A Few Words About Consultants’ Productivity

An old French proverb states...

"It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory."

Sadly, over the years, consultants' productivity is still measured by the same flawed standards that management consultant and productivity charlatan Frederick Winslow Taylor established in his "masterpiece", Scientific Management.

The problem was that Taylor tried to apply his notorious motion studies to knowledge work as well. Well, more accurately, it wasn't Taylor himself, but some of his most eager zealots, including the communist mass murderer, Lenin, have tried to apply Taylor's "One best method" approach to knowledge work, including consulting.

Imagine that a method Taylor developed for moving pig iron is now being used to measure the productivity of consulting. The funny thing is that the whole taylorism has failed and Taylor has been branded as a fraud, many consulting firms are still marching to the beat of his drum in the form of billable hours, timesheets and amounts of deliverables. Innovation and improvement seem to be irrelevant.

So, in this distorted light, we try to take a closer look at how to determine consultants' productivity. And this is what we discuss this month's brain-fryingly exciting episode of Commando Consulting, entitled, A Few Words About Consultants' Productivity. Enjoy!