Consulting Consultants

I've been a product developer/marketer my entire career. I walked into the job accidentally, and have done essentially the same thing either independently or as an employee since then. I've spawned lots of products and a few businesses, and I continue to create them. My latest, Blue Ocean Strategy Createware -- the only authorized practitioner's tool for Blue Ocean Strategy -- is shaping up to be one of the coolest yet.

Some consultants are brilliant: they have great insight and they're fantastic at what they do. There's a good chance that by hiring a strong Blue Ocean Strategy Consultant that you'll raise the chances of finding a blue ocean opportunity. But some others consultants are lousy: the damage they can cause to an organization far outweighs any value they bring to it.

The key, I suspect, is simple: ask a consultant what they've done that they're really proud of. Ask them what business and products they've built, sold, or acquired. Then listen for a tinge of nostalgia and pride in their voices as they rattle off a few, along with a bunch of digressions about the challenges they came across. They may even send you an email with a bunch more they remembered after your conversation ended. The best consultants will be enthusiastic even about their flops, explaining what caused the failure and what they'd do to prevent it next time.

Good consultants will talk more about the reach and influence of their products, rather than the revenue they generated: I don't entirely understand why, but this trait seems to exist with the best of them. You'll have a tough time getting them to stop talking about how at least one product or service, that they were a key member in creating, rocked the world in its market.

The bad consultants will drone on endlessly about money and metrics. That isn't to say that money and metrics aren't important -- they're vital to business -- but they're just measurements of deeper factors influencing success.

Most importantly, remember that unless you've hired a full featured product development firm like IDEO, and trust them enough to sell whatever they produce, you are still going to have to do the work. This may work with a tiny number of the very best firms, like IDEO, Frog Design, or Fluid. But more often than not, it won't lead to success.

A business process like Blue Ocean Strategy -- in the hands of competent consultants -- makes it more likely that you'll succeed. But you still have to do a lot of work to get there. There is no low-cost magic machine that will turn out blue oceans on demand: the path to success is paved by sweat, disappointment, and endless hours of hard work, plenty of which will result in nothing.

But once you succeed -- once you unlock that blue ocean business -- you'll look back on those endless hours of toil with nostalgia as you struggle, like Nintendo, to crank out widgets fast enough to meet consumer demand.