Most of the time, you don’t hire consultants for insight. You hire them to borrow courage you refuse to grow.
By Jack Barsky
A board I used to advise paid a Big-4 firm $1.2M for a 140-page deck. What the Chairman actually needed was a goddamn spine…
The board wasn’t lacking data. They weren’t lacking insight, options, nor courage. That’s not why the deck was commissioned, nor the real reason why the consultants were hired. It was not for answers…
But for comfort.
Because if things went south, they could point the blame to somewhere else… To the slides. To the fees. To the proud logo on the front of the report. And say, “We did our due diligence.”
Here’s the part most leaders hate to hear: Most of the time, you don’t hire consultants for insight. You hire them to borrow courage you refuse to grow.
You already know what needs to be done. You already see the hard choices in front of you. You already know where the business is bleeding.
But you stall. You wrap indecision in reports, dress fear up in analysis and hide behind the process and PowerPoint… Meanwhile, the business keeps bleeding. The market keeps moving. And all the slides in the world won’t fix that.
You can buy quite a lot of things for $1.2 million…
A spine simply isn’t one of them.
