Procurement

A very good friend of mine recently admitted to a rather strange affliction. She calls it shopping bulimia, and it manifests itself as a desire to buy items (particularly shoes) and then return them. The idea is that she gets to enjoy all the pleasures of retail therapy without the lasting guilt of having spent her money. For those of us of a saner disposition – or, dare I say it, for those of us who are men – this seems singularly ridiculous.

One of my favourite quotes is Machiavelli: “A prince who is not himself wise cannot be wisely advised… Good advice depends on the shrewdness of the prince who seeks it, and not the shrewdness of the prince on the good advice.” I’ve used it often when lecturing about consultants to explain to the students (and consultants) in the audience that they can’t deliver good consulting unless they have a shrewd client who knows how to use consultants appropriately.

Well, they can certainly breed.

If my experience in college, where my second year room backed onto a rambling garden, is anything to go by, mating hedgehogs make quite a racket – a point I vividly recalled when talking to a client about his organisation’s use of operational improvement consultants for our forthcoming report on this topic.