seems to propagate through completely new consulting domains as fast as they emerge.

This is the divide between the Positioning and People schools of consulting.

The essential difference between them is that the Positioning school takes its intellectual cues from economics, and uses formal models and numbers as the ultimate foundation for everything, while the People school takes its intellectual cues from sociology and psychology, and uses narrative as the ultimate foundation for everything.

If you think these big-picture schisms only matter at C-suite levels, for billion-dollar problems, think again. A life coach might adopt a spreadsheet-driven life optimization approach (this essay explains how you can do that) or one that looks more like psychoanalysis. Or take the newish field of crypto. The Bitcoin world is already exhibiting Positional school biases, while the Ethereum world is already exhibiting People school biases.

Why should you care?

You should care because great deal of energy has been building up along this fault line ever since the internet matured as an economic medium around 2000, destabilizing a 50-year old detente between these two schools. A detente that favored the Positioning school.

A war of ideas is coming, and you’re going to get caught up in it one way or another.

You should also care because because indie consulting is almost entirely People school. The converse is also true, though less strongly so: the People school is dominated by indie consultants (and smaller boutique agencies). So merely by identifying as a current or aspiring indie consultant, chances are, you’re at least unconsciously sympathetic to the governing philosophies of the People school, and unsympathetic to those of the Positioning school.

This means you’ve likely already picked a side, and it’s probably the People side.

Walter Kiechel’s excellent 2010 book, Lords of Strategy, has a good account of the history of the Positioning vs. People schism in the strategy consulting world, where the divide is clearest (here’s my review), so I won’t rehash that. Let’s skip right to the methodological differences between the two schools.

The Great Playbooks

This week’s application of the Bohr principle: The opposite of every Great Playbook is also a Great Playbook.

The Positioning school tries to operate by this Great Playbook:

1. Assume a relatively simple, predictable model of the players in a situation (example, rational actors, bounded rational actors, or legibly-biased rational actors).

2. Make some sort of standardized, relatively detailed, and data-driven map of the environment.

3. Place the simplified people models on the map.

4. Simulate possible futures, pick the best ones, and then use the player models to prescribe courses of action.

5. “Execute” the solution, and monitor the evolution of the situation with a feedback loop.

The People school tries to operate by this Great Playbook:

1. Take an inventory of actual named players in the situation, sorting them into rings by their level of agency and ability to influence the situation.

2. Make up a story to account for the recent history of the situation, using abductive reasoning, to uncover what the actual players are up to, and why.

3. Start “nudging” the situation to test your narrative, and start forming live, evolving judgments about the actual players: who matters, who doesn’t, how they align/don’t align, what futures they are working towards.

4. Pick the group of players you think is both right about the future, and capable of winning the future. Help them win. If such a group doesn’t exist, or you’re on the wrong side from them, exit the situation or switch sides.

5. Keep retelling the story and nudging the action according to the current narrative logic, monitoring the evolving situation for narrative violations and disruptions.

Of course, these are just broad predispositions. In practice, both schools muddy their own idealized playbooks a lot. Still, there is something like a grain to how problems get analyzed and solved by the two schools, an overall tendency. My playbook caricatures attempt to capture those dispositions and tendencies visible under actual case histories.

The reason there is usually a clear tendency one way or the other is that opposed Great Playbooks are based on opposed Great Truths, and people tend to swing towards one or the other.

The Great Truth of the Positioning school is that objective, external reality is everything, and subjective reality is just noise that gets in the way, but is easily tuned out.

The Great Truth of the People school is that subjective, internal realities (note the plural) are everything, and objective reality is a matter of evolving consensus and dissensus.

The resulting methodological divide between the schools is pretty unmistakeable.

The Methodological Divide

For the Positioning school, narratives, if used at all, are a matter of cosmetics and optics. A way to package, present, and influence using the conclusions of a one-size-fits-all playbook.

Positioning school practitioners are essentially wonks at heart, who believe in truth-by-spreadsheet, but sometimes make what they think of as concessions to human nature by telling stories.

For the People school, formal models and data, if used at all, are something like specialized forensic investigative tools. To be used when the process of repeatedly retelling the story while nudging it along runs into show-stopping mysteries and puzzles.

People school practitioners are essentially storytellers at heart, who believe in truth-by-narrative, but sometimes make what they think of as concessions to empiricist insecurities by including data and graphs.

These two Great Playbooks are in an eternal cosmic dance with each other.

It should be obvious that the former produces scalable, generalizable, somewhat universal solution templates for widespread problems, while the latter produces non-scalable, bespoke, hard-to-generalize solutions for specific situations.

Peak Positioning School

Great Truths are eternal and unfalsifiable. Great Playbooks never go away, they are simply rewritten for new eras through cycles of prominence and obscurity.

That doesn’t mean that all Great Truths are equally true at all times. When a Great Truth and its associated Great Playbook get too powerful, internal contradictions start to blow up. Then you get a collapse and recession, during which the opposed Great Truth rises from its own recession. So you have 2 yin-yang cycles of peaks and troughs.

The Positioning school has been on the ascendant for about 400 years, with a particularly rapid rise to near-total dominance in the second half of the 20th century. The People school, on the other hand, has been in recession for nearly as long, and is due for a resurgence.

Peak Positioning was probably sometime between 2001 and 2015. The output of the Positioning school has declined in quality if not quantity. It hasn’t had truly fresh big ideas to offer since the late 90s, and is running largely on momentum and fumes at this point.

The Lay of the Land

By my estimate, about 80% of the consulting industry (in terms of revenue and profits, but not headcount) is aligned formally or informally with the Positioning school.

It comprises relatively larger firms and institutions, including the Big 3 consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, BCG), the Romulan Empire, and Mordor. It scales all the way down to firms of a couple of hundred. Many indie consultants who are alums of larger organizations also run the Positioning school playbook.

The heart of the Positioning world is Harvard Business School, and the Pope of sorts is Michael Porter. Other leading intellectuals of the Positioning school include Emperor Palpatine, and Saruman. Institutionally, it is organized as what Kiechel calls a literary-industrial complex, comprising prestigious publications, conferences, and a busy book-producing cottage industry to document the never ending stream of structuralist models of the world. Positioning School people wear expensive suits and fly around in business class.

The People school is much more of a fragmented grab-bag world of small firms and indie consultants. Instead of a single heart, it has a distributed presence all over the world, with small, volunteer-staffed outposts in Silicon Valley, the University of Toronto, and Tatooine. Instead of a Pope, it has dozens of contending thought leaders, such as Karl Weick, Gareth Morgan, Albus Dumbledore, Yoda, and Lao Tze.

Though we have a few of our people at Positioning School strongholds, such as Clay Christensen at Harvard, institutionally the People school world comprises a shadowy network of personal relationships, stealthy organizations such as the Order of the Yak, and a vast, hidden warren of emails lists, slacks, twitter conversations, and messaging groups. We typically wear Henleys, rarely fly business class, and often orienteer cross-country to get from Point A to Point B.

Instead of a literary-industrial complex, we have something more like a background tradition of evolving oral history with many more contending ideas and no clear canon at the core. To quote from my review of Kiechel’s book:

[Lords of Strategy] quotes one study which found that 105 experts polled for “key ideas” from the [People] school produced 146 candidates, of which 106 were unique. With that much dissent, the “People” school doesn’t stand a chance in the commercial marketplace for retail business ideas (which is why, by my reasoning, it is automatically more valuable, since fewer people understand the ideas). By contrast, in the “Positioning” school, there are perhaps a couple of dozen key ideas that everybody agrees are important, which every MBA learns, and most non-MBA managers eventually learn through osmosis.

I wrote that in 2010, when the tide was just starting to turn in favor of the People school (which Kiechel notes in his book).

Springtime is coming for the People school, and winter for the Positioning school. So congrats, you picked the right side at the right time.

Be wary though, of getting all tribal about it. Being a consultant is about staying in a state of dynamic balance, evolving your own game with the shifting balance of power between Great Truths and Great Playbooks.

The Positioning school may be headed for an extended recession, but there will still be times when its Great Truth will prevail.

The People school may be ascendant and headed for dominance in the post-digital world, but there will still be times when its Great Truth will fail.

Think of this as the difference between riding a bicycle and sailing a sailboat. A bicycle in a state of balance is upright except when taking corners. But a sailboat might lean strongly in one direction or the other, depending on the direction of the prevailing wind, and the direction you need to go.

As this war of ideas unfolds, you want to be a sailboat, not a bicycle.

There is a saying in sales that customers buy only two things: happiness and solutions to problems. As an indie consultant, you’re very unlikely to be selling happiness (outside of certain types of speaking gigs where you might be the featured entertainment). Whatever the content of your services, whether it is corporate strategy, web design, M&A technical due diligence, survey design, market research, or copywriting, you are almost certainly selling solutions to problems.

And the problems external consultants solve always fall into two basic buckets: insufficient systematic confidence, and insufficient systematic doubt. If a problem does not fall into one of these two buckets, typically it will be solved by an employee, contractor, or a b2b product/service. Any consultants present will be seen as parasitic leeches to be exterminated rather than utilized more. A part of the problem rather than the solution.

Each of these two classes of problems can exist at two loci relative to the client: in their outer world or in their inner world. That gives us 4 basic types of clients (both individuals and organizations), and 4 kinds of consultant they typically hire, as shown in this 2×2. Take a look, tag yourself, and let’s unpack this.

The Four Types (Individual)

As a consultant, your identity and style are derived from your client’s identity and style: your persona is a shadow persona. So the four types of clients induce four different basic shadow identities and styles of consulting. Of course, no client is a pure or constant example of a single type, so no consultant is a pure or constant example of a single type of shadow.

1. The Explorer is a client who wants to build capacity for systematic doubt at an outer-world locus. They do this by constantly considering possibilities, alternative perspectives, and “refactorings” of world views. They tend to hire a sparring partner type of consultant who can constantly stress test their thinking and actions, and undermine their assumptions from unexpected new directions.

2. The Achiever is a client who wants to build systematic confidence at an outer-world locus. They typically hire consultants who take on roles as teachers or coaches, helping them develop specific functional capabilities and skills, such as public speaking, survey methodology, being more productive, architecting databases, running kickstarter campaigns, applying for government grants, or sourcing things from China.

3. The Integrator is a client who wants to build systematic confidence at an inner-world locus. Whether or not they choose to explicitly acknowledge it, they look for an element of therapy or life coaching in their relationships with consultants they hire. Whatever the nominal subject — better relationships at work, faster time to market, improved sales conversions — the actual focus for the Integrator client is always building a better integrated psyche.

4. The Tester is a client who wants to build systematic doubt at an inner-world locus. They do this by constantly testing their thinking, questioning their assumptions about themselves, and introspecting on their actions. Don’t mistake all the testing for an empiricist or exploratory orientation though. The Tester is primarily looking for meaning in a philosophical sense. The ambiguities and uncertainties they are probing are primarily within them. Their experiential experiments are about discovering themselves.

I estimate — and this is a pure guess based on anecdotal evidence and notes swapped with fellow consultants — that about half the demand for consulting services is from Integrators. The smallest market is Explorers. Achiever and Tester markets are in between. This is my read on individual demand (whether personal or situated within an organization).

The Four Types (Organizational)

The four types can also be used to anthropomorphically characterize organizational personalities in relation to the types of independent consultants they like to hire (large consulting firms serve a different kind of need, with a broader footprint, that doesn’t map well here).

This organizational personality is often, but not always, an extension of the personality of founders or powerful senior leaders (who may be long dead or retired).

1. The Explorer Organization tends to be future-oriented, and is likely to have people or departments devoted to activities such as scenario planning, futures, and market modeling (often called “strategy operations”). Explorer organizations hungrily consume forecasts and trend information, as well as historical analyses and industry reports. They believe they are curious organizations.

2. The Achiever Organization tends to be capabilities-focused, and is likely to have a well-developed and staffed training organization running various sorts of structured training and coaching programs for all employees right up to executive level. Achiever organizations love building out corporate habits-and-processes infrastructure ranging from Lean Six Sigma for everybody to media/PR training for senior executives. They believe they are winning organizations.

3. The Integrator Organization tends to be employee mental-health and “culture” focused. They love things like employee engagement programs, well-being initiatives, and diversity and inclusion programs. You will find a strong culture of listening habits inside such organizations: town-halls, manager-employee 1:1s, and effective communication training. They believe they are compassionate organizations.

4. The Tester Organization is a relatively new type, since it is not exactly easy for organizations (as opposed to individual employees) to be “philosophical.” Typically, in a Tester organization, you will find what Nassim Taleb calls a barbell organizational strategy: a strong focus on metaphysical values and manifestos one end, paired with a strong focus on data-driven skepticism and interrogation on the other. There is low patience for high-concept “middleware” between those two extremes. Within tester organizations, you will find habits of challenging and interrogating claims and data, strong belief in instrumentation and monitoring of operations, and a non-ironic, non-theater continuous dialogue around foundational values and principles. There will often be a culture of ritual adversarial thinking within. They believe they are rational organizations.

Of course, depending on how much they are actually winning or losing, the organizational self images may be more or less deluded in different ways. That’s where people like us come in, and where management jokes are born, but that’s a story for another day.

The market sizes represented by these 4 kinds of organizations for consulting services are hard to determine. I suspect, in terms of sheer population size, Achiever organizations are the most common. I’d guess as high as 70%, followed by Integrator, Explorer, and Tester organizations. At some point I might try to research this question.

The raw population statistics however, are misleading, since the actual market size needs to be weighted by:

1. The relative sizes of the organizations (revenue/market cap for private sector, operating budgets in the case of government/non-profit)

2. Profitability, which determines the discretionary funding available for hiring consulting support

3. Sectoral culture around hiring external consulting support versus relying on building out internal resources and capabilities.

For example, even though the Tester type organization is probably the rarest, the big tech companies are almost all Tester, tend to have tons of discretionary cash, but are almost always systematically averse to using that money to hire consultants (which makes getting hired by one of them a bit of a coup), relative to old economy organizations. They all love contractors though.

At the other extreme, individual government agencies at any level usually have very little discretionary money, but due to sheer scale there’s a lot in aggregate. But you have to run through layers of bureaucratic defenses and processes to get at any of it. To the point that there are meta-consultants who specialize in teaching small businesses and other consultants how to sell to the government.

Your Consulting Style

To determine your consulting style, ask yourself what is the easiest kind of deal for you to close, ideally via inbound leads. Do you find it easiest to convince an HR person to sponsor a training workshop on a particular skill, or do individual senior executives tend to reach out to you for a particular personalized need based on your blog posts?

I personally operate almost entirely in the top right quadrant, and almost entirely serving individual senior executives who reach out to me, rather than their organizations.

The organizations I have worked with so far have been a more mixed bag. I’ve worked with organizations of each of the four types.

The reason for the difference is subtle and worth understanding even if you typically serve one of the other quadrants. In general, the higher up in the organization your primary individual client or internal champion, the more their individual personality will override the organization’s personality. An Explorer type middle-manager in an HR department within an overall Achiever organization is unlikely to have the influence to find the budget to hire you for a scenarios-and-futures workshop. But an Explorer type Senior VP can pull it off, even if it goes against the organizational grain.

Also note a subtlety: outside and inside are relative. An “outer world” problem for an executive can be an “inner world” problem for the organization, and how you operate depends on the role you’ve been cast into in the drama: working for the organization as a whole, or for the organization as seen from the perspective of a particular executive.

So if you find it easiest to sell to middle managers, then your style is determined by the typical organization type you sell into, and the individuals you end up working with will be a mixed bag.

If you find it easiest to sell to senior executives or individual clients, then your style is determined by the specific individuals who tend to hire you, and the organizations you work with will be a mixed bag.

Take a shot at plotting yourself along both dimensions of the 2×2. Here’s my self-assessment.

• Along the confidence/doubt dimension, I’m so bad at serving people and organizations looking for systematic confidence, if I could reliably detect them up front, I’d run away every time.

• Along the inner/outer dimension, I’m generally better at outer-world locus consulting than inner-world. It’s not that I’m uninterested in others’ inner lives; I’m just uninterested/ill-equipped to help with the doubt/confidence dimension of inner life, which is where most people need the help.

Note that the same person or organization may have needs (and the money to pay for support in) all four quadrants. When I started eight years ago I was surprised by the percentage of clients who also hired people in other quadrants besides me. Now I expect it. Some spend thousands of dollars a month on an entire support suite. Relying on external consulting support is an operational orientation.

That said, the client’s personality generally favors one or the other of the quadrants, especially for individuals.

Classifying Your Client

How can you tell which kind of potential client you are looking at? Here’s a handy set of tells that work both at individual and organizational levels, mutatis mutandis:

1. The tell of the Explorer in Need is a sense of staleness and being in a rut evident in ways of talking, distractibility, and arbitrary pursuit of Next Shiny New Things. The situation need a dose of freshness and a shake-up of perspectives, and they know it, but don’t quite know how to address it.

2. The tell of the Achiever in Need is energy being dissipated “random acts of X” where they are thrashing and improvising behaviors in an area where skilled and disciplined behavioral precedents exist. Marketing is particularly full of “random acts of marketing” clients.

3. The tell of the Integrator in Need is endemic mental health issues across activities. There is too much anxiety. There are communication problems everywhere. Relationships are fraying and falling apart all over the places. Morale is plummeting.

4. The tell of the Tester in Need is toxic arguments that go nowhere, disagreements over facts and data that get weaponized along lines of control, big ego conflicts, and ideological battles. Behaviors are driven more by the need to feed ongoing beefs than accomplishing missions. In an organizational context, monitoring, instrumentation, and data governance are heavily politicized.

Notice something? In each case, you classify the organization by looking for a locus of either chaotic or dissipative energy expenditure in futile ways. That futility is your opportunity.

An important point to keep in mind, incidentally, is that both individuals and organizations can have two polar opposite reasons for hiring a consultant: to build on a strength, or to mitigate a weakness. And it might surprise you to hear this, but it is vastly more common for both individuals and organizations to be driven by a growth motivation (working on strengths) in retaining consulting support.

It usually takes a crisis situation to drive an individual or organization to seek external help for a weakness. The “crisis gig” economy is a whole distinct economy in its own right.

In each of the four cases, and whether the motive is growth-oriented or deficiency-oriented, the way the consultant addresses both the symptoms and root causes is by injecting a much-needed dose of disinterested systematicity in the right place.

I’ll cover that concept in a future post.

Previously on The Art of Gig

May 15: Making it interesting: Pricing for interestingness (subscribers only).

May 8: Always Be Strategizing: Every gig is a strategy gig (subscribers only).

May 2: The Shadow’s Journey: Every consultant has an origin story (subscribers only).

April 30: 42 Great Imperatives: The one true doctrine for all indie consultants (public)

<< Always Be Strategizing| Into the Yakverse index | The Two Shadows of the Hero >>

In indie consulting, some days are all about playing with fancy gadgets like strategometers, or jumping out of helicopters to make emergency deliveries of thought leadership, or hanging out with mystic monks. But most days are just about two minds quietly getting into deep subtleties over coffee. When it is two consultants getting into it, things can get particularly meta.

One such day in 2016, I was sitting across from young Bernie Anscombe in a coffee shop. He was not very happy with me. He had asked to buy me coffee to get some advice on some of his gigs that seemed stuck, and I had just offered him a diagnosis no consultant ever wants to hear, especially from another consultant.

“All your problems are due to one thing: your hourly rate is too high.”

Bernie is the brother of Arnie Anscombe, whom some of you have heard me talk about: the hotshot young consultant I’ve run into in several gigs, who does data-hackery magic with SQL, and sometimes manages to steal clients from me.

Still, I have no beef with the Anscombe boys. Though they make me look old-fashioned with my 2x2s and occasional Excel spreadsheets, so far I’ve managed to hold my own. The way I figure, if a client thinks SQL is the answer, they’re not asking any questions I can help with anyway. It is a market I’m happy to cede to the millennial young ‘uns with their software-eaten transhuman brains.

The Anscombes are an ancient consulting clan. Consulting is a calling that tends to run in families, with secrets handed down from generation to generation. Some consulting clans claim to go back to Ancient Egypt, and claim Pharaohs among their earliest clients. The Anscombe clan is not quite that ancient, but their history does go back to at least the Crusades, according to family lore.

Legend has it that the clan got started when Rexthor de Anscombe, a medieval French dog walker, sold a Capability Maturity Model to the Knights Templars back in 1306. When King Philip IV of France went took a torch to the Templar organization soon after, many blamed de Anscombe’s advice, so he had to flee for his life to England, where later generations of Anscombes slowly repaired the clan’s reputation and became known for their fine hand-crafted 2x2s and capability-maturity models. In the 19th century, the family migrated to the US and set up shop on the East Coast. Anscombes reputedly worked with all of the Robber Baron 100 companies.

Yeah, I’m a bit of a consulting history nerd I guess.

Bernie and Arnie, as it happens, are two members of a set of identical quadruplets, all of whom are indie consultants. The family has always frowned upon corporatization as a degenerative disease, and raises its scions to take pride in indie free agency. Young male Anscombes (yeah, they’re a bit patriarchal) are thrown out of their parents’ homes at age 14 and told not to come back until they’ve accrued at least 10 billable hours. It’s a harsh system, but it has produced some fine consulting talent over the ages.

All four, Arnie, Bernie, Chuck, and David — the Anscombe boys, or Anscombe Quartet, as they’re known along the Acela corridor — are regarded as up-and-comers in East Coast style data-driven gigwork. They can be hard to tell apart, but once you get to know them, they’re as different as four people who look exactly alike can be.  

Arnie’s the most established of the four, a relentless hustler who eats and dreams multiple regressions, but Bernie’s the one I like the most, which is why I always say yes when he hits me up for coffee. He’s got soul in the game.

Though he mostly toes the conservative family line, Bernie occasionally plays the family rebel, flirting with West-Coast style narrative consulting methods that would make his ancestors roll in their graves. Alone among his siblings, he dabbles in machine learning, and unlike them, calls himself a data science consultant rather than a statistician. I think he seeks me out for mentorship mostly to annoy his family. An indie consulting blue-blood taking advice from a first-generation upstart descended from paycheck types.

At the moment though, young Bernie was not happy with my mentoring. He looked at me coldly, like I’d slapped him across the face. 

“What do you mean my hourly rate is too high? I’m logging at least 20 hours a week at this rate. It’s not like it’s a vanity rate you know… people are actually paying me at this rate.”

I waved the thought away, “Not at all. Not at all. I’m not suggesting that. You charge more than I do, and you log more hours than I do. Whatever your problems, pulling in the money isn’t one of them.”

“And not just from family connections, mind you; I’m getting more inbound leads from random people on Twitter than through the family. And I’m constantly saying no to gigs too. I could log a hundred hours a week if I hustled a bit more like my brother Arnie.”

“Absolutely. Perfect seller’s market. Storm of demand meets pedigreed Anscombe supply. Product-market fit. Congrats on hitting that.”

“Exactly. I have a high-demand skill, and a strong tailwind, why shouldn’t I charge what the market will bear? Why should I leave money on the table, no offense, like you seem to?”

“Why shouldn’t you, indeed?”

“Maybe I will. Maybe I should go higher and cut back on my hours. Everybody else is telling me to go higher. You’re the only one telling me I charge too much.”

“So double your rate and do 10 hours a week. Or 5x it and do 4 hours a week. Live the 4-hour work-week dream. It certainly sounds like you could ride the demand curve anywhere you like, which is a luxury few of us enjoy. What’s stopping you?”

Bernie looked uncomfortable. “Now, hold on, that’s not what I’m driving at…It’s not the quantity of hours, but the quality…”

“So solve for 4 quality hours a week.”

“Well, like they say, you need the quantity to get to the quality. I don’t always agree with the family, but we Anscombes aren’t in it for free rides. We take pride in actually doing the hard work and putting in the hours needed to help make history.”

“Quality of hours, not quantity, and quality follows quantity, help make history, exactly! Couldn’t have put it better myself! In fact, I’m going to steal that line. Hold on, I gotta make a note of that…”

I made a little show out of pulling out my notebook and making a note.  Note-taking is the great status leveler in all consulting conversations, including mentoring conversations between consultants. It signals I too am learning from you, see? The gesture seemed to mollify young Bernie a little.

“…Is it though?” I asked, shutting my notebook with ritual deliberation, and putting my pen down.

“Is what it?”

“Is the quantity of hours leading to quality hours? Are you getting, like 2 quality hours for every 20 you bill?”

“I guess not. I mean, I’m getting all this inbound, and more work than I can handle, but none of the gigs is actually, you know… interesting. And that’s what I want to solve for. I’m not overworked or underpaid, I’m underpurposed.”

I opened my notebook again, “…not overworked, underpurposed… you’re on a roll today. I’m stealing that one too.”

“Thanks, I guess. Can’t recall where I heard that line.”

“…So underpurposed… you find yourself wondering whether you should just take a regular job to find purpose, huh? Hang with all the missionary types with cathedrals in their eyes?”

“Well don’t tell my family that, but yeah. I guess I’ve always been the black sheep of the family. I think they already half-expect me to dishonor the clan name by taking a paycheck job. No Anscombe in history has ever had a paycheck job.”

“Your family is right on that one. That’s just grass-is-greener thinking. If you can’t find quality hours as a consultant, you’re unlikely to find them as an employee either. So what makes your hours low-quality? Why isn’t quantity leading to quality?”

He considered this. “I like the actual core of the work. You know, diving into the data, trying out models… it’s putting it into glossy TPS reports and stuff, that’s what I hate.”

“So why not stop doing that? Do the fun part, and let them write their own damn TPS reports? I mean, isn’t that why you don’t want to be an employee? They’re the ones with health plans and job security. Let them earn it by writing the TPS reports. You and I live dangerously so we can have some actual fun between cash crunches.”

“That won’t fly. The reports are what they’re paying for…. Though it’s not like they really read them. Once the executive summary says what they want it to say, they’re happy.”

“Exactly! And they forward the reports with their comments to their VPs, right? Proposing to do what they wanted to all along?”

He looked depressed. “Yeah. It’s just the usual cover-your-ass fodder my family’s been churning out forever I guess. Did you know, one of my 17th century ancestors wrote a report for a pope titled, Dealing with the Protestant Disruption using Logarithms? I’m doing basically the same thing in 2019, just with machine learning.”

“Fascinating family history there, but to get back to you, how might changing your hourly rate change the quality of your billable hours?”

“Yeah, yeah, I see what you’re getting at. It would be weird, but I suppose if  I told them I’m cutting my rate in half, but that I wouldn’t do the report writing, that might fly. But it seems wrong somehow, lowering my rates when the demand is up.”

“Demand for machine learning, or demand for reports with ‘machine learning’ in the title proposing the same ideas they’ve been pitching since 1988?”

“I get it, I get it. No need to rub it in. They’re just using me to externalize their risks of riding a fad.”

“Yes.”

“I’m playing in the shoot-the-messenger market.”

“Yes.”

“If it works, they win. If it doesn’t they can try again with the next fad.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m just riding the fad to pay the bills. I get it.”

“Do you?”

“My brother Chuck, all he does is feed that beast. Though somehow he manages to always cover his own ass as well, and never actually gets shot.”

“So what’s the opposite of being a disposable messenger?”

Bernie sighed. “Umm… a…pump-and-dump artist like my brother David I suppose. I have quite the family. Arnie’s a mercenary hustler solving for money, Chuck is a professional punching bag pretending to be a sparring partner, and David’s a pure predator sucking the marrow out of clueless middle managers selling them shit they don’t know they don’t need.”

“What does that make you?”

“The poet in the family I suppose. The one who keeps asking if there’s more to the game.”

“And is there perhaps a poetic hourly rate here?”

“Is there poetry in consulting at all? Either the client is dumping risk on you, or you’re dumping risk on the client. Externalize or be the externality.”

“C’mon! The ancient Anscombe clan didn’t survive since the Crusades without some poetry to its story! Are you and your client necessarily on opposite sides of a zero-sum risk hot-potato game? You can think of no way to get on the same side as your client? Is the game really that bleak?”

“Why don’t you drop this Socratic shtick and just spell it out?”

I gave him an injured look. I like my Socratic shtick. 

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll give you a formula: price to partner, raise with risk. It’s not really about pricing too high or too low, but pricing your time right to solve for interesting. Want me to break that down?”

“Yeah, that sounds clever but I don’t know what it means.”

“That’ll cost you another cappuccino…”

Bernie raised his eyebrows at me, “What?”

“You heard me. Touch of sugar in the cappuccino. And I’ll take a cookie too. Oatmeal raisin.”

Bernie shrugged, stood up and went to the counter to order. I checked my email and twitter, shot off a shitpost, and began idly scanning the crowd. The guy at the next table seemed vaguely familiar. He’d been glancing at us talking throughout. I couldn’t quite place him though. Oh well, it’s not like we’d been discussing NDA’ed state secrets.

Bernie returned with fresh cappuccinos for both of us, and two cookies.

I took a sip, and a bite of my cookie.

“Mmm. Good cookie. Where were we? Ahh yes. Price-to-partner means you set an hourly rate high enough that the client can see you as a partner in the risk rather than mere contract labor, but low enough that the client is not tempted to cast you in the role of a pure risk-sink, being paid to take a hit of some sort.”

“And raise to risk?”

“Raise with risk, not raise to risk. Raise to risk means you are moving risk around, or worse, adding risk by changing the price tag of the project rather than the substance of it. Raise with risk means you price your services in proportion to the risk level of the project itself. I’m not talking negotiating a cut of the rewards by the way. I’m talking pricing your services now in proportion to the rewards the client may enjoy later.”

“So if I want to charge more…”

“…You have to pick clients who are taking bigger risks, or encourage your current clients to do bolder things…”

“But what if they can’t afford it? Like an unfunded startup.”

“Then you look elsewhere. That’s why you’re a consultant. You look for the intersection of interesting and has a budget. And some places, there’s no elbow room to make the formula work. But there’s a lot of interesting in the world to choose from.”

“Price to partner, raise with risk, hmm.” Bernie turned the phrase over in his mind, trying it on for size.

“It is a formula for bringing your story and the client’s story into narrative harmony. Mere incentive alignment is shallow play. Narrative harmony is what anthropologists call deep play.”

“How can I tell whether I’m being paid more to absorb more of the risk, or paid more to partner in a bigger risk?”

“If I might rephrase your question, you’re really asking how you can tell whether you’re in shallow play mode or deep play mode. Well, have you ever had a client reject your advice?”

“Of course. Many times.”

“Then tell me this. When they reject your advice, assuming you think it’s good advice and the problem is with them, is it a failure of their imagination, or a failure of their nerve? Do they not get it, or do they lack the guts for it?”

“I guess… mostly they don’t get it. Or rather, they don’t care whether they get it or not. So long as I tell them I get it.”

“Then you’re a risk sink. You absorb their risks of riding a fad.”  

I could see him visibly struggle with this thought. He did not like it. I gave it a final shot.

“Think about the phrase, let’s make it interesting. Do you think that’s about imagination or nerve?”

But Bernie was done sparring. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it…”

I grinned at him, “Yeah, we all know what that means. That’s fine. I already have my cookie!”

Bernie smiled weakly at me, and got up.

“Well, thanks for the conversation.”

I sat there for a few minutes after Bernie left, meditatively sipping my cappuccino and nibbling at my cookie. Sometimes you get through, sometimes you don’t. So it helps if you make sure the coffee is always fresh, and that there are cookies.

Just as I was about to get up, the guy at the next table, the one who’d been glancing at us curiously throughout, strolled over.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing. That was an interesting conversation. Do you think your young friend will do it? Try charging less to make things interesting?”

I drained my cappuccino and shook my head, “No.”

“Why not?”

“The hourly rate, it’s The Number for us consultants. And if it’s not always going up, it’s hard to tell if you’re winning. It’s hard to ask a client for more money, but it’s nearly impossible to talk yourself into accepting less in pursuit of mere interestingness.”

“That seems wrong.”

I shrugged philosophically. “He chose money over interestingness. In consulting, a mistake nearly everyone makes.”

The guy smiled and nodded appreciatively. “That’s a good line, I’m going to steal that. I’m Frank Underwood by the way.” He pulled out a notebook to make a note.

“Nice to meet you Frank, here’s my card if you’re ever looking for a consultant.”

<< Always Be Strategizing|  Into the Yakverse index | The Two Shadows of the Hero >>

<< The Shadow’s Journey | Into the Yakverse index | Making it Interesting >>

Every true consultant is a strategy consultant. It’s not a title. It’s a state of mind.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re delivering SEO suggestions for a website to a middle manager, sparring free-form with a Fortune 100 CEO, or providing career coaching to a star individual contributor at a startup. If you’re not participating in shaping the organization’s strategy in some form through your client, you’re not a consultant. You’re merely an ersatz employee, without job security or benefits, to whom some work has been outsourced: a contractor.

Why would you want to participate in strategy?

What is so rewarding about strategy work that you might even want to give up job security and financial rewards to participate in it? Why is even a low-paid consultant sometimes better positioned to participate in strategy than a high-paid senior employee with an impressive executive title? Why might you even want to pick lower-paying gigs over higher-paying ones simply because a strategy component is present? Why does McKinsey fight to hang on to a “strategy” brand, and why do upstart IT firms and design agencies strive to claim a piece of the strategy pie?

Before you get to all those interesting questions, you must first answer a tricky question: how do you even know when you’re doing strategy?

The best answer is: using a curious device known as the strategometer. It looks like a battered wrist watch from the seventies, but instead of a clock dial, it has a blank 2×2 display with no annotations. It does one thing and one thing only: when it senses that you’re really doing strategy, a small crystal in the top-right quadrant lights up green.

I’d estimate there are only a few dozen strategometers left in the world, though it is rumored that there were once thousands in circulation. Nobody knows where they came from, or how they work. Some say the green indicator crystals are actually mystical gems that sense strategic élan vital in the body. That they were once set in neck pendants worn by members of the Order of the Yak. Others claim they were originally crafted by Swiss watchmakers after the Napoleonic wars, for use by political leaders through the century of European realpolitik.

And still others say both those stories are bullshit, and that strategometers are the product of a top-secret Cold War biometrics project, aimed at improving the strategic intuitions of senior military and intelligence officers.

Nobody knows for sure, and the remaining few are so priceless, nobody wants to do a teardown to find out.

The few remaining strategometers are passed on from consultant to consultant. Each one has a name, and an individual secret history that’s part of the consulting lore passed on from one bearer to the next. Some supposedly have legends attached going back hundreds or even thousands of years, which is perhaps evidence in favor of the older origin stories.

Interestingly, it is rumored that only indie consultants may possess one, and that they don’t work if people with paychecks try to use them. One even supposedly exploded in 1994 when a McKinsey partner tried to wear it. I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard there’s a McKinsey DarkOps team devoted to tracking down and destroying all remaining strategometers.

The only time I ever saw one was when an old veteran consultant friend of mine, let’s call her the Ancient One, let me try hers on in 2012. This was back when I was starting out. Her strategometer, she said, was known as Kongō Gumi, and was one of the oldest ones, at 1500 years old.

“How does it work?” I asked, strapping it on.

“Do you know the story of the three stonecutters?”

“Uhh… Yeah of course. Consulting 101. Drucker. We all know that story.”

“Tell me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Humor me. It helps the strategometer calibrate.”

“Fine. Well, there’s this guy walking around, and he sees three stone-cutters working. He asks them what they’re doing. The first one says he’s earning a living, the second one says he’s doing the best job of stonecutting in the world, and the third says, with a missionary glow in his eye, ‘I’m building a cathedral’. And the moral of the story is…”

The Ancient One interrupted, “Yeah yeah, the first one is okay, the third one is the true leader, and the middle one is the problem. Let’s skip the moral.”

“Okay…”

“What I want you to tell me is this: assuming they all offered to pay you the same, which one of them would you rather have as a client, and why?”

I stared at her and then thought for a minute. It didn’t seem like a trick question.

“Uhh… the third one I suppose,” I said finally.

“Why?”

“I guess, because there would be an opportunity to work at a strategic level, on an end-to-end vertically integrated cathedral business model.”

The Ancient One smiled. “Is the strategometer green yet?”

I looked. “No,” I said.

“Try again.”

“Well, I suppose the second one wouldn’t actually be that bad to work with. Maybe ‘best stonecutter’ should be understood as best-in-class horizontal player for a component…”

“Go on…”

“And come to think of it, the first guy isn’t that bad either. He’d be the low-cost commodity volume supplier in the market. That’s it, isn’t it? All three are worth working with, depending on what you want to learn.”

I looked down. Still no green. I still wasn’t being strategic enough.

“Here’s a hint,” the Ancient One said, “You’re thinking too grand. Think personal. In terms of your billing models for example.”

I pondered this. “Well, you said they’d all pay the same, but I suppose they’d have different expectations and preferred engagement models. I’d say the first stonecutter would probably want a project-style engagement model with clearly defined deliverables and deadlines, and an upfront ROI estimate. He’d probably talk about bang for the buck. Sounds awful, frankly.”

The Ancient One smiled slightly.

“The second one would get all clever about incentives, and spout profound-sounding BS about skin in the game and ‘measurable value-add’. He’d probably offer a performance bonus based on pre-defined quality tests and speed of delivery. Okay, that all sounds awful too.”

The Ancient One continued to smile and say nothing.

“And the third one… hmm… I suspect he’d be fine with simple hourly billing based on deciding he trusts me, and we’d figure out the what, when, and how as we went along. Yeah, that’s definitely the one. Final answer. I’d work for the third guy.”

“Why…?”

“I suppose because the greater the ambiguity and complexity, the more an over-structured engagement model gets in the way, and the more mutual trust between client and consultant matters. He’d trust me not to pad my hours, I’d trust him to keep things interesting and send enough billable hours my way to make it worthwhile for me.”

“And why is that important?” 

Enlightenment dawned.

“A more free-form engagement model means more participation in strategy!”

I glanced at the strategometer. Still no green.

“You’re almost there,” said the Ancient One, encouragingly.

Enlightenment dawned again (if you work in consulting, you must get used to enlightenment dawning multiple times an hour).

“Okay, how’s this. A missionary client navigates by a sense of what’s priceless and is willing to trust the serendipity of a free-form engagement with a consultant they find stimulating, to truly try and get to fresh insight, instead of getting too clever with the bean-counting, expectations structuring, and incentives. They acknowledge the fundamental ambiguity in the situation, and they embrace the uncertainty in the likely outcomes.”

“Boil it down!” said the ancient one, rapping my knuckles with her iPhone.

“They basically bet on the relationship!”

I looked down. The strategometer was glowing green.

The Ancient One smiled, and said, “I’d like that back now please.”

“When I first tried this test 30 years ago,” she remarked, as she strapped it back on, “I got to green by arguing that walking towards the light of a missionary purpose leads to the client casting the strongest shadow. The strongest shadow gives the consultant the most room to work with.”

“That’s fascinating, I’m going to steal that” I said. “A much more psychologically subtle analysis than mine.”

“We were much more into Jung back in the 80s,” she said. “But you did well; very few consultants get to green on the first attempt. And I’ve known veterans who’ve tried dozens of times but never gotten to green.”

“Does anyone ever get to green arguing for the first or second stonecutter?”

“Lemme put it this way. You’re the tenth person to I’ve seen get to green arguing for the third stonecutter. I’ve seen two get there arguing for the first stonecutter. I’ve seen none get there arguing for the second stonecutter…”

“That doesn’t mean it’s impossible though, does it?”

“But it is certainly suggestive, don’t you think? Well anyway, my helicopter is waiting, so I must rush. All the best with your next gig!”

I’m hoping she decides to pass Kongō Gumi on to me when she retires, but it may not be up to her. They say each strategometer chooses its new bearer when the previous bearer retires or dies. I’m not sure how that works. Maybe I’ll get a chance to find out some day.

As you navigate your own consulting career, perhaps one day you’ll run into a veteran wearing an oddly unfashionable watch.

Do a double take.

If it’s a strategometer, try to talk them into letting you try it on. They’ll know how to spar over a suitable parable or case study with you to calibrate your strategic intuition. And they may put you on the shortlist for possibly being the next bearer. Truth be told though, the really experienced ones are so in tune with their own strategic intuitions, they know when the strategometer is glowing green without even looking.

Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, those who bear the few remaining strategometers need them the least.

But realistically, most of us will never own a strategometer. Which means we have to rely on just an inner sense of when we’re genuinely participating in strategy, when we’re participating in some sort of bullshit theater or CYA operation, and when we’re merely playing contractor.

Simplicity in the engagement model — and an hourly billing model is as simple as it gets — often creates the most conducive environment for that to happen. It’s not that other, more complex models can’t get you involved in strategy, but the chances are lowered with every bit of added structure and incentive engineering.

Why would you want to participate in strategy? Is it the status? The money? The claim to a label guaranteed to attract contempt and hostility rather than esteem from many? We will explore the why in a future issue.

But in the meantime, trust me. Whether you charge $25/hour or $25,000/day, and whatever you’re delivering, at whatever client organizational level, you should Always Be Strategizing. And the best way to try and make that happen is to choose somewhat missionary types to work for (when you can choose; because there will always be times when you can’t). With an hourly billing engagement model.

Burn that idea into your brain. You’ll thank me later.

<< The Shadow’s Journey | Into the Yakverse index | Making it Interesting >>

<< Prelude: III | Into the Yakverse index | Always Be Strategizing >>

Employees have resumes and job titles, but consultants, like senior executives and entrepreneurs, have origin stories. Even the lowly $20/h ones have origin stories. But unlike senior executives and entrepreneurs, we are not ersatz superheroes within the mythos of the business world. Nor are we even regular heroes, villains, or antiheroes.

We are shadows. 

And we have shadow origin stories that begin, like superhero origin stories, with some sort of horrifying accident. The shadow’s journey though, unlike the hero’s journey, doesn’t end in either triumph or tragedy.

In fact, the shadow’s journey does not end at all.

At some point, it simply becomes billable. Living on billable time is a curious and shadowy existential state that we’ll say a lot more about in future issues, but let us talk about origin stories.

In my case, the accident happened late one night in 2010, while I was working at Xerox. On my way out of the building, I saw what I thought was a small blank 2×2 scribbled on the whiteboard of a conference room. Unable to resist, I grabbed a marker and reached out to fill it in. 

BAM! I felt a sharp pinch, and the 2×2 scuttled away and disappeared under the door.

Turns out, the 2×2 was actually a spider that had lost 4 of its legs after being trapped in a projector during an 8-hour strategy meeting, and had also turned radioactive from the RGB radiation.

When I woke up the next day, after a feverish, sleepless night, and got to my office, I found, to my horror, that I had gone organizationally blind. 

I could no longer see the organization that everybody else clearly inhabited. Everybody was behaving like they could see all the familiar realities of organizational life — org charts, titles, boundaries, protocols. So clearly things were still normal, except I’d gone entirely blind to things that were clearly still there. Things I too had been able to see, as clearly as anyone else, just the day before.

Now I could see people, desks, chairs, whiteboards, and documents, but I couldn’t see the organization itself. And this was a huge liability because, as a middle manager, it was my job to believe in the organization.

Yes, you heard that right. The job of the middle manager is to believe in the organization. A futures consultant friend of mine predicts that Electric Monks running deep-learning based belief engines will soon replace all middle managers by 2040, but until that happens, middle managers will do much of the believing-in-organizations necessary to keep them running.

But back in 2010, I was in trouble. I couldn’t do my job. I started saying truly embarrassing things in meetings, like “But why??”

So I had to leave in disgrace.

I bought myself a few henleys, a pair of distressed jeans, and a tactical backpack. Then I grew a stubble and went off to Bhutan to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life, now that I was organizationally blind and unable to do the only thing I knew how to do.

For several weeks, I got nowhere. Every night, tossing and turning in my cheap hotel room, I had nightmares about 4-legged spiders crawling over the walls. I spent the days wandering in the hills, bleary-eyed.

And then one day, after a long, hard, hike in the mountains, the nightmares suddenly stopped.

Quietly, and without ceremony or flashes of profound enlightenment (that’s for heroes, not shadows), the nightmares were gone. The 2×2-spider demons had retreated, and the fever had lifted. And just like that, I had turned billable (though I did not know it yet). 

I was able to sleep a dreamless, restful sleep for the first time in weeks. 

When I woke up the next morning, I found myself reaching for my notebook and drawing a 2×2.  Then another one. Then another one. 

For the next three days, I lived a steady, serenely energized life, sleeping soundly and dreamlessly at nights, spending mornings filling my notebook with the most poignantly insightful 2x2s I have ever seen, and afternoons practicing martial arts.

Sadly, I lost the notebook during a hectic covert gig in Budapest a few months later.

Those were the best 2x2s I have ever made, and I’ll never top them. They captured sublime answers to all the questions I had then, or have had to ask (or been asked) since. Now, I must painfully reconstruct the 2x2s I need out of dim memories of those in The Lost Notebook. When I come up with a particularly good one, I think to myself, “this is almost good enough to be from The Lost Notebook.”

Anyhow, on the fourth day, my notebook was full, but my pockets, after paying for what would be my last cup of yak butter tea, were empty.

And so there I was, sitting in a countryside tea shop, sipping my awful yak butter tea, and wondering how to make money, when a monk came in. I hadn’t seen him at the tea shop before.

He sat down across me and motioned to the waiter for a cup of tea. Then he smiled at me, and looked inquiringly at my open notebook. I shrugged and slid it across to him.

He sat there, sipping his tea, and gravely reviewing my notebook, for several minutes. Finally, he closed it and slid it back across to me. After a moment of thought, he took a rough-hewn silver coin out of his robe, and slid it halfway across the table, between us.

“Is that for me?” I enquired cautiously.

The monk nodded, with a slight smile.

“For my notebook?”

He shook his head.

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

In response, the monk got up and headed out the door, pausing at the doorstep to look back at me over his shoulder, and holding up a second coin for me to see.

I downed the rest of my butter tea, picked up my coin and notebook, and followed. A 50% advance was good enough for me.

We walked a mile. Though I was in decent shape from my weeks of martial arts practice and hiking, I found myself huffing and puffing to keep up with him. Somehow, he managed to stay several steps ahead of me with no apparent effort. 

Eventually, we arrived at a medium-sized monastery on a hill. Young monks were doing yard work. Through a window, I could see some sort of grand abbot monk in a special hat chatting on a smartphone. Christian Bale and Liam Neeson were practicing sword-fighting on the roof. A few motorcycles were parked in front. All in all, a regular modern monastery.

We walked around to the back, where there were a dozen enclosed pens, each with a large shaggy yak in it. The monk indicated one of the yaks, handed me a pair of shears, and stepped back, settling down beneath a tree. 

“You want me to…?” I began, but he had already closed his eyes and was deep in meditation. 

I got to it.

It took me two hours to shave that yak. It was a big yak. Fortunately, it was also a good-tempered yak that did not appear to mind being shaved. It was wholesome, tiring work, and it left me exhausted.

When I was done, I stepped back, admired my handiwork for a minute, and then walked back to where the monk was still meditating. Or, as it turned out, asleep. I shook him awake.

“Done!” I said.

He got up, went over to the yak, and inspected it and the pile of wool next to it. He seemed satisfied. He reached into his robe, pulled out the second silver coin, and handed it to me.

I said, “Good doing business with you. How about I come back tomorrow and shave another one?”

At this the monk looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. His slight smile broadened into a huge grin, and he spoke for the first time.

“We don’t have the budget right now, but circle back next quarter.”

And with those words, something terrifying happened. The monastery, the pens, the yaks, the other monks, the abbot in the window, all vanished, dissolving into black smoke. 

My monk — I suppose I should call him my first client — vanished last. He vanished quite slowly, beginning with his sandals, and ending with the grin.

I felt anxiously in my pockets. The two silver coins were still there.

I examined the coins more closely. Each had a yak on the front, and an inscription I couldn’t read on the back. It wasn’t Tibetan or any language I recognized.

Many years later, I met an expert who consulted on obscure languages, and showed him my coins.

“Where did you get these?” he asked, with a curious look on his face. “They’re not rare, but they’re not very common either. I haven’t seen one of these outside of private collections for years.”

“Why, what are they?”

“They are called yakbucks. They have no documented provenance. I’ve only heard rumors about them.”

“What rumors?”

“They are supposedly coins from an ancient global order of… well…”

“…assassins?”

He chuckled. “You’ve been watching too many John Wick movies. No, an order of what I suppose we’d call management consultants today. It was called the Order of the Yak. Died out in the 18th century I think.”

“Makes sense I found them in Bhutan then. What are they worth?”

“The history is all speculation and rumor, so probably not much, and there’s a fair number of them around. They just have curiosity value. You might get a few hundred dollars from a collector if you’re lucky. But you should probably just hang on to them. Good conversation starters. And maybe they’ll appreciate in value if anyone ever digs up some verifiable history on them.”

“Can you read the inscription on the back?”

“Sort of. It is in a curious language called Yaka, invented by 16th century Silk Road traders. Some people claim that’s the origin of the English word yakking.”

“And what does it say?”

“I’m not 100% sure, but I think it says, First you pay for your beliefs. Then your beliefs pay for you.” 

It would take me years of yakking to learn what that meant.

That was my first gig. I still have the two yakcoins. In fact, I have many more, buried in a few secret stashes around the world. And as for the Order of the Yak, let me just say the consultant on obscure languages was wrong. It did not die out in the 18th century.

If you build a career in indie consulting, you too may one day earn some yakbucks. Some people say you’re not a real consultant until you’ve earned some yakbucks. Perhaps they are right.

Yakbucks can’t be spent like regular money, but they are more than mere curiosities. They are worthless without deep knowledge of the art of gig. But the more you know, the more valuable they become. And curiously, the more yakbucks you earn, the more real dollars you earn as well. Perhaps there is some sort of mystic connection between he two. So look out for them and collect them when you can. They are silver, and about an inch across. You generally have to wander off the beaten path of gigs a bit to find them.

Those weeks in Bhutan proved to be the turning point. After my encounter with the monk, I made some regular money doing some thought leadership for a local travel agency, bought a ticket back home, incorporated my business as an LLC, and went into business. Shortly after, I found my first normie client, who paid me in dollars.

I had turned billable.

So long as I was getting paid, I found I could see, and believe in, any organization. My horrible accident had turned into a gift. Perhaps one day, electric monks will replace me too, but until that day comes, I suspect my gift will keep me billable.

We will talk more about this shadowy world and the billable life in coming weeks, but until next time, you may want to reflect on your own origin story. What horrible accident sent you down this path? What gift did it turn into? Have you earned any yakbucks yet?

And perhaps the most important question: are you billable yet?

<< Prelude: III | Into the Yakverse index | Always Be Strategizing >>