I generally don’t like consultants. It seems that as much as you try, you can’t pay someone to really care about your problems.

Steve Jobs on consultants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4CNB80SRc

I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil in consulting,” Jobs said. “(But) I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages, and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results. Not owning the implementation, I think, is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better

This is similar to the value of most college degrees. Students go to school and learn about things, but never actually do the thing. There is more knowledge gained from doing that cant fit into a book.

Conversely:

“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.” -Warren Buffett

I would take it a step further. You shouldn’t rely too much on a consultant or contractor. Certain things are your job, and you cant just offload that to a third party. It’s ok to get help with things, but you have to choose what your core competency should be. For example, let’s say you have a company that sells software, but you dont actually develop the software in-house, you have a contracted company do the dev work. Then you don’t really have a software development company, you have some kind of sales company. The analogy needs work, but I think the ide is solid. Really decide what you want to DO and focus on that. You can offload the things that aren’t important to you.

The problem is not Consultants taking money for Powerpoints, the problem is Managers giving away money for Powerpoints. @Thomas-mt4rx

I like this too. To be fair, there can be good reasons for this.

We often think of the managers in an organization as being at the “top” of the org chart. That gives this idea that they have some high ground or some vantage point to see whats going on throughout the organization, but that isn’t true. Managers are not in a spot that allows good visibility based on their rank. Managers might have leverage and authority to give orders and make changes, but they need to work separately to make sure they are getting context from their reports. This is why we have to report things to The Board. The Board doesn’t know what is happening on the ground level, but it’s your job to tell them. I think sometimes that relationship goes bad.