Consulting
Approach
The secret on how to become a great consultant:
Take all the blame, distribute all the praise.
Here is the thing, being a consultant is a thankless job, and it needs to be. If a project does not go as planned, the success does not happen. Take the blame. You are an external, it does not matter. They got you into the company to improve the state of the client, to improve them. If it does not happen, you are to blame. And they need someone to blame, so just take it.
If you succeed, spread the praise. You worked with them, it was the right decision that they hired you, so they did great. And you just humble helped them to unlock the potential they already had.
Thing is, in scenario 1, if you deflect blame, they will not hire you again. And they will badmouth you if somebody asks. You you take the blame, they might not hire you again, but they will respect you when somebody asks about you.
In scenario 2, if you take all the praise, they will not feel good about themselves, and will not WOM (word of mouth) you. If you spread the praise, they will feel good about themselves, talk about their success and will so WOM you.
A thankless job. I love it.
Orange Juice Test
Ask about the solution of a hard task, see Weinberg Example Blog Post (search for Orange Juice Test Weinberg)
On the Hertz Website disaster
It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms.
The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around.
Meanwhile at the big company, you’ll have the opposite problem. A team of people with decades of experience, but who don’t really know anything about anything other than how to make their corporate machine not fire them. They’ll think they know what they want, and will confidently tell you…but in actuality, these people have zero understanding of technology or even how their business runs. And who can blame them, they’ve spent a 30 year career not doing or risking anything specifically, so its hard to learn how anything works with no feedback loop.
It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough, before the client does their best to try to ruin the project out of sheer hubris and incompetence.
This case is famous for being one where the dance went so bad it became a meme.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32185108
