Clueless in Consultopia

Leaving Uday Chopra aside, of all the remaining threats to mankind, consultants are the gravest and most undermined danger to humanity. Just like mosquitoes (who suck blood & produce the irritating huuuuuuuuuuuuuuu) enjoy the unexpected and dubious distinction of being the most dangerous animal on the planet, consultants (who suck money & produce the irritating sound of bullet points flashing) hold the dubious distinction of being de-facto heirs to Uday Chopra's throne.

For, when consultants aren’t busy in strategic reengineering of primordial processes, streamlining innovative initiatives, facilitating blueskying sessions on emerging economic paradigms etc. , they are planning something diabolically dangerous i.e. envisioneering Life in Consultopia (Consultants’ Utopia.)

For a few moments, imagine that you are a consultant in Consultopia (sounds scary?)... What would your *normal* life in Consultopia be like? Showcased hereunder is a vignette from the *envisioneered* life in Consultopia:

• You believe in having robust & structured mechanisms for your personal life (whatever that means :-P)

• For wooing women, you don’t read the mushy stuff meant for lesser mortals {e.g. Linda Goodman love signs etc.}, rather you use Michael Porter’s competitive advantage theory and the BCG Matrix as an independent objective source to assess your market position and outwit other guyz in competition.

• You ask for a detailed “Statement of Purpose” from your girlfriend before marriage. {It’s an inevitable part of the blue-tooth enabled best-practices. OK....Ok...i agree that the blue-tooth part is crap..but then so is rest of the statement ;)}

• Your girlfriend is made to sign an independence declaration before marriage. {That she is not related to any of your competitors and is not marrying with the sole intention of stealing private & confidential (googled up) data from your laptop}

• Your wedding card HAS to be a PPT.

• Your wedding card also has a Brobdingnagian PDF attachment for disseminating shared values, vision, mission, and objectives of your marriage.

• You also emboss the standard Boilerplate of your company on the wedding card. {I know it looks weird but consultants HAVE the capacity to do that}

• You hold an urgent (& brief) brainstorming session (min. duration 14 hours) with the girl’s family (on the wedding eve) to discuss the Approach & Methodology of the marriage and strategies to make wedding arrangements more “customer-centric.”

• Due to downstream effects of this paradigm shift in Approach & Methodology, the wedding is delayed by 3 days. {But you are satisfied as you followed the right process. Remember,
  

  It doesn’t matter what the outcome is.....following the process is important }

• You prepare a formal document which lists "roles & responsibilities" of the married couple.

• A SOD (Segregation of Duties) matrix is created to prevent either person from doing incompatible work.

• After marriage, you don’t attend to any problems which are covered in spouse's list.

• Also, you don’t attend to those problems of your list which are not escalated through the prescribed format of “issue-log”

• You don’t eat food unless it is accompanied by a "ready-to-eat" certificate signed by the preparer.

• You disown/abandon food if there is no supporting documentation stating the Approach & Methodology recipe used in preparing it. {It might mean that you waste the food, sleep hungry or order from outside. Leave the inconvenience aside; be proud of the (ludicrous) fact that you followed the right process.}

• Whenever you and your spouse discuss something, children note the discussion as MOM {minutes of meeting}, take counter signatures and file it.

• You don’t like to be called as a father. Your child HAS to address you as Chief Mentor.

• Your child's admission form contains a suo-moto attachment in the form of a disclaimer. {Whereby you declare that you are not responsible for your child's action in the school.}

• If you are relocating/shifting to a new home then you can give your wife a strategy for end-to-end-seamless-transition and *facilitate* the relocation. {But doing any *real* work does not come under your “roles & responsibilities”}

• For your child’s grades, you calculate variances and perform their root cause analysis.

• You ACTUALLY issue a 500 page report (out of which 480 pages contain disclaimers) to your child on how he can improve his grades.

• Your child starts referring Harry Potter, Chacha Chowdhary, Naagraaj, and Supercommando Dhruva etc. as Best-in-breed "thought leadership" publications.

• At your home, an ice-cream CANNOT be bought directly. Competitive bids are invited from neighborhood shops and internet vendors alike. {It might mean that the dessert for Sunday night party arrives on Thursday, but then every true blue consultant knows that “The outcome doesn’t matter, following the process is critical.”}

• At your home, weekend newspapers come from a different vendor {To avoid concentration of vendors. They probably don’t arrive till Monday midnight but then (as you know by now) The process is important}

Did your heart skip lots of beats? Did being a temporary Consultizen scare you even more than Uday Chopra’s face? Don’t worry! There is hope coz consultants seldom practice what they preach :-P So go have an ice-cream at the neighborhood shop (don’t invite competitive bids) and you shall feel better :-D

For once, we agree that our politicians & bureaucrats have given us very little to cheer about (I am being positive), but if consultants have their hands on this world then undoubtedly we would find the existing potholes & mud roads as the roads to El Dorado.