“Consultants borrow your watch to tell you the time and then leave with your watch.” So said Robert Townsend, former CEO of Avis, in his no-nonsense observation on management nonsense—Up the Organization…

This is often interpreted to mean that consultants will question you and your colleagues, capture your knowledge, and then fail to adequately document and share with you what they have learned. Or that the consultants themselves do not have useful knowledge to share. Or that if they do, they will take great care in sharing their knowledge asset with you in a way that reduces your dependency on them. And when everything goes wrong, who is to blame? You don’t control them properly.

Many people believe that this issue is just as relevant today as it was when Townsend made his widely accepted observation. And the catalog of disasters and frustrations suggests that it is. But there are consultants who have overcome this problem, consultants who offer a high quality service and are used time and time again because they have addressed this fundamental problem. How do these ‘good consultants’ do it?

First, if ‘good consultants’ have real knowledge to donate, they outsource it in a way that it stays with their client when they leave – the knowledge is encrypted. Second, if they don’t have the knowledge themselves, they make it easy for the client to externalize what they really know, but cannot easily verbalize; again, the knowledge is encoded. And if they are working on information systems, they make sure that it is very clear WHAT is to be done, HOW and WHY; again, knowledge is encoded.

And if you contact us, we can give you a list of consultants you can trust as “good consultants” – they won’t borrow your watch to tell you the time, and they won’t walk away with your watch!