It looks obvious

Enjoying the warm weather and the great autumn we traveled yesterday along the hudson river and stop in several places. One of our stop was in the first American winery - Brotherhood - hopping to catch the last tour at 4 PM and maybe to enjoy tasting of few of the wines. The place itself is very nice and worth a visit, we also enjoyed the brotherhood riesling before and liked it so we had somewhat high expectations from the visit.

Arriving at about 3:00 PM we assumed that we have plenty of time, but we were wrong. We discovered that the lines for wine purchasing, and people obviously bought many bottles of wine, and for the winery tour are same lines. Additionally some computer problems caused the payment process to slow down even more than normally. So after standing in line for about 45 minutes we start to express our displeasure from the service and from the fact that we are going to miss the tour due to unreasonably bad service.

Quickly we were pulled out of the line and registered to tour and while waiting to the tour - and to the tour guide to pull everybody that still waiting in line - One of the owners came to apologize. He expressed his frustration with the new process that was initiated by consultants that the winery hired to improved its processes. One of the things he repeatedly said was that the visiting process was working well for years and that he doesn’t understand why they had to change it.

The fault of the messy inefficient process is, obviously, the owner’s and not the consultant’s. He hired them to recommend changes - and he is the one that should make the decision if he is going to institute them completely, partially, or as sane company owner should do - ignore them. The fact is that hiring consultants to improve the processes in your own company is a bad decision - nobody should know better than you where are your weak points, nor do they have the knowledge about your priorities, vision and the way your company should do better. Most of the time the visiting consultant experience is limited to consulting and they tries to force general solutions on specific problems.

I don’t remember where did I heard the expression “outsourcing the brain” before but the person that coined it was painfully accurate. I do remember, however, this wonderful post that concluded:

The whole fraud is only possible because performance metrics in knowledge organizations are completely trivial to game. The best part is that most management consultants, the stunningly good-looking, bright, earnest chipmunks with 4.0s in Russian Lit from Harvard who work for these companies, have absolutely no way of knowing this, so they can go through this whole exercise without even knowing that they’re doing it! They get all the way through the 2-year associate program on their way to MBA school without even realizing that they haven’t done a goddamn thing about productivity, all they’ve done is caused a fairly pointless transfer of wealth from ExxonMobilConoco to BainMcKinseyGartner’s senior partners. And it’s a lot of fun! First class flights to Houston and Oslo! Helping the world be more productive! Rock on, young stunningly-good-looking Management Consultant.

The tour, by the way, was very nice and so were some of the wines we tasted.