Accenture’s Code of Business Ethics and core values are central to the company’s culture and character. Respect, inclusiveness, and shared ethical values are at the heart of Accenture’s culture, and fostering these values is essential for making your conduct count. Accenture’s GetThere booking tool, owned by Sabre, advises travelers when potential booking options violate policy and forces those insistent on making them. The company’s single global travel policy provides a corporate card to travelers, who must pay it individually. To provide afterhours support, Accenture established a dedicated after-hours support team.
Accompanied by a comprehensive travel policy, Accenture ensures employees are well-taken care of and their travel expenses are covered. Travel is a necessary part of Accenture’s business, but it represents a major company expense and time commitment. Each employee is responsible for evaluating every trip to ensure a cohesive, elevated customer experience.
In 2012, Accenture made changes to enforce its revised policy, eliminating international first-class travel, requiring all employees below senior managers to fly economy, and allowing business class only for senior managers and executives on flights of more than eight hours. For reimbursement purposes, employees are expected to pay Amex with their personal bank account, and Accenture will reimburse them separately.
To increase the value of travelers, Accenture offers travel consulting services for the travel, airline, and hospitality industries. The company requires employees to work with Accenture for two years and has a policy stating that any travel over 6/7 hours total trip time is considered business class. Top priorities for 2024 include a new travel tool as a single point of entry for all travel needs and a continued commitment to sustainability goals.
📹 Insurance News: Travel rules create complexity for consumers, June, 2021
With travel restrictions changing almost daily as the pandemic wanes, insurers likely won’t be able to introduce new products …
What is the leave policy in Accenture India?
The Accenture employment contract allows for a maximum of 270 hours of work per year, including mandatory public holidays. Additionally, employees are entitled to seven to eight days of emergency leave and 12 days of vacation leave per year. Vacation leave is calculated on a monthly basis, with one day added to the total each month.
What is the limit for international travel?
India and UAE have different limits on foreign currency and cash carry. India can carry up to $3000 in cash, while the overall permitted limit is $2, 50, 000. For UAE, AED and other currencies can be carried up to $3000. The general limit for individuals under the Liberalised Remittance plan for Resident Individuals is $2, 50, 000 per financial year. Payment for foreign exchange can be made by money up to Rs 50, 000 or by a crossed cheque or demand draft. It is important to check the laws and regulations for each country to ensure safe travel.
Does Accenture negotiate salary?
It would be prudent to negotiate with Accenture and request a 60-70% increase in your compensation package, given that the current offer is contingent upon your years of experience.
What is the travel policy?
A travel policy is a set of rules and procedures for a company that outline how employees should approve, book, and sponsor business-related travel. These policies are typically created by the Finance and Travel Managers and cover aspects such as business class travel, travel duration, and precautions for solo travel. These policies should not be confusing or restrictive but should positively impact both travelers and businesses. However, challenges to travel policies include their complexity, lack of technology enforcement, and bureaucratic nature.
The Travel Policy Template can help overcome these issues by providing an easy-to-understand policy that includes approved travel booking tools, cost limits, exceptions for costlier cities or routes, reimbursement processes, permitted and not permitted expenses, travel debriefing, travel insurance carriers, and duty of care procedures. This template can help organizations create a more effective and efficient travel policy for their employees.
What is global travel policy?
The global travel policy provides a framework for employees to claim reimbursement for business travel and entertainment expenses on behalf of the company.
What is travel security policy?
The duty of care is a company’s moral and legal obligation to ensure the safety and security of its employees, whether they are in the office or on business trips. This obligation is fulfilled through an action plan that provides the necessary care. Some safety risks to consider while traveling for work include:
- Employee injuries or illnesses
- Unsafe working conditions
- Lack of communication and collaboration
- Inadequate training and development\n7
What is international travel policy?
In organizational contexts, the terms “foreign travel policy” and “international travel policy” are frequently used interchangeably. These policies typically prioritize employee experience, well-being, safety, and business budget considerations. A comprehensive foreign travel policy delineates the procedures for making travel arrangements, establishes limits for travel expenses, and specifies the conditions applicable to different categories.
How to write a travel policy?
A business travel policy is essential for any company, regardless of its size or growth stage. It outlines goals, identifies stakeholders, ensures easy use, decides on the travel management style, lists necessary elements, and creates the first draft. Even small startups with employees traveling only twice a year can benefit from a solid corporate travel policy. It is crucial to ensure the policy is easy to understand, accessible, and enforced, as well as to maintain a consistent travel schedule.
What is the speak up policy at Accenture?
Accenture encourages employees to report inappropriate behavior, including disrespect, harassment, racism, discrimination, retaliation, or concerns about unethical or illegal behavior. They have zero tolerance for retaliation and offer various ways to raise concerns, including leaders, Human Resources, Legal, and the Accenture Business Ethics Helpline. When a concern is raised, the company aims to confirm facts professionally, methodically, thoughtfully, and balancedly.
What is the policy of Accenture?
The policy of non-retaliation is strictly enforced and may result in severe penalties, including termination, for any individual who reports an incident in good faith. Retaliation can be either indirect or overt and may take various forms.
📹 Steve Jobs on Consulting
I worked for 15 years as an engineer for 1 organization and Jobs is 100% right. Much of what I learned came as a result of having to live with the decisions I made on behalf of my customer. When it broke, they came to me and I had to fix it. And when I designed it next time during the next iteration, it didn’t break. My ability to design good systems increased dramatically as a result.
I work in IT. My company decided to spend close to 30 MILLION DOLLARS on consultants instead of hiring more help (which would have been a fraction of that). CIO was an idiot (got fired this last week). Consultants walked away from a fire with their wallets full and left us with the mess. I quit shortly afterwards.
I have 20 years in manufacturing and 22 since as a consultant so I’ve pretty much seen it all. Jobs is right for consultants without significant industry experience. Those of us with arrows in our backs and substantial scar tissue who become consultants are usually better at understanding where our clients are coming from and what issues they may face. So we tend to give them better advice. Beware of the big consultancies; they hire MBAs right out of school and throw them at you for $600/hr. While these kids are smart, they’re knowledge-free and are learning at your expense. Make sure you know what you’re getting when you hire a consultant.
He articulated his thoughts so well here. I will always remember this message from Steve. The fruit analogy has persuaded me to pursue my own business idea and own my recommendations instead of taking a safer route in consulting. It’s funny that he mentioned a banana before an apple. I’ll let you know what the fruit tastes like when my time is done as well Steve! 🍎 🍌
I agree with Jobs’ assessment. Having been on both sides of the consulting equation, however, I found that companies tended to value the ideas of consultants over the ideas of their employees. If push ever cams to shove, the consultant’s advice was taken and the employee’s was ignored or certainly underrated. So, if you have enough experience in an industry, it is far less stressful being a consultant. You also have the advantage of being above the fray when it comes to office politics. And this, in spite of the inherent depth and value of loyal employees’ ownership of systems, problems and issues.
Consulting is a great career if you do it from within a company that primarily makes a product. For example a consultant in a software company works with the customers to make them successful with the software. The customers don’t go away, just transition to support. You are still accountable long term for the customer’s success.
After many years in business, I finally learned (from a consultant) that consultants are often hired to cook up and justify whatever conclusions are wanted by the person who has the mandate to hire them. So even worse than pontificating on industry or domain matters where they may have less expertise than their clients, they are used to manipulate or eliminate opponents in organizations. A bit like think tanks or lobbyists ranting about “data”. This might explain why many consultants end up working in senior government positions.
True in the ownership aspect, but I would say that a good consultant is a good listener first, and after having listened to hundreds or thousands of employees and owners, from a multitude of companies and industries, a good consultant can present ideas and perspective that would otherwise be hidden, due to that wider field of experience. It is easy to get tunnel-vision in any field, and great value can be added from a good consultant. If the payment for consultancy service is connected to results of implementation, or stock-options, the ownership, lyability and invested interest can be more connected. I am speaking both as an entrepreneur and consultant, with a father having the same mix..
Worked 10 years in steady jobs and recently swiftched to consulting, but not completely standard as I am fulltime employed in a tech company, and they send me out to customers to consult in short cycles. It’s awesome. As someone else said, learning to listen is key. Often I collect questions that I have to reaerch myself, which means gathering insight from colleagues and building an internal network. I often wonder what happens to the projects that I work on, but sometimes customers do take initiative to come back and say that they were happy. My sense of continuity comes from the fact that because I work with my company’s tech all the time, I gather valuable feedback that I can feed back to the other engineers. That means that if I do my job right, some of the problems that I face this year, I won’t ever have to face again. I expect to do this for a while now, maybe years.
He was absolutely right here. There is something inherently irresponsible in consulting, because you are detached from what happens to the company in the long run. On the other hand, I must say I have seen the same lack of responsability in many tech start-ups, where people come just to get experience and some fancy title: many poor decision are taken by people who already know that in 1-2 years will be already working somewhere else and not paying for the consequences of their poor decisions. That’s unfortunately the world we live in.
I’ve done both. Consulting and sitting around maintaining the project long term. Consulting came second. In Engineering you get tired of knowing the decisions you are forced to make are bad. The people you work with aren’t very skilled or don’t care. The company wants to save money and so they hire inexpensive Engineers lacking experience. You get sick of it. And Consulting allows you to break away from these bad decisions. If companies stuck to Jobs advice to “Hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”, I’d work for them. They don’t. They cut costs. They cut corners. And the Engineer gets blamed. No thanks. I’ll stick to consulting.
I’ve done both. Product for longer than being a consultant. But consulting is by far my favourite. For pure exposure to variety and awesome people. At least in my experience the types of companies who are self aware enough to hire consultants are usually doing good work. And I’m still very much learning about providing effective feedback. Because you see plenty of know it all consultants who give an opinion without having to see it implemented. It’s why I like longer gigs because in a former life I was involved with leading technical teams and going live was the best part of the grind.
He is of course completely correct, a consultant will never understand a business as well as its own employees. However, I feel he has missed the utility of a good consultant; a good consultant will find inspiration for change through what company employees suggest and build on those suggestions. Sometimes it just takes a fresh perspective/outside view to do what a company knows it should have been doing from the start!
The rough transcript… “How many of you are from consulting? Oh that’s bad. You should do something. No seriously, I don’t think there nothing inherently evil in consulting, I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a change to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action states and accumulate scare tissue for those mistakes and to picks oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off one learns a fraction of what one can. Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation I think is a faction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better. You do get a broad cut at companies but it’s very thin, it’s like a picture of a banana, you might get a very accurate picture but its only 2 dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get 3 dimensional, so you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends, I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes, but you never really taste it, that is what I think.”
Consultants often have 100 employers, not one and not subject to the will of 1 set of incompetent managers. In niche areas can gather experience at a rate you cannot get in an corporation. The question is who do you want on your team? Someone that read about, seen it, or did it. Hence the real value of a consultant. He is right about a lot of things, but what he doesn’t mention is most companies are not like Apple and don’t have the same resources internally.
I think about the worst form of consultant is the management consultant. What greater failure in an organisation than the fact that those managing it believe they’re not competent to do so, so call in people to help them do their job. Anyone else not competent at their job would simply be fired – the correct course of action. Of course, the other reason to bring in consultants (and I’ve seen it done) is to pay them to legitimise what you already wanted to do anyway. Ie, by having an ‘independent expert’ third party say what it is that you want to do, you can say that the course of action is not merely your whim, but based on ‘expert advice’.
Im saving these for later: Oftentimes companies listen more to consultants than their own employees. I agree with Jobs’ assessment. However, I found that companies tended to value the ideas of consultants over the ideas of their employees. If push ever came to shove, the consultant’s advice was taken and the employee was ignored or certainly underrated. So, if you have enough experience in an industry, it is far less stressful being a consultant. You also have the advantage of being above the fray when it comes to office politics. And this, in spite of the inherent depth and value of loyal employees’ ownership of systems, often creates problems and issues. I’ve done both. Consulting and sitting around maintaining the project long term. Consulting came second. In Engineering you get tired of knowing the decisions you are forced to make are bad. The people you work with aren’t very skilled or don’t care. The company wants to save money and so they hire inexpensive Engineers lacking experience. You get sick of it. And Consulting allows you to break away from these bad decisions. If companies stuck to Jobs advice to “Hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”, I’d work for them. They don’t. They cut costs. They cut corners. And the Engineer gets blamed. No thanks. A good consultant is a good listener first, and after having listened to hundreds or thousands of employees and owners, from a multitude of companies and industries, a good consultant can present ideas and perspective that would otherwise be hidden, due to that wider field of experience.
Agreed, that’s the same exact thing i say about business consultants, i call it fake career, besides they cannot be fully trusted simply because they sell the same ideas to everyone else therefore business consulting companies do play a major role in devastating markets, big firms should have their own private consultants who have the real experience it takes for it
100% agree… I am currently experiencing these highly paid, highly experienced and extremely intelligent consultants and none of them has held a position longer than 2 years.. generally 6-24 months stints as “head of this” and “head of that” but never having actually done the jobs of the people they are in charge of… they can wreak a lot of havoc and walk away from the fallout onto their next “head of” position
Steve isn’t wrong. There is a big risk hiring pure strategy consultants. What he didn’t address, and I see few, if any comments mentioning it, is there are consultant firms that do strategy and implementation. I’m lucky enough to be in one of these firms where I have the opportunity to practice what I preach. He’s right though, because I see it too, it’s important to have implementation experience.
I agree with him but that is actually a strength that an outside consultant brings to a company. They aren’t affected by the corporate culture, they don’t have scar tissue from past failures at the company so they won’t be biased toward one thing. They also aren’t swayed as much by corporate politics. (Yes a different set of politics, but not the usual ones.) When used effectively they can work quite well in identifying new things you should do, things you should not do, and even when they agree with management, there is a benefit. Less risk.
This is true with everything. Try to explain a tree and thereby understanding it. And then compare that to the experience of becoming the tree in the unity of deep meditation. You’ll recognize that all knowledge is ultimately empty if not also experienced by oneself. Knowledge is not bad, it fosters the experience of becoming, but it’s not the end goal. Wisdom, or rather, Being, is.
I’ve done a few internships online, got a taste of marketing, public sector work, law, and logistics. These were short internships designed to really sell the Industry to you. Out of all of them, I left the consulting internship with one thought in mind. Holy shit, these guys get paid to do absolutely nothing, and do that nothing extremely competetively. They make expansive plans and acronyms and thought experiments that are obviously going to have 80% of it ignored by the actual company, and then in a few years a new crew of consultants come in to spin up something new and exciting and the cycle repeats. If stuff goes wrong then it’s because the plan wasn’t followed, if stuff goes right in any part of the business the consultants can say “look, your profits increased by 5% (even though it had nothing to do with us), see you next year!”
I know someone in IT-consulting. He’s self-employed. He is the only one in the company that he owns himself. He sees mostly pros and hardly any cons. Where he lives in 2022 there’s an abundance of work. And being at the height of his career in his early forties he only really has to work hard at the beginning of new consulting gig. After that it’s mostly a breeze. His klient is in the public sector. He get’s a very good salary comparable to others in the local job market. He’s had his current gig for some 4 years. And he will probably be in that same gig for at least another 2 years. The only way he could earn more is by taking some gig where he would have to constantly work his ass off. And that is not very appealing. Especially since he’s got a kid. As I understand it, Jobs had a daughter that he really didn’t spend much time with at all… But this is a more broad criticism of the market economic system. Another good example is Elon Musk. He has of course accomplished more than any other human being – including Jobs. But Elon has hardly done much else except work and sleep… And not many humans are capable of pulling off what Elon has done… How many of us seek or even want that kind of life?…
I have sen this many times. The company has a problem and it brings in consultants and pay them a lot. They come up with a solution. Many of the employees with long experience who actually does the work see problems with this solution, but those opinions are ignored. The result: All the changes and extra work (usually with ridiculous deadlines) falls on the shoulders of the employees. If it’s a success both the consultants and the employees get a pat on the back. If it turns out to be a disaster it’s the emplyees fault. Almost every problem can be solved if the leaders would ask the employees and care enough to listen to what they have to say. Bring together all the people that the problem affects and share ideas and views. I can not understand why an outsiders opinion is more important than that of a experienced employees. What’s also funny is that in many cases the consultants ask the employees and then present the solution as if they came up with it themselves.
Some good points here. I used to work for a large UK utility company and we spent a fortune on consultants to provide quick solutions (at high cost) but because they didn’t understand the industry context all that well we’d often end up with “solutions” that we couldn’t actually implement. One of the worst examples is when we paid a company £15 million for a software solution that didn’t even work and we had to scrap it and write the whole investment off
The issue here might be somewhat more simple – a good consultant will tell management what it needs to hear, whether it wants to hear it or not, and good consultants do exist. With Jobs, that could largely be a non-starter proposition because he bought into his own hype that, because he was in charge of it all, he did it all (except for the things that he wanted to disown anyway). In terms of “qualifications”, I think the progression might be something like this: You’ve never run a company. Oh, you’ve run a company, but you’ve never run a computer company. Oh, you’ve run a computer company, but you’ve never run Apple. In short, no one would be “qualified” to tell Jobs anything he didn’t want to hear if he ruled them “unqualified” and he didn’t want to hear it. On the other hand, if he took the advice and it was successful, he could take credit for taking it and so, again, it’s all about him. For all of Jobs’ supposed “time in the trenches” and tasting bananas, he frequently had very little comparative regard for the people under him, yet that’s the very “credential” that he lorded over consultants.
I like consultants because they are able to frame data in a way that provides optimal clarity to the course of actions. That said, competent people in management should be able to make effective decisions based on their own due diligence, or not be in the job. Reliance on external consultants is ludicrous because those are not the people accountable for outcomes. Steve is right. Too often ‘strategy’ is a cookie-cutter mold with no experience of prior context.
Consultants don’t take risks. They never own the consequences of their actions. They have skin in the game without a soul. The idea of consultants is somewhat against the Babylonian laws of King Hammurabi were an architect will be put to death if a house he built collapses and kills the owner over time.
Yes, a consultant is somewhat (not totally) detached from what happens to the company in the long run. But the same is true for most employees – how many people change jobs after a couple years? Company success is usually measured not in years, but in quarters, so most managers don’t even have the liberty to think in such long terms. And as a consultant, the job is to – consult. to provide an outside perspective. Because if you’re working on apples for years and years and years you might not even know what a banana looks like – and even though the consultant may not know what the banana tastes like, they can at least tell you that.
I do not understand here why the fact that this consultant is running and trying to grow his/her own business is ignored. He/she is also going through challenges, finding solutions, to create a succesful business and make ground in the specific industry. Consulting also requires a bit of creativity. To design an effective business model, be a great leader for employees. What is more some of them do not content themselves with only one business but launch other businessses. They also get to taste their fruit(s) at the end of the day.
Two points, there is a difference between consultants and contractors. His description is right about contractors. They don’t care about the end result. True consultants, who make it their living to serve others, and have clients for years “own” what they do. I have had two clients for over a decade each. I have created and owned and been accountable for countless projects. Second, what I think he may be referring more to though is the strategy consultants (think McKinsey). They come in and tell you what you should do but then don’t help implement the idea. Then, if it fails, they say”you must have implemented our ideas wrong”. Use the consulting companies that actually stay AND implement what they say. Those are the ones that are “in the boat with you” and you can probably trust more.
I think he is right. I’m just starting off a career in software development and I’m starting my first job at a consultancy, but for me I think it’s a great option because I’m not sure what I want to do yet and I want to learn a broad set of skills before I decide what I like and want to specialise in. So I think working at a consultancy is great for that. But after a couple of years I definitely plan to move onto a product company.
Jobs is right of course but I think he is quite blinkered in his thinking. The beauty of a consultant, a good one, is he/she does actually own the implementation, faults and all. He makes a huge assumption that they do not. The benefit the customer gets is that the consultant has performed across many many organisations. So each customer is actually benefitting from the previous organisations experiences. Rather than, one single siloed skewed perspective if you are exmployed by that company. I’ve done it for 35 years. It works amazingly. But you have to be hungry for change. Even when you’re old 🙂
I understand where Jobs is coming from, I agree maybe most consultants are like what he says. Some defenses for consultants: • We have experience working with multiple industries this means that when we work for you we also bring experience from other industries. • A good consultancy business model should revolve around repeat customers. I work with a lot of client organizations that our company has been working for 10 years. During that time we build the scar tissue that Jobs is talking about as we must face our clients and take responsibility for our actions in order to keep a good reputation with the client.
Steve Jobs was literally just a consultant. All he did was make demands and recommendations. He seems to praise manufacturers yet he didn’t invent, or physically make anything, He wasn’t an engineer, he wasn’t well versed in business acumen and economics, nor was he a good administrator. All he did was make demands, and recommendations. He was just in the right place, at the right time and was ambitious/ruthless enough to take advantage of his situation.
I do agree with Steve Jobs that by giving people accountability for their success makes them think much deeper about the decision. We do have a very transient younger workforce (especially in Engineering and Tech) right now that want to “move up” as quickly as possible but often find themselves not really prepared for the new role. When it doesn’t work out, they quickly change to a new employer and try to get a promotion. As a hiring manager it’s frustrating because I’d rather not hire someone who hasn’t seen a project to completion. There are some excellent consulting engineers and process engineers that don’t need to be on a particular project for 3 years. But those usually have gotten to that role by having been on 4-5 projects like that.
It’s weird, today I’ve spent many years consulting and we see our recommendations through all the way to the implementation and even give hyper care after the fact to ensure our recommendations and solutions are successful. Has this not always been the case in consulting? Or is this not the case for all consulting?
I really feel Steve’s stance on this is probably applicable for many consultants however, my own experience as a consultant contradicts this somewhat. I’ve been working as a ERP consultant for 8 years now at the same organization and I have a couple clients that I’ve been allocated to there accounts personally for 12-16 hours per week for the last 7 years. My team and I very much have to learn from our mistakes and see things through. Our business really works on a long term partnership with clients. And reap the rewards of synergistic growth. I have however had to collaborate with other contractors who align with Steve’s analysis exactly.
and that is why after 22 years working everytime people tend to see my management skills and assign me more management role i slowly transfer back or find my way back to engineering role. I had a lot of pat in the back after I release a product I even barely touch. Sure releasing needs a lot of soft skills but I find no satisfaction to releasing products i barely understand what’s inside… let alone not building it myself. I can totally relate to what Jobs is saying.
I am originally from China and graduated from a top 10 school in the United States with a PhD in engineering. As a quick observation, almost none of my American classmates are still in tech, while most of them entered the consulting business right after gradation (with a PhD in engineering). Some of them go to the law school or business school since a lawyer or MBA with a background of hard science seems very popular nowadays. The MBA people will end up in a consulting firm anyway. Most of my Chinese classmates, or immigrant students, including me, are still in tech. I found it very interesting.
Back when I had to hire engineers, one of my rules is I wouldn’t hire people who didn’t stay at prior jobs long enough to see a project from beginning to end, and experience the consequences of their work. For a similar reason, I’d discount references from people who didn’t see the end product of the candidate’s efforts.
Dead on. He’s addressing this as a path to personal growth, but there’s a more significant reason: when people have the authority to make decisions but not the responsibility to deal with the consequences, there is no mechanism to deter dumb decisions. Companies then spend extra time and money to fix dumb stuff- usually of multiple units already on the production floor, where fixing dumb stuff is at its most expensive. Separate responsibility from authority at your peril.
Jobs fails to acknowledge that it is companies that hire consultants (for their own reasons). If the demand were not there, consultants wouldn’t exist. I completely agree though, as a consultant who has worked long contracts and short ones, the longer the contract is, and more importantly, the more embedded I am with the company, and generally, the more responsibility I have, the more I learn. Totally makes sense.
Definitely agree with the idea of there always being more to learn, but I disagree with his opinion of consultants. I work with them all the time and they provide invaluable expertise to companies. Just like with anything, there are always bad apples (npi), but the basic idea of having experts gather data so you can spend your time manufacturing product is very important in business.
The assumption that a consultant doesn’t own something over a period of time is just inaccurate. What consulting had Steve actually done? I’ve been a consultant for many years and I always own my work. Some of my work continues to be iterated 5 or 6 years later under my oversight. It might seem popular to have a pop at consultants but I think it actually shows Steves inexperience (in that area) a bit here.
Consultants DO own something…. their own good name and reputation. I owned a business in my industry for 15 years, and then began consulting. We have over 200 testimonials from customers who we helped massively increase revenue and profit margins over the past 6 years. And we have an incredibly generous refund policy to prove “Skin in the Game.” It’s rarely been used. In the cases in which the refund policy has been used, it has been used for the reason it was intended…. not because of quality of service, but rather because the company wasn’t a good fit for our service – and we discovered this early in the working relationship.
Pretty broad strokes as far as Painting a Profession goes. A poor consultant is no poorer than a poor carpenter, a poor engineer or a poorly performing CEO. The challenge lies in cutting through the noise (they are many & they all sound the same) and finding a consultant worth their pitched value. How is this different than most other professions?
I am a consultant. He is partially right, however, it is untrue that Consultants do not follow through. I was rented for a few years to several companies, where I had to run daily customs and excise operations. I noticed, that I had a tremendous advantage over most employees only occupied with certain topics, because you have to have a broad skillset as a consultant and learn to adapt very quickly. and extend your expertise to many areas. I almost always received a job offer from my clients and had no problems what so ever to keep the business running. I would go as far as saying, that consultants can adapt to the industry much more easily, than the other way around. Most people from the industry quit after a short while, because of the working hours and high amounts of pressure to manage several clients with different needs and very complicated topics at the same time.
True fact 1 : as a consultant or extern your “real” objectives are those of your own company and not those of the client which can lead to absurd situations I was sometimes ashamed for. True fact 2 : when a project is over consultants leave and have few or no feedback about things not working properly over time. I was always sad about this but it is the clients that never take this mission… Make it cheap… But with the turn over of today we can’t say employee can feel the consequences of their decisions either. True fact 3 : leadership of today lead to the necessity for outsourcing (consulting and contracting) most projects… Low headcounts… Last true fact : A consultant is a tool. And if you think further in fact Apple just build a computer that is a tool that an engineer or architect will use to build something extraordinary. Conclusion, consultant or employee is not the debate. For me it’s more about the mindset than about the status. You can have a consultant who feels more involved with the client result than an employee.
There’s no genre of business that is somehow flawed. Consulting requires less capital than manufacturing, and its easier to get your foot in the door as an entrepreneur. And believe it or not consultants are liable for their consultations so Jobs was not right about that part. Whether they are held liable is a different story.
Regarding this article, I’m a bit of an oddball business model. I’m a freelance business development guy and started my firm in 2004. The lion’s share of my clients are still with me today in 2022. Each time I take on a new client I research their sales strategy and make certain that their presence is very weak or non-existent in my territory. That way, when their business grows they know I’m invested in their success. My father’s mantra, and now my adopted one is, “Hard work kicks ass hard.”
Before we blindly agree on what Steve says, we must always remember that Steve was probably also some sort of “manager” within Apple. He didn’t actually build the product, although he painted the pictures. So it’s kinda ironic because, while Steve, as business owner goes through way more than the consultants, he himself probably didn’t do or probably didn’t have enough visibility on the inner workings of his own product. The same comments would have been much more powerful if ‘Bill Gates’ or ‘Zuckerberg’ would have said it, because they built the initial versions of their software/product with their hands.
Spoken like he hired some consultants before…. You either pay consultants to do the work for you so you can taste and eat 95% of the fruit, or you give them a % of the deal and let them own it. Obviously, consultants are here because there is a need for them and employers want 95% of the fruit for themselves….
A lot of people go into consulting because they got tired of working for lousy bosses in companies with no accountability for the incompetence up the ranks. It’s easier as a consultant to bend the ear of those people than to do so as an employee “in the trenches.” The problem isn’t with consultants. The problem is with bad leadership that can’t figure out how to structure their companies to allow their employees a voice equal to their qualifications or experience.
If that was true so many companies out there would not be as horrible as they are. And consultants would not be needed in the first place. It’s a bit more complex than how Jobs thought of it. Plus consultants would be more than happy to implement (and they increasingly do so), it’s companies that aren’t often willing to fork out the costs of that. Plus, if management can’t think and can’t do either, then there’s nothing really that justifies their salary.
Consulting = ADVISING, RECOMMENDING, SUGGESTING, etc… – that is consulting for you… Without business owners who have ownership, accountability and responsibility to see their requirements be implemented, and functionally working to their expectation – consulting is just that, consulting… or advice, recommendation, suggestion… just that… and some come at the cost to the company that goes beyond 6-7 perhaps even 8 (company wide) figures on annual basis…
There are few people like Steve Jobs. He helped innovate the explosion of technology. Apple competitors all want the same thing.. a piece of the pie and they’re getting it. Who will be the next Steve Jobs and Elon Musk? If Elon is able to control the AI market could he buy out everyone? I look around my house as I’m moving out and so many things are obsolete for me. I literally have my iphone, laptop, desktop, chair, desk and this is what I need to survive. We have to thank the Pioneers for leading us to a more technological easier life.
I do agree with his assessment – in my role for the last 25 years in a leading edge technology company I have stressed to clients that “I am the guy, I ain’t going away, I am accountable and here is my mobile phone number “. Thousands of clients big and small have tested me and I think what they found is that I just love this schtuff and even when things go way off the track, we can figure it out, learn the lessons and get back to smooth operations pretty quickly – then go share a Vegetarian pizza – ha!
#### Summary 📝 Steve Jobs emphasises the importance of hands-on experience and taking responsibility for recommendations in consulting. #### Highlights – Consulting lacks the opportunity to learn and improve through experiencing the implementation of recommendations firsthand. – Jobs compares consulting to looking at a two-dimensional picture of a banana, instead of actually tasting it. – He believes that without ownership of results, consultants only gain a fraction of the value and learning opportunities. – In hard times, consultants become a variable expense.
I share these sentiments about consulting firms. You really need to get your hands very dirty before you start consulting. As an experience IT veteran of 30+ years, I’ve contracting consulting firms many times for very specific aspects of our roadmap. However, I’ve learnt not to use them for strategy, stakeholder interviews, or continuous improvement. To do these well, I think that you need to understand the ethos and culture of an organization. Without experiencing this firsthand, you have never “tasted” the organization.
I can see what he is saying but on the flip side I was an environmental consultant once undertaking flood risk assessments. I now realise we actually followed the rules more than the government agencies did and still do. They set the rules and we applied them. Whether they are wrong or not is not the question…
I do believe it has to be a fit…. You have to craft your consulting in a way that it brings value it needs to be relationally driven. I make it clear in my vision statement that this is a long-term relationship that us vested in a companies growth strategy….. they are required to sign me for at least 1 year…..
It’s true to some extend. Loads of companies do the same thing. The idea is that Consulting firms have the knowledge on how to achieve the same outcomes but in a more efficient way, that’s it. They don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of the product or whatever you’re manufacturing or doing, they provide a method that you can apply to change the way you work to make things better. But I completely understand Jobs frustration about consulting firms (at least the big ones) as they lost that purpose and are just a bunch of useless scammers milking millions of dollars for no outcomes, and entangled in so many corruption cases nowadays. If big consulting firms were a religion they would be Scientology.
Consulting Engineer needs degree in related engineering discipline plus Gov’t License (PE/PEng/CEng) of State or Federal Gov’t.For IT Consulting Engineers,degree in CS(Computer Science)/ CpE(Computer Engineering)/IT(Information Technology)/ SE(S/W Engineering) is required plus PE/PEng/CEng registration of Gov’t. Note:- But for H/W or Network Technology Consulting,only first three degrees required & they may also work as S/W Consulting Engineer if they wish.But degree holders of S/W Engineering may work only as S/W Consulting Engineers
Consultants come in many flavor, but the one jobs was describing here are most likely management consultants from firms like McKenzie. They are often hired by executives who are lost on what to do or know what needs to be done but don’t want to take full ownership of unpopular decisions. In some cases they are also used too make the case for higher executive bonuses. These consultants often leave without making any benefit (because of their high costs) or even give bad recommendations that cost companies money and also incurr cost on society.
The truth is companies don’t want to give an employee making 1k a 100$ raise, but have no trouble giving 2k for the same job if it comes from the outsourcing/consultant company. As if giving money to normal people would corrupt them, but sending it to other company would be fine. It is all about politics and power and not much about the real results or costs.
I agree with Steve, but the reality of the jobs market, is that there are 100 times more jobs for consultants than there is money for startups and small business. I think most graduates would love a startup technical role if it was available. I worked in consulting for 5 years and hated it, fortunately I was able to transition to something else, but I really didn’t have a choice after applying for hundreds of jobs, and being out of work for close to 8 months. Startups, research, software, engineering and small business is extremely expensive, and it usually takes a highpowered networkingy sales guy to make sure those tenders and projects are issued a budget. While I wish everyone could choose their passion and pursue their career goals, the reality of jobs market and economic forces means that some jobs are are more financially feasible and can support a salary, while may technical roles are rare and extremely competitive to get into.
I definitely see his point. On the other hand, it would be very foolish to NEVER get a consultant. I think allowing a “fresh” pair of eyes on a project, or allowing an element not native to that environment, could really benefit the company as long as that consultant isn’t crappy. His opinion is very grounded and experienced, but a bit pessimistic, and close minded.
Shows me, based on the first few moments of this speech, that he was one dimensional in his thought process. Many people go into consulting after having been in the roles he spoke of; they move to consulting because they have the expertise/experience. Knowing how to walk through the minefield makes you the best at helping your clients; it also makes you a great mentor. He needed the insight of age and experience…shame no one spoke up.
I agree with his portrayal in technicality. But I also believe although the pursuit of “being a consultant” in an unwise one, they do in fact occur, and occur successfully and can and do benefit mutually both the consultant and their clients. So as a philosophy and desire in life, yes probably not one to assume or apply to any young mind. But when a person with a knack for it is found, I see no harm in attempting to apply their developed form into that role (suggest, encourage, develop further their consultation skills in a particular or broad spectrum of areas). Some people have great ideas for most things they contemplate but lack the focus/motivation/desire/passion to continue in one novel physical or mental pursuit. Consultation is a gamble that clients have the right to take, and if they are right, could reward them. And in turn, it very surely also allows brilliant and insightful innovative minds that might otherwise feel burned out in devoting their efforts towards a single entity or operation to attain satisfaction and fulfillment. I like discouraging intro college kids from it, but I also like reminding an appropriate mind of its existence before they walk a stage and sign off to a corporate life.
A consultant has an external and objective view which is very important – to say that Consultants have no perspective because they did not build the business would be equivalent to saying a doctor is only competent if he already had the disease himself he tries to cure. And just because Steve Jobs says something does not mean it is a universal law.
i am a consultant and I nv took ownership for my client’s outcomes, because they cannot afford to have me on a project once their budget run dry on the timeline anyway. like Jobs said, since I dont need to own the outcome and its consequences, therefore I just need to get paid and leave a mess for the client after the rolloff. OH, and it’s not just me, most people just come in a project, do a shit job, dump it and roll off. In my heart, I pity my clients, I never understood why clients paid so much for this shit/scam. #DELOITTE
Jobs was not an average CEO. He had the rare ability to attract and hire the required talent. Hence his perception about consultants can not be generalized. A typical CEO’s weekly calendar get filled with meetings with top consulting firms. Those consultants get to influence decisions which involve spending serious money. Companies won’t have those skills in-house. As such they require such advisory on a need basis hence those consultant fees tend to be very high.
My opinion on this is that Mr. Jobs is only partially true. It starts as a one – or two-dimensional view through banana, but in time, it adds more and more bananas not only to learn a path of success but also a path of failure. To build a successful business, you need to own but also prevent problems from accumulating before they materialize.
That’s only one perspective. Another one is that companies are hiring consultants for that breadth (even though it may not have depth) of experience. And they are engaging consultants to find solutions that their own people (with depth, but not so much breadth) can’t fix. Sometimes company culture prevents workable solutions. Someone without that can do things and go places that the native culture won’t allow.
Working as a hired resource my big annoyance was not being allowed to fix issues I thought were important because the customer didn’t want to pay for it. If it’s not a new feature they want or a problem they’re experiencing right now it’s difficult to convey the importance of little things like… security, or refactoring to fix their messed up legacy code so we can work 100 times faster later on.
Insightful but…. I’ve seen managers reject employee ideas only to accept same solution from an outside “expert” aka consultant. That’s (partly) why I became a consultant, 2/3’s of “gigs” were long term b/c I took client problems seriously as well as responsibilitiy for success. IOW I wasn’t a hit-and-run type consultant like Steve is describing.
Consulting is as serious a trade as would be manufacturing. Both have their place in commerce and business. It is wrong to say that consultant Just looks at pictures but doesn’t know anything beyond what’s on the wall. Most successful consultants have deep domain experience. Just he could stand there and pontificate to entertain the class does not mean consulting is a light hearted avocation for the non serious as he alleges.
Most consultants I have worked with have been useless. They come in and tell you how to do everything because of how smart they are and how great they did this one thing 20 years ago, and they leave and don’t have any accountability. All the while collecting a massive paycheck. No thanks. If we can’t figure out a problem ourselves and with the people we have in the building already, then we have much bigger problems.
I haven’t been in industry for long, but from what I’ve seen consultancy can be a vicious cycle for companies, as the output is often something only the consultant can maintain (not to be a cynic, but I would argue this is often by design). Enterprise solutions have extremely high switching cost, so it’s not uncommon to keep doubling down. The result? Your organization gradually atrophies as institutional knowledge and skills diminish, at which point you become dependent on external talent. The only way to recover is to reallocate your consulting budget to the core business, but our thinking is too short-term in US to make this decision feasible for any given individual. Whoever makes that judgment call would inevitably be fired due to short-term performance decline for long term growth.
I completly agree with Jobs here, but I think I do so in another way than most people: I’m currently in med school and therefore spend much time in hospitals and such. And what I more frequently see are people who want to be in charge, make a general plan for a patient’s wellbeing and so on, but those people are not willing to actually ACT the responsiblity given to them.
Kind of like every front end engineer who comes in and sets up a ridiculously complicated build system nobody understands just to put some error messages on a form and then goes and gets another job somewhere else after a year to set up a completely different ridiculously complicated build system just to put some error messages on a form.
That is exactly what Consulting companies sell though. There are certain decisions where the right answer is not known in advance. In such cases there are two ways to move forward. If the company’s culture allow for failures, somebody may take responsibility and go for it. If however the company’s management is a pack of sharks fighting for the promotion, no one wants to be the one who made the wrong call. Come in consulting company. They come with a solution and then they leave. Even if it was a bad solution, not a single manager is ultimately responsible for it. It came from a reputable expert, right? And the expert is no longer here. This is an essential in demand service that keeps those organizations moving.
I’m working as a consultant and I’m currently working for over a year on my current project. I understand Steve’s point, but it’s a nice thought that you can just leave when everything goes haywire (which you can also do as an employee I guess). Responsibility can be a difficult thing to deal with, especially if you’re a concientious person. Wanting to do things right, but not being able to because of thight deadlines, too many different projects and bad management decisions can easily set you on the path to a burn-out. If you want people to stay on a project long time, you need to keep them happy and not overworked, with good management. Though in the current market short project cycles and lack of accountability are encouraged. We’re not living in a stable economy, it’s running and standing still, boom and bust. It’s not strange that people are discouraged from taking responsibility under these conditions.
Depends on the consultants. Depends on the job. Consulting for a product architecture for a years-long thing? Yeah, maybe not the best place for relying on consultants. An audit? A consultant who isn’t involved in office politics and won’t face career blowback for an honest assessment is probably perfect.
What he is criticising is the consulting a la McK, BCG & Co. Not consulting. With that in mind, I disagree with him on his assessment as there are plenty of ways to do it differently. The value in consulting lies in the fact that some fresh, external eyes can provide a different perspective and/or expertise. But that requires a broader appraoch, other than charging millions, sending in juniors, throwing a report at the client and then leave. It also includes coaching, interim with some level of ownership. And something like that cannot be done with the usual consulting workforce.
I would stop doing consulting if permanent positions were correctly compensated. You might gain more “ownership” experience staying a long time at a company but sadly, more often than not, your compensation doesn’t follow the experience gained. If you don’t want to spend years working your ass off and leaving money on the table then you have to jump ship when: 1) You aren’t learning anymore. 2) You aren’t compensated correctly for the experience gained.