Got an email from a reader this morning. He found an old blog post I’d written on my personal blog, in 2016, on consulting companies.
Conversation
I think I wrote it because I was dissatisfied — I never figured out how to ‘win’ when I was still running the consultancy. This dissatisfaction lead me, eventually, to David Maister’s book, which I summarised here:
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I think what strikes me about the two posts is that while my original observations were directionally correct, they weren’t useful! Maister’s ideas, on the other hand, had levers that were immediately useful to the operator.
Usefulness is always a higher bar than correctness.
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I think it’s experiences like these that make me suspicious of “correct”-sounding arguments by smart writers on the interwebs.
Yes, you are directionally correct. Your English is 👌. Your arguments are sound. But are your ideas *useful*? Have you tried them? Do they work?
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To paraphrase Lee Kuan Yew, “That’s a nice, high-falutin’ idea. But so what? How does that affect Singapore? How can we use it?”
I’ve found the ‘so-what?’ question remarkably clarifying.
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Another quote in this genre, from Christopher Leonard’s Kochland.
There are probably more, from other, smarter people. And you can probably see why it’s such an attractive epistemology: what is true is whatever you can verify for yourself.
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