You aren't Da Vinci.

You aren’t Da Vinci.

attentionindustry:

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Very few people are Da Vinci, very few people have the ability to excel in many different areas. But the assumption that you HAVE to be Da Vinci causes some serious problems.

If you’re crap with numbers, you wouldn’t do your own accounting. It would be idiotic to do so. Similarly, If you are a world class painter, you would probably want to hire someone of similar skill to frame your work.

This is my issue with people who insist that consultants are often useless, because they can’t ‘do it themselves’. I’d rather work with someone who has an expertise in a specific element of my business that I don’t, than assume that because they can’t paint, I should ignore their framing expertise.

Just because you make the best furniture in the world, doesn’t mean you can sell it to people in an effective way. If you have a great internal marketing team repping a strong product line, that doesn’t necessarily make them a team that specializes in influencer relations, or social media outreach, or a specific demographic or community.

If you use consultants as a security blanket, or to protect yourself from the realization that what you are doing or selling isn’t sufficient, that’s a problem. But if you refuse to bring in an expert frame maker because they can’t paint, you’ve missed the point entirely.

I have no idea if your post is a result of my post on awesomeness. But for the sake of the discussion I will assume it was.

This argument doesn’t make sense to me. There is a difference between hiring someone to do your accounting and hiring someone to do your thinking. Talking about “awesomeness” like Umair does will not help your business in any way. In order to truly understand something you need to do it — that is how you get insight. Not by observing the news and reading blog posts. You do it by talking to customers, by solving problems, trial and error. And you may not be become Da Vinci but chances are you will find problems that you can solve, and these problems get more complicated and rewarding as you go along.

I agree that hiring someone to do your thinking is a problem. But hiring someone to share expertise and help strategize about a specific aspect of your business is entirely different. I guess I have trouble conceiving of consultants as people who come in, talk about vague, undefinable concepts, and leave. I generally call those people a waste of time. Consultants, on the other hand, are usually asked to make recommendations.

My main point was that consultants don’t come in without insight in what they are consulting on. My argument is that to help a painting look good in a frame, you need insight in framing, not necessarily insight in painting. My point is that these people, if they are at all useful, have experience in doing - in executing and strategizing certain tasks or groups of tasks, rather than in the core business of the firm that is hiring them at the moment.

attentionindustry