Thursday 12 April 2018

Day 9: My Job

We had some American friends over from Los Angeles this evening, that's how far Americans will come to sample a home made dinner:

  Curry d'empereur aux carottes au lait de coco accompagné de riz

  Variétés de fromages avec baguette aux courges

I'm a management consultant, what does that mean is the first question that people ask me when I tell them what I do.  Thinking about it, I realise that the first thing it means is that for the foreseeable future I am safe from being replaced by an AI system.  I believe that the more understandable and clear your job is the easier it is to replace it by a machine. That goes from the taxi driver who will be replaced by the self-driving car to the doctor who will never be as objective or have as much knowledge as an AI system.

But a management consultant, what on earth do they do?  Ask you for your watch to tell you the time, as the old joke goes.  Actually that is quite true, that's exactly what we do.  The real value of a consultant is not the expert knowledge and sophisticated models that he or she may have acquired over time, it is the capacity to ask the simple question : why do you do what you do? And 1 in 10 times the answer may be "I don't know" or "because we have always done it that way" and that's when your work starts.

Effectively the management consultant is the Leon Trotsky of the business world. We are there to question the way things are being done and propose doing things differently, in other words we are proponents of the Permanent Revolution. Ultimately a consultant can always find something to change, because there is never an end state.  As a consultant, we are there to make sure change happens and possibly it might make things better (or possibly not).

You can see how this is an ideal job for me, if I have a choice between doing things the usual way or a different way I'll always choose the second.

Viva la revolucione







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