Hitting That Sweet Spot

IT consulting takes countless forms thanks to the mindboggling complexity of technology and the people who build a lifetime career on it. You can be a middleware consultant and earn your living by maintaining crappy products whose functionality still eludes me. You can be a security consultant and write governance documents that have a close resemblance to a Danielle Steel novel. You can be a project manager and your job is to defuse political feuds going on between two groups. All this non-sense pays very well but - let's speak frankly here - it's not the Klondike.

There's a specialty in the IT industry that very few people in the consulting business can achieve because you have to be fairly crazy and probably delusional, but finding one is like hitting a home run from a financial standpoint.

When you're considered a "luminary", it means that your Kool-Aid has found its prime target. No matter how crazy you are, no matter how disconnected you can be, many people will listen to you and ask for more. Simply said, it's a match made in heaven. Of course some people who maintain a ground connection with reality will quickly realize you’re just a phoney, but those people are not my concern because they are not the ones willing to pay for a luminary.

I heard many cases where consultants came up with ideas that were simply nuts, I mean totally bogus, anyone with an ounce of common sense would have said that this was a road to fiscal perdition. But the customer found the idea so appealing that multi-million dollar projects where founded. The crazier the idea, the bigger the budget. Strangely enough, this situation occurs only with public customers, crazy ideas don't stick in the commercial sector – well at least not very long – ask those who worked at Lehman Brothers for examples.

Although it's very bad news for the taxpayer when such crazy projects are jumpstarted, it's tremendously positive good news for consulting firms because it means millions in revenues over the course of several years.

When the customer is hooked up on a delusion, the last thing you do is to wake it up and talk about reality, because at that moment you're killing the goose that gives you golden eggs. What do you do then? You jump into the game, talk the same lingo and offer new ideas to augment the flawed idea, because the customer will love you even more.

Have you ever had a close contact with a luminary? How did you feel afterward? Let me know your experience at fake mike at gmail dot com. May profitable growth enlighten your day.