[Sigia-l] Gordom Ramsey consulting?

[Troy Winfrey]

Ramsay's brilliance is all about the yelling. This is because it's his
authentic style, a true reflection of who he is, and he uses it to target
problems of a specific type and with a specific audience. It's also a bit
obsessive, which is what you pay truly great consultants for. See the profile
of Ram Charan in
Fortune<http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405482/index.htm>for
a different flavor of the same principle.

I think billable hours are total crap. Fee-based work is the only way to go.
It frees you to become obsessive for your clients and takes you out of the
chains of hour-based structure. For complex strategic reasons (see
Christensen's Innovator's series for a brilliant explication), billable
hours are a beguiling trap. They prevent you from being flexible and
responsive to competition. They constrain great solutions and even keep you
from taking certain kinds of work...in many cases, the work you need to be
doing to stay relevant, such as working with startups or disruptive business
entrants.

I am pleased as punch about the impending recession. I am going to focus my
practice on optimizing my clients' IT, identifying cash leak points, and
helping them continue to exist for less money. They will pay for this
because it will save them money and because they will worry about continuing
to exist, so they will be motivated to engage anyone that can keep that from
happening. The best part is that my fee-based structure will *destroy* my
typical agency competition, since they won't be able to swing their massive
guns around to track this tiny but very profitable target. It probably will
be a bloodbath for those who can't adapt.

I have to say: consultants of the world, who's *your* Gordon Ramsay? Are you
really Gordon Ramsay in this story, or are you the restaurant owner? All
these people who have terrible decor, disgusting menus, slovenly kitchens?
Who justify these business killers because "it's the only way to do it?" Be
honest. Are you refusing to do the right thing because, well, you need
Gordon Ramsay to call you a donkey and give you a boot in the bum?