It's Showtime, folks

The news that American TV company Showtime is launching a new comedy series about management consultants, subtly entitled House of Lies makes for a depressing start to the year for anyone working in the consulting industry.  But it’s also a timely reminder that any attempts to improve the image of management consultants in the media (clients’ views and would-be recruits into the industry are different) will need to engage people’s hearts as well as their minds.

With that in mind, we’d like to start 2012 with some programming suggestions of our own:

• Downton Consultants: A tear-jerking drama from the early days of consulting in which rational decision-making is replaced by meaningful looks and labradors.
• Consulting Trek: Boldly going where no management thinkers have gone before, a plucky band of consultants, armed only with sixties-inspired technology, seek out alien ideas and stun them.
• I’m a Consultant, Get Me Out of Here: Share the tears and joys as otherwise decent consultants fight their way through the organisational jungle.
• Consultant Who: Rogue interim manager uses time-travel tricks to take change management to a whole new level.
• Great Expectations: Classic Victorian story is given a new twist when Pip and Miss Havisham’s interior design business has to be rescued by charming but enigmatic consultant, Estrella.
• Frozen Consultant: Stunning documentary footage of consultants enduring the toughest client conditions on the planet, complete with details on how this unique programme was made by cameramen who spent months disguised as laptops.

Funny? We hope so, but there's a serious point here, too. Most marketing by consulting firms tends to play it safe by promoting intellectual capability to existing clients. If creative media types are finding sufficient material in the consulting stereotype to make a TV series out of it then perhaps its about time the industry responded in a similarly creative way. And found a way to talk to the heart as well as the head.