Don't work. Do.

For most of my career I was one of the first folks in an office to play consultant bingo whenever one of my companies brought someone in to consult. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend it - essentially you give your employees inconspicuous bingo cards, but instead of letters and numbers, the cards are filled with inane words and phrases that get thrown out by consultants for admiration as though they are Edison first igniting the electric bulb.

OK, looks like Ryan wins this game with, "Lean, bandwith, boil the ocean, 30,000 ft view, and quick wins" It always felt like the ultimate insult to bring someone in that was supposed to provide greater insights in a day (or week or whatever) than the full-time leadership team. And yet, now I am a consultant. Why?

Well, at one of my professional stops I worked at an organization that was facing a huge challenge that could only be solved in one of two ways - it could completely change its business model, likely endure short-term revenue pain, and emerge on the other side as the clear leader in its industry or it could hide under the covers and hope that monsters weren't real. Well, let's just say the monster was very F'ing real. That of course is the story of many, many businesses, BUT in the midst of that circumstance I recalled a comment made to me by a senior leader during my interview, which was that "we don't have any consultants here - everyone has to work".

At the time I nodded and thought, 'absolutely' because as I mentioned above, I was no fan of consultants. Yet, when I was part of a small group of folks clamoring for and pitching the big change that was needed, it dawned on me. No one is ready to do anything because everyone is already working. That is why you need a consultant - someone that can collaborate with your leadership team to analyze, to debate, to improve, and most importantly to stop working and start doing. Those are remarkably different things.