How To Make My Job Obsolete – Do Yours Well

My brief but rich (and, happy to say, no end in sight) time in professional services has been laden with eurekas.  Having survived four rounds of layoffs, re-orgs, and played client, salesperson, vendor, vendor’s vendor, and now consultant, a shortage of experiences I have not.  And I’ve done great stuff too – launched brand new products, brought in over a million dollars in new business, designed training for new managers.  But the entire time, amongst this corporate chorus one chord always has and continues to resonate with me.

My job is fundamentally – at its very core – useless.  Extraneous in the best of lights, but more often than not painkiller for a chronic illness.

Inefficiencies, ineffectiveness, unprofitability, obsolescence, whatever the corporate ailment, my job and consulting at large is not the panacea we in industry imagine ourselves to be.  We’re not curing anything in fact, we’re merely treating a symptom at best, and at worst, we’re palliative.

Morose, isn’t it?  Well, sometimes we are needed.  Consultants are essential in diagnosing what exactly is wrong, and writing the prescription to make things better.  But we’re still fundamentally ineffective at curing.  To cure is to make ourselves obsolete.  To borrow from an obscure but brilliant title, companies can make my job obsolete by doing theirs well.  As a closeted, aspiring, patiently waiting business manager, there’s literally nothing I can attach to more strongly, believe in more passionately, and elevate more hyperbolically, than to rally behind the idea that companies and the individuals that power them should strive to make people like me obsolete.  In fact, it precisely analogous to how I feel about non-profits.  Non-profits’ sole (and soul) goal should be to make themselves redundant.  I’m sure you already agree, why wouldn’t you?  But let’s not bleed this into a whole other discussion.  The point is companies that solve their own problems (with the help of consultants of course) are poised to be infinitely more profitable, effective, innovative, et. cetera, than those who would rather ride on the coat-tails of consultants than pull upon their own bootstraps.

And as someone who believes whole heartedly in American entrepreneurialism, the social good business can lead in, and the stand-alone merit of running an efficient and profitable business, there are few things I could more strongly wish for than to be obsolete.  Maybe world peace… and a backstage pass to Phoenix.

Analyze This – The Usefulness of Data

The past couple of months have been filled with numbers.  Contract value, market size, workforce analytics, sales transactions…  after long enough, data turns into indistinguishable binary madness.  But in this madness there’s a certain beauty in the truth of it all, isn’t there?

I’ve come across a dichotomy of opinions on data, and it’s usefulness.  As my father, bless his heart, always says, “the facts are the facts”.  Of course, when I present him with “the facts” he retorts, “left wing propaganda”.  But there’s a lesson here.  Data, like beauty, too often is in the eye of the beholder.  I suppose it’s okay for beauty to be like that, it lets plenty of ugly people live happily-ever-after-and-out-of-their-league.  But with data, it should be different.

One of my favorite business quotes is “data is not the plural of anecdote”.  Too often data is superceded by conventional wisdom, or corrupted by internal / political bias.  People coddle metrics about what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s par, and make decisions off them.  The problem is, rarely do these opinions or metrics evolve, or get re-examined.  Anecdotal evidence for getting things done is never enough, people really ought to get back to data to get things done, rather than rely on popular wisdom.

Or should they?

A few weeks ago I spoke with a former VP of HR.  I can’t say what company, so let’s just say they’re in the business machine business (whoops!)…   In a conversation about workforce engagement, VP frustratingly proclaimed, “You know, people from inside this organization come to me all the time asking for data to prove what they already know.  And I almost always say no, because if you know what’s wrong, just go fix it.”.   Fair enough.  Sometimes homeopathy is the right solution for certain ailments, particularly when you think of scale.  It might make sense to run the numbers before revamping your comp and ben plan, but it might be overkill if you’re looking to experiment with marketing via Twitter.  Perhaps in this environment, more than ever, the ability to go with the gut, and make smart gambles, (insert counter point about being data driven) separates the hired from the fired.

As for me, luckily I’m low enough on the totem pole that I can just point at the data and say “told you so”.