How was your commute into work this morning?
Was it stimulating? Was it one of your top 10 travel experiences?
Or was it a mundane chore, possibly even to the extent that you can’t even recall parts of it. If you were driving, you might have experienced ‘highway hypnosis’ or ‘white line fever’, where you drive for miles without causing any harm but without really knowing what you were doing.
Over many years of working as a communications consultant I have often been asked the question at the end of a presentation, “so, what other clients do you have in our sector?”
It’s a logical question; it’s comforting to think that the person in front of you is a specialist and we equate specialism in the professions with expertise. Nobody wants to be the brain surgeon’s first patient or the barrister’s first defendant.
But communications isn’t the law, or brain surgery. There isn’t a right or wrong way to go about communicating.
There is a variant in the PR meeting, which basically asks which journalists you know in the company’s target media.
This is rooted in the belief that a little black book of contacts is the sure way to secure positive media coverage and protect the company when a cold wind blows. This is an anachronism when about 40% of journalism jobs have been lost in the past 10 years.
A contacts book will always be trumped by knowing what will make a journalist’s ears prick up; they simply don’t have the time to indulge an approach that relies on past glories.
Returning to the specialism versus perspective question, in over 20 odd years or working as a consultant I can say that the projects and clients which have produced my best work are the ones where I had no prior experience of the sector and where the outcomes of a campaign are uncertain.
These were the equivalent in my driving analogy to those memorable drives over a mountain pass or through a foreign city when your nerves jangle and you are alive to every piece of new information to make quick decisions.
I might be wired to rise to a challenge, but I am far from unique. I’d go further and suggest that the essential qualities of a good consultant are that they are intellectually curious, thrive on ambiguity and see problems as challenges.
Familiarity, predictability and the mundane are hemlock to someone who has the self-belief (some might say arrogance) to carve a career out of advising others on the way forward.
The irony of the “what experience do you have in our sector” question is that it is often posed by people who themselves who have been headhunted after achieving success in other industries.
I met a group of senior executives the other day, not one of whom had worked in their current industry before, yet were achieving great things because they were applying insights and perspectives gained in other sectors to forge something new. It didn’t stop them asking the ‘specialism’ question though….
Imagine if this question was expressed a different way: “If we give you this job, which of our competitors’ strategies will you be re-heating and serving up to us?” Or, “which ideas that you can’t sell to your other clients will you be dusting off for us?”
You’d have to be a strange kind of manager to aspire to repeat yourself for the rest of your career or in the motoring analogy, to be a bus driver, ploughing up and down the same route each day.
Maybe the search for the thrill, or the special moment was what led the Captain of the Costa Concordia to divert from his pre-programmed route with disastrous consequences.
What do you think?