Adrian Trenholm

Music isn’t a loaf of bread… and consulting ain’t stationery

Johnnie Moore has posted a fascinating little snippet from Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy , regarding the free online distribution of Wilco’s latest album. Says Tweedy:

A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that’s it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it’s just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.

To which Johnnie says:

Big message here, and not just for the music business. Do you want to treat your customers as collaborators? If so, you have to let them make their own meaning out of what you say and lighten up around “owning” ideas. (It’s called conversation).

Spinning off from that, my thoughts turned to consulting. Too many people - both clients and consultants - treat consulting like stationery, to be bought, used up and replaced.

For clients, the problem with this approach is that when all your “thinking” is outsourced, your staff don’t learn anything new. So when more thinking is required in the future, you have to get another agency to do the work instead of doing it in-house. In the end, those people who do have a mind to be creative will get bored and leave your firm.

Consultants and other external advisors have done much to encourage this situation with “proprietary methodology,” the consulting equivalent of Tweedy’s “pieces of plastic, packages of intellectual property.” But so much good quality business education is available now, so freely, on the web and elsewhere, that this approach to selling consultancy will eventually backfire. In the end, clients reward those suppliers who give them choices, instead of locking them in.

To distinguish themselves, consultancies and agencies of all stripes must collaborate with their clients at every level. We must leave our clients empowered by, not dependent upon our services.

If you are a consultant, build client learning and development into the engagement from the outset. Clients? Demand that your consultants do so, and fire them quickly if they fail to deliver.

2 comments May 18th, 2005

Return of The Weekly Standards

Totally by chance (looking through some sites I bookmarked a while ago for inspiration), I came across the “new” Weekly Standards . The old Weekly Standards, set up and run by Adam Howell was my favourite of all the CSS showcase sites, so I am keen to see what new owners, Forty Media , are going to do with the site. I am really pleased that they plan to leave Adam’s work archived “as is.”

Adam has a nice write up of the new site here and he has hit the nail on the head. It looks sensational, courtesy of design contest winner Mario Carboni and Forty’s James Archer must have worked really hard on this week’s write up of AT&T’s standards-based site .

Recommendations:

1. Lose the adverts - in their current position they really break up the flow of the article. In fact note to all website owners - most of us hate this advert positioning, please don’t do it. Does it make that many more dollars on your ad words account?

2. Cut the article length by 50%, maybe even 75%. I guess you wanted to start with a bang, but this can’t be a weekly read surely? I loved the old site for it’s intelligent succint comment and handy “stats.”

3. No thanks on the guest pundit, either. I would prefer to see a trackback link, then, if a site’s worth talking about we can carry on the discussion ourselves.

That said, I am chuffed to bits about the return of the Standards, and James is going to do a great job. If you have any interest in web design whatsoever, add TWS to your RSS reader now.

4 comments May 18th, 2005