Practice what you preach

I’m increasingly of the view that the only way to lead anything, or anyone, is by example. Oh sure, my heart still flutters involuntarily at the ‘bending the arc of human history towards a brighter future’ type of rhetoric we heard from Barack Obama in 2008, but I’ve been watching him closely ever since and – attempts to overhaul the American healthcare system and stupendous successes at not being George Bush aside – I can’t honestly say I’ve seen a huge amount of arc-bending yet. Iconic  though he may be in the imagination of most people who aren’t Republican Americans, Obama isn’t Mahatma Ghandi or Nelson Mandela. Whether or not you view it as a criticism, he is a man who leads by vision and rhetoric. They were men who led by a willingness to die for their cause.

And it seems I’m not alone. If consultants can be broadly, and somewhat crudely, divided into those who have done it all before themselves, and those who have learned how it should be done, then clients increasingly prefer to hand their business to the former. That’s not entirely accurate, of course; what they really want is to hand their business to the consultant they most trust to deliver results, no matter what their background. But because results these days tend to mean a lot more than just a report, a working knowledge of what happens when you try to put plans into action is a highly-prized asset.

So what does that mean for the future of thought leadership? At the moment, thought leadership broadly divides into two camps itself: material that is based on new ideas, driven by the experience and intelligence of the consultants behind it, and material that is based on research, driven by the experience of the clients who are the subject of that research. Both – in their noble attempts to push boundaries and add value – usually end up proposing something that remains untested; a situation that’s exacerbated by the perceived need, amongst consulting firms, to keep churning out huge volumes of new material all the time. Rather like a newspaper (exactly like a newspaper in many cases) you sense that the primary concern of consulting firms isn’t that clients won’t be interested in what their saying, it’s that they won’t manage to fill the yawning expanse of white space they’ve committed themselves to filling on a regular basis. Better to say something than nothing.

But if clients really aren’t paying attention and are increasingly interested in consulting firms who lead by example, then isn’t there a missed opportunity here? What if consulting firms had the confidence to test out their theories, not just on clients, but on themselves? Wouldn’t that strike right at the heart of the biggest concern all clients have about consultants: that they’re all talk and no trousers?

It’s an idea the potency of which – by our reckoning at least – is evident in Atos Consulting’s announcement, earlier this year, that it intends to phase out the use of email in its firm. Remarkable though it may be, given that few people had the first clue what an email even was 20 years ago, this an almost shockingly exciting idea for the modern executive, whose working life increasingly seems dedicated to the unending service of his or her inbound mail server. Even as an announcement of intention it’s incredibly brave. Imagine if they actually did it and then wrote about how it worked out for them. That’s a piece you’d really like to read, wouldn’t you? Calling that thought leadership would do it a bit of a disservice, wouldn’t it? Arc-bending might be slightly over-egging it, but not by much. Not that it would matter much to Atos what you called it when clients started queuing up at their front door.