Class, Cuteness and Cleverness - What’s the real Consultancy Game?

Last night I travelled a fair distance to listen to an innovation guru speak to the MBA students at a big Management School in the North West.

He was rather good and spoke frankly of his progress via Oxbridge, powerful advertising agencies on the U.S. West Coast, the upswing of the glory years of the Dotcom boom and the desire sweeping through the UK Public Sector to be more innovative and relevant.

I don’t doubt that he is good at what he does – but I did get to thinking about what “good” might mean in this context. And it also very much got me thinking about my own consultancy aspirations and activities.

You see, the lecture theatre was absolutely full of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have called “Cultural Capital”. There were a large number of people who were in the later stages of enjoying elite education. This Management School has grown exponentially in recent years, with success in attracting students and staff feeding an upwards spiral of new buildings, more courses and more funding. This is not a place of poverty of thought, more particularly poverty of expectation and confidence, and, crucially not a place of material poverty.

Two other of Bourdieu’s concepts also applied very strongly: Habitus is the cultural ambience of assumptions, subjective status and self-directed image making and productive actions, Hexus is the actual physical embodiment of the Habitus, our physical bearing and the shape of our presence in space.

The lecture theatre as full of people with big, confident personalities. They wore clean, modern casual clothing, studiedly understated. The guru seemed to have the biggest personality of them all……not that mine is small, and certainly wouldn’t have sounded small as I loudly asked a question, which, on reflection, might have been more about boasting of my own assumed intellect and business activities than actually being a question at all!

In fact, the guru spoke at length about always having to appear at the outer edges of what was credible to assume and claim. We didn’t talk a great deal at all about value-add and real, sustainable client improvement.

I shifted my pricey Timberland boots around quite a bit towards the end, wondering how much of this consultancy game in which I am an enthusiastic player is really more about reflecting class, cuteness and cleverness than it is about rich, useful content.

I for one (not that assume our speaker does either) certainly do not want to be part of an elitist confidence trick. Today I am giving a lot of thought to what it is that I actually claim to do, not who I claim to be.

- Malcolm Evans is co-founder of The Cultureship Practice, corporate culture and business ethics specialists.