The history of consulting is sadly a very under-studied subject. We modern indie consultants tend to talk and write as though ours is a field of timeless, ahistorical ideas drawn from an eternal platonic realm of aphorisms, perfect 2x2s, pick-2-of-3 triangles, 7-principle lists, and 12-laws lists (these are known as the 5 Archimedean consulting gases by the way). The operating assumption seems to be that history is something that happens to clients, and that we bring perspectives from nowhere and nowhen.
It doesn’t help that much of our own history is shrouded in shadows, secrecy, mystery, esotericism, and the occult. So, since I talk a lot about historical context and ancient consulting traditions in this newsletter, I figured I should do a brief history.
I divide the history of consulting into 9 distinct ages of varying lengths, grouped into three eras of three ages each, forming a neat little 3-act Big History. I will cover the first era, the Pre-Modern Era (which by law is required to be a Fall from Golden Age Act), in this post, and cover the other two in the next two parts.
Here is a visual of the history with some Act 1 milestones marked.
1. Age of Wizards (prehistory – 800 BC)
The earliest consultants were also the most adept in terms of their inner game of tennis, as well as other dimensions of adeptness, and their reign is sometimes known as the Golden Age of Consulting.
Consultants from this era were Real Consultants, their clients were Real Clients, and gigs, also known in those times as mythic adventures, were Real Gigs. Various magical divination techniques, astrology that actually worked, and the earliest known versions of various subtle technologies like shtickboxes and strategometers, appear to have been first developed during this era. Sadly, almost all of this early knowledge is now lost.
In popular culture, consultants from this era are generally known as wizards (though there were a few witches as well). They were not indie, but tended to form clan-like memetic lineages, with knowledge, skills, and client contacts passed down from master to student. Their clients were kings and queens claiming divine status. The earliest consulting gigs revolved around creating the CYA scrollwork and tabletwork to legitimate such claims. An early wizard, known as the Great Gartner, who served in the court of an early Pharaoh, appears to have created the first known 2×2, known as the Magic Quadrant. This has now been lost but was apparently used to classify Nile floods into 4 types, and justify the Pharaoh feeding people he didn’t like to crocodiles.
Gartner, the modern consulting firm, was named after the Great Gartner, and they produce a 2×2 also known as the Magic Quadrant in honor of that lost first 2×2. They’ll deny this of course, which is why this is a secret history.
Though wizards and witches had largely disappeared by around 800 BC, a few true wizards and witches can be found in later periods of history. One well-known one was Merlin, consultant to King Arthur and inventor of the Round Table Methodology.
But people claiming the label wizard since around 800 BC have largely been frauds. The end of the Golden Age was brought about by the invention of money.
2. Age of Sages and Seers (800 BC to 400 AD)
During the Age of Wizards, consultants were generally paid in kind, in the form of magical objects, secret formulas, keys that opened mysterious doors, email addresses of important court officials, gems with strange powers, the ability to talk to birds, and so forth. Also room and board. That’s the stuff that was valuable back then, since there wasn’t much you could buy with money anyway. Amazon didn’t even sell Moleskine notebooks back then.
The once-magical objects that survive from that era are mostly duds now, since the thaumic field on Earth has decayed to the point that you can’t do much with it. Many blame this on the invention of money. Money killed the magic in consulting, but it also led to a deeper engagement with the real world, and based on a meta-analysis of several cost-benefit studies of that shift, it has come to be regarded as generally a Good Thing even though it would be nice to have magical powers.
The invention of modern impersonal money and coinage in the first millennium BC led to the rise of consulting in a form we would recognize today, based on the premise of paying a stranger to do unpleasant things it would be inconvenient to do yourself, and awkward to ask of people you have other sorts of ongoing relationships with.
It’s sometimes hard to see this, because money is like water to us consultants, but the existence of impersonal money (as opposed to mutual credit based on interpersonal trust) is actually a prerequisite for the existence of consulting. David Graeber talks about some aspects of this in his book Debt, but misses the connection to consulting.
The popular saying, you don’t pay a consultant for advice but to go away after giving it, dates to this era. You can’t go away if you can’t spend what you’ve earned in the neighboring kingdom.
Money gave mobility to consultants.
Consultants during this period were generally known as sages or seers, and though they generally lacked magical powers, most were in denial about it, and therefore very conflicted and insecure about debasing their high arts and esoteric knowledge by accepting money. As a result, many of them failed to effectively navigate the Consultant’s Conundrum:
Embrace asceticism and poverty as the lifestyle most conducive to generating deep insights and perhaps rediscovering Golden Age wizarding powers?
OR
Embrace shameless commerce as the path to acquiring the worldly knowledge to complement esoteric insights, and thereby make up for the loss of magical powers and astrology that works?
Several events are notable from this era:
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Around 500 BC, Laozi emerged in China as the first known consultant for whose existence there is some historical evidence. He reputedly charged 1 gold coin per day (though sometimes he charged per aphorism). Clocks accurate enough for hourly billing had not yet been invented.
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Around the same time, his contemporary Confucius emerged as the first bureaucrat to sign off on a consulting purchase order (PO), for an employee engagement study of the emerging Chinese bureaucracy (in a related development, the first overdue invoice for consulting work entered the historical record 90 days later). He was the first person to use the phrase, “let me see if I can find money in the budget for this” in a conversation with a consultant.
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Another notable event was the founding of the Order of the Yak somewhere along the Silk Road, in the wake of Alexander’s Invasion, around 310 BC. The Order of the Yak would go on to become the most important steward of consulting traditions for the next two millennia.
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Kautilya, the first known Indian consultant also emerged in this era, as an advisor to Chandragupta, that founder of the Mauryan empire. Kautilya earned an MBA at Nalanda University and wrote the Arthashastra, which is Sanskrit for “How to Make Good 2x2s”.
India was a major center for the consulting arts during this era. Familiar consultant titles like Pundit and Guru can be dated to the Ashram tradition of ascetic teachers of this period, who lived in conveniently located suburban forests where kings could go seek advice. Sadly, the growing scholastic conservatism of Brahmin traditions led to the decline of this tradition. Consulting activity shifted first to Buddhist court philosophers in the growing urban cores, and then declined in the subcontinent altogether.
In the West, Greece had a conflicted relationship with consulting, with notable figures like Aristotle being more like public intellectuals and teachers than consultants (though some of them took on the occasional side hustle during the summer months). Some say the relatively democratic and public-spirited tone of classical European antiquity made it a somewhat hostile place for the consulting arts, which, let’s be honest, aren’t exactly very democratic in spirit.
Ancient Greece was where the Fundamental Tradeoff of consulting, between a high public profile, based on public speaking and 6-figure advances for tablet deals, and high private influence, based on court intrigues and discreet backroom whisperings in the ears of movers and shakers, was born.
3. Age of Missionaries vs. Mercenaries (400 AD – 1500 AD)
The fall of the Roman Empire led to the shift in the center of gravity of the consulting arts from Asia to Europe and the Middle East. Though the Romans employed mercenaries in their military, and borrowed ideas freely from the lands they conquered, they were not particularly interested in the consulting arts, preferring more concrete ideas. During the decline and fall of the empire, many consultants tried to pitch turnaround strategies (at least one based on Southwest Airlines, according to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) to later Roman emperors, but they were unable to close on the gigs, and as a result, the Roman empire, starved of good ideas, fell.
But with the fall of the empire, Barbarian Europe arose, and proved to be a much more fertile home for the consulting arts than Asia. Despite the general decline and Dark-Agery going on in the rest of European society, consulting began to come into its own at places ranging from early Christian monasteries to the estates of great feudal lords.
This age is marked by the emergence of the great, enduring conflict at the heart of our calling: mercenaries versus missionaries. The mercenary/missionary conflict was actually the outgrowth and institutionalization of the Consultant’s Conundrum from the Age of Sages and Seers. Mercenaries were those who embraced commerce, while missionaries were those who embraced commerce while being very conflicted about what that would do to their Pure Ideas.
Missionary-style consultants continued to pursue a form of the consulting arts that superficially valued poverty and asceticism, but they managed to accumulate power and institutional capital all the same. A key instrument of this evolution was Christianity. Due to the practice of primogeniture, pissed-off younger sons who were sent off to monasteries to join the priesthood figured out all sorts of clever ways to restrict the power of their elder brothers, and claim it for the Church. As a result, the power of the Catholic church grew. Some of this story is told in Matthew Fraser’s book Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom.
(A subplot in the history of consulting is that celibacy of various kinds, both voluntary and involuntary, from Chinese court eunuchs to Christian monks, was a major driver of the evolution of the field throughout the pre-modern era).
On the other side of the conflict, ecosystems of mercenary consultants of all sorts emerged to fill the vacuum left behind by the collapse of imperial Roman institutions. There were mercenary knights, mercenary traders, shady people hawking unreliable maps at farmers’ markets (which back then were just known as “markets”), flavor-of-the-month divination systems, and so on.
The great intellectual advances of the era, such as the 2x2x2 and 3×3 matrices, came from the missionary consultants operating out of monasteries. The great practical innovations, such as detecting the synergy possibilities between the sacking of Constantinople and the liberation of the Holy Land, came from the mercenaries.
The great historical events of that era, such as the Crusades, were as much about mercenaries versus missionaries as they were about the nominal combatants fighting over religions.
Notable events occurred in the Near East as well. Hassan al-Sabah founded the Ismaili Order of Assassins, and the associated Total School of Consulting, combining missionary and mercenary approaches and introducing the smoking of Interesting Substances into consulting practices. Mullah Nasreddin emerged as a prominent Turkish consultant and early pioneer of the business parable. Over in what is now Tunisia, Ibn Khaldun, the Arab philosopher, widely regarded as the founding father of sociology, wrote the first airport bestseller, 12 Habits of Highly Effective Caliphs.
On a global scale, for a century or so around the turn of the millennium, there was intense competition between the Order of the Yak, which was expanding westwards at the time, and the Assassins, for control of intellectual culture along the Silk Road. The competition was inconclusive, but neither managed to expand much into Europe proper. With the advent of the Age of Exploration, the Silk Road ceased to be the main conduit of intellectual exchange between East and West.
The pre-modern era of consulting came to a relatively sudden end with the development of the Gutenberg Press.
Suddenly, your average consultant no longer had to rely on lineages, monasteries or imperial courts to be part of an intellectual tradition. With movable type, the seeds of independence in consulting were about to be planted. The Consultant’s Conundrum and the Fundamental Tradeoff of Consulting were about to be transformed in fascinating new ways by the printed word.
In the next part (which I’ll post in a couple of weeks), we’ll see how the Gutenberg revolution triggered a consulting renaissance and inaugurated the Second Act, which would last all the way through World War 2, to the beginning of the Modern Era.