How many from consulting?
*After seeing a significant number of hands go up*
Oh, that’s bad. A mind is too important to waste. You should do something.
AUDIENCE: Why is that bad? A consultant can come into a company and use your system, and basically build their applications in predictably short amounts of time, and show them a working product.
S J: The only consultants I’ve seen that I think are truly useful are the ones that help us sell our computers. No seriously, I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil in consulting. I think that without owning something, over an extended period of time — like, a few years — where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick 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 fraction of the value, and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better. And so you do get a broad cut at companies, but it’s very thin. It’s like a picture of a — I’m a vegetarian, so I won’t use steak.
But it’s like a picture of a banana. You might get a very accurate picture, but it’s only two dimensional. And without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three dimensional. So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls. You can show it off to your friends. You can say look, I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes. But you never really taste it. And that’s what I think.
The first time I heard this insight, I thought this was phenomenally articulated. There is always this tension between the doers and the thinkers. The thinkers think that the doer is dumb and the doers think that the thinker doesn’t know the dust and grime of being in the field. And they both are right to some extent. However, I do think that the best work happens when thinking and doing is being done by the same person or team. Thinking and doing should be integrated.
Steve’s dissatisfaction with consultants might have been because he was always working to create new industries – at the cutting edge of technology – totally reimagining them. Any consultant would find it hard to contribute where there is no template, and a new paradigm has to be not just imagined, but built with custom nuts and bolts.
However, as I grow up, I realise Steve is not completely right. A consultant might be very much needed for legacy businesses with poor exposure to tech – for example, digitisation of Indian Railways. A huge operation, being run by bureaucrats with very basic or no domain knowledge – of either railways or software. I am sure such organisations can make very good use of consultants.