<< The Two Shadows of the Hero | Into the Yakverse index | The 12 Eigenconversation >>
Occasionally, I get a drink with my young Millennial buddy, Arnie Anscombe — you may recall him from the original Art of Gig case study, and we talked about his brother Bernie in Making it Interesting a few weeks ago — and we swap notes. I pick his brain about the latest magical developments in data science and machine learning. He dumps his more speculative, narrative-oriented thoughts ( which he seems to feel guilty about thinking) on me for reactions. Usually in the form of gotcha questions, hoping to trip me up and prove the superiority of his methods, and perhaps atone for his sins of data-free speculation that way. He’s a bit of a Data Supremacist, but very Catholic about it.
When we met up a few weeks ago, he had a smug look on his face, like he’d come prepared with a particularly good gotcha for me.
“So, I see you wrote about me again in your newsletter, and dragged my brother and the rest of my family into it as well…”
“… ah c’mon, you know I love you all you guys…”
“…And not particularly flattering either. Bernie was a bit mad at you about it, but then we both got a couple of good leads for gigs from your subscribers, so I guess all PR is good PR.”
“Always glad to help out the Anscombe boys,” I said. “So what’s on your mind now?”
“So,” said Arnie, as we settled in with our drinks, “I read your other newsletter a few weeks back, where you talked about the 4 styles of consulting. And I have… some thoughts.”
“Ah yes, did you like that one?”
Arnie gave me an indulgent look, “You and your 2x2s. Usual wild speculation without a shred of data behind it, but entertaining as always. I suppose you have me pigeonholed in your Achiever quadrant.”
“Is that where you think you fit?”
Arnie waved the Rogerian Therapy question away.
“See, I think overall consulting style is the wrong unit of analysis. I don’t think I have a fixed mode. The real unit of analysis is the conversation, not the conversational style.”
One of my rules of thumb is to never let a conversation get bogged down in No True Unit of Analysis quagmires, so I caved immediately.
“Sure. The style lens has its uses for talking about doctrinal matters, but the conversational lens is probably better for fine-grained tactical questions about meeting-level sparring methods.”
“Exactly, and as we both know, professionals talk tactics and logistics, amateurs bullshit about strategy.”
I ignored the neg, and went yes, and: “Plus you can get more empirical with it. I bet you maintain a spreadsheet of your consulting conversations?”
Arnie grinned, “Of course. I log all consulting conversations. I track 19 objective metrics, and score all conversations on 7 subjective dimensions, on 5-point Likert scales. And I just took Tiago Forte’s course, so I’m building a second brain in Evernote too, for my free-form notes.”
Just thinking about all that work exhausts me, but I neither agree nor disagree with that sort of quantified self approach to consulting. Hey, everybody has their own style.
“And what patterns do you see from all your tracking?” I asked.
“Actually, it’s what I don’t see that’s interesting. See, one of the things I track is the set of broad functional themes every conversation hits, and interestingly, two business functions almost never come up, except in passing. But both almost always hover ominously in the background. Care to guess which ones?”
I smiled and leaned back. I was pretty sure I had this one. Time to put the young whippersnapper in his place.
“I’ll bet sales and corporate finance.”
Arnie looked surprised. “Got it in one, wow! How did you know? Do you track your conversations too?”
It was my turn to look indulgently at him. I leaned back, steepled my hands, and said, “No, it was a matter of simple deduction. You, like me, are an indie consultant. And like most indie consultants, you mainly get roped in to help with decision-making while there is still room for creative ideas, and time to try imaginative maneuvers. Elementary, my dear Arnie.”
“But what does that have to do with the missing conversations on sales and finance?”
“Let’s hear your theory first. I’m sure you have one. After all, as we both know, data without generalization is just gossip.”
Arnie smiled and shrugged, “Touché. I don’t have a theory. I thought you might have one. You’re the wild speculation guy.”
“Ah, indeed I am, and indeed I do. Very well…”
I took a sip of my Manhattan, and began. “You ever hear that line, the aim of marketing is to make sales superfluous? I forget who said that. Might have been Al Pacino in Raging Bull.”
Arnie gave me a pained look. “Yeah I’ve heard the line, and it was Peter Drucker. What about it?”
“See, sales is fundamentally a tactical mop-up function. If marketing is primarily about maneuvering and positioning for an unfair advantage, sales is primarily about being effective in the melee to finish the job. The better you are at the former, the less you need the latter. The idea behind the line is, if you do the marketing right, you might not need sales at all.”
“How does that explain why it doesn’t come up? And what about finance?”
“Finance too. Sales and finance — proper corporate financial engineering, earnings-per-share stuff — are both tactical mop-up melee functions. The aim of every other function is to make sales and finance superfluous. If demand for your product always outstrips supply, and there’s always a comfortable cash-and-control cushion, the VP of Sales and the CFO can spend all their time in Hawaii. Robots could do their jobs. Those jobs exist because strategy never takes you all the way.”
Enlightenment dawned on Arnie.
He said, “Ah, I see, and they don’t come up in free-wheeling open-ended strategy conversations — the kind indie consultants are usually involved in — because they’re the backstop downstream functions that kick in to solve problems with brute force….”
“….where upstream strategic maneuvering fails to make them superfluous by solving them with imaginative elegance. Precisely,” I finished the thought for him.
“So, let me see if I got this straight. If you do end up talking with a client about a problem from a sales or corporate finance perspective, it means the company has already lost the strategic initiative, and is embroiled in a melee situation.”
“Yes, and there’s nothing much left to talk about at a strategic level, only technical cleverness and brute force to get out of the situational melee. You can buy time, one quarter at a time, with sales hacks and financial engineering jiu-jitsu, but only for a while. If the company never gets back to where strategic maneuvering conversations fueled by imagination are meaningful, it is down for the count. Eight, maybe ten quarters before it turns into a zombie, ready for private equity or bankruptcy.”
“Ah, and the reason you and I don’t see much of that action is that there’s nothing much indie consultants can do if things get that far, and not much money to pay us with anyway.”
“Almost, right. There’s still technical things specialized indie consultant types can do, but ironically, if you’ve been dragged down to the melee level, it’s mostly a big-firm Positioning School game. Us People School types require time and real maneuvering room to deliver any kind of value.”
“Shades of Alfred Thayer Mahan there, huh? The Influence of Sea Power Upon History?”
Sometimes young Arnie surprises me.
“Precisely,” I said. “Culture eats strategy for lunch, but only if you survive the breakfast melee.”
“And I guess companies can go back to talking strategy when they’ve gotten out of the melee long enough to create some maneuvering room.”
“If they get out at all. That’s why finance and sales aren’t really absent from strategy conversations; they merely loom ominously as temporal forcing functions on all other conversations as corporate memento mori.”
“The twin 400lb gorillas in the room,” said Arnie, in an unusual display of conceptual licentiousness (though with characteristically accurate book-keeping of gorilla poundage). I might make a narrative-driven bullshit artist of him yet.
“Exactly. Not invisible so much as studiously ignored. Typically, sales and finance will only come up in a couple of ominous warning slides, showing profit or share-price trends, reminding you of the forcing functions and time horizons at work, framing the situation…”
“…and threatening to turn it into a melee.”
“Exactly. Remember that other other Drucker line, about marketing and innovation being the only two necessary functions in business? Well, sales and corporate finance are what happen when they turn out to be insufficient.”
“Ah, so does that mean every real strategic sparring conversation is a marketing and/or innovation conversation in disguise?”
I’d never thought of this. Young Arnie had managed to ask a gotcha question after all.
I thought for a minute and did a mental review of my foggy first-brain memory of 8 years of conversations, hoping to get lucky. I came up with squat.
“Hmm… you know what? You got me there. I’m not sure. Off the top of my head, I count four different types of conversations that seem to account for 80% of my sparring with clients, but they don’t seem to map to the marketing/innovation dichotomy in any obvious way. What about you? Does that pop in your logs or notebooks?”
Arnie pulled out his laptop and tapped busily for a few minutes, then shut it and looked up ruefully. Apparently his second brain was as stumped as my first brain.
“I can try running some detailed analysis on my logs later, but I don’t see an obvious pattern there.”
“Ah, too bad.”
“So you’re saying you’re stumped, huh? Not even a 2×2 for your 4 different types of conversation?”
“Well, I do have a 2×2 in mind, but something seems off about it, and it doesn’t answer your question anyway. Hmm…”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Actually, I think this one is beyond me. Do you have another hour or so? I think we should go talk to my brother, he lives just around the corner in Diogenes Alley.”
“Whoa, you never told me you have a brother!??”
“Yes, I haven’t mentioned him before? Mycroft Rao. He’s much better than me at this sort of thing. Bills out at five times my hourly rate. I’ll bet he already has a taxonomy of Types of Consulting Conversations figured out.”
“Well then, let’s go. I’m free the rest of the evening!”
<< The Two Shadows of the Hero | Into the Yakverse index | The 12 Eigenconversations >>