After 20 years in the coal industry I spent the next 20 years as a self-employed management consultant. It’s a fabulous way to make a crust.  Companies were paying me £500 a day to hear what I thought. The joke is that after 8 o’clock at night, anyone could hear what I thought for free, down the pub.
 

Happy days.

And I found it all rather easy.

The modus operandi was quite formulaic and founded on the precepts of Perception and Expectation.

Let’s take Perception.

Picture – Tall, slim (hard to imagine now, I know), grey-haired (important, that), dark blue suit.  In short, wise and successful belying that all they were getting was Cloglump Coopey.  Add to this the backround in coalmining and an ‘earthy’ manner – it was a combination which implied knowledge and experience with down to earth call-a-spade-a-fucking-shovel commonsense.  Deadly to Chief Execs.

So, moving on to Expectation.

I would always explain in interviews that I didn’t bring magic only a new way of looking things.  (Code for ‘I shan’t do anything’).

I’d map out what I would do; starting with evaluating the issues and not making glib solutions for the first few months (Code for ‘I shan’t do anything’). 

I would say that I would talk to the people on the job (‘They know what to do; if only they were asked’).  This appealed to the Company’s corporate sense of flattery.

I would ask ‘daft’ questions under the guise that they were challenges to the received wisdom of the status quo.  Ahhh! The number of times I’ve seen Chief Execs (who, remember, know little of the detail of how operations run) turn to their Management Team and say “We should look into that”.

Some time later, no doubt, the CEO would remark to his team, ‘That consultant.  All that money we paid him.  What did he do?’

The answer is – he lay on his Costa Teguise sunbed enjoying the fruits of his hard work.