What’s the value of management consulting?

From a TOC perspective: Paying tribute to a Great Pragmatic Thinker

In a public speech he gave in 1971 he warned:
“The wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

And he went further. In his 1973 paper titled, “Applying Information Technology to Organizational Design”, Prof. Simon wrote:

“The information-processing systems of our contemporary world swim in an exceedingly rich soup of information. In a world of this kind, the scarce resource is not information; it is processing capacity to attend to information. Attention is the chief bottleneck in organizational activity, and the bottleneck becomes narrower and narrower as we move to the top of organizations.”

Reading that ^:
1. I enjoyed it, helps articulate some ideas that aligned with my own experience. Insight porn.
2. But I find myself holding back from absorbing or copying the mindset because it feels too theoretical and I don’t want to train / wire my brain to follow that pattern / goes too deep into that style of thinking.


Got these open:


Btw this is completely the skill / mindset I’ve picked up during and now trying to replicate to the whole team in SA. The consulting mindset:

A possibility to evaporate the conflict is to radiate your real views, but be careful with the style of your answer/explanation. If you are not able to estimate without knowing more, then give an estimate based on certain assumptions, BUT RADIATE THOSE ASSUMPTIONS CLEARLY. For instance, “If we assume the current economical situation stays as it is today, then I estimate the potential between X and Y, however, if there is a change then the difference might be much larger.” Now, if the client does not accept such a careful answer, then the chance of giving him value are very low.

Or a wordy way of saying: notice and state all your assumptions


Haven’t read these two:

  • https://elischragenheim.com/2020/04/02/after-the-crisis/
  • https://elischragenheim.com/2020/03/26/conferences-between-onsite-and-virtual/

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