Adrian Trenholm

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

May 18th, 2005

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.

Entry Filed under: Learning , Leadership