#92: Too Big to Think 🤔- Beyond The "Next New Normal"

😷Reflections on life, work and the self-employed journey

May 2nd:  Greetings from Las Palmas. We have entered into “phase 0” and we were allowed out for the first walk in 48 days which is the first time we walked around our neighborhood (we arrived here the day of the lockdown).

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#1 The emerging “indie” ideaspace

Consider two trends from the last twenty years:

1. An increasing number of talented people who opting-out of the default path for a variety of reasons who have a lot of time to explore ideas that interest them
2. Emergence of digital spaces where people can increasingly “find the others,” and test ideas through a digitally-enhanced peer-review

Depending on the niche, “finding the others” happens on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, pinterest, twitter or reddit. On Twitter the increase to a 280 character and the adoption of threading seems to have made finding other curious independents easier than ever.

Many of the self-employed in category #1 are what we might “underemployed.” Not in the sense that they can’t find a job but in the sense that many would do more if they could find the interesting projects they want to work on.

Consulting Has Become Too Big To Think

The consulting industry attracts people that like ideas. However, my desire to go deeper was one of the biggest motivators for leaving the consulting industry. I wanted to grapple with interesting ideas and spend less time on bullshit.

While I would recommend spending 2-3 years at a consulting firm to many in the business world, over time it becomes tiring if you are more excited about ideas than landing new client projects and moving up the ladder. If you spend long enough in the industry, your imagination for possibilities for the business world inevitably narrows to things that can be sold, things that help senior exec break into the next tier of leadership or make it to Davos and ultimately, things that can be quantified on an excel spreadsheet.

Almost every big company has a top 3 consulting firm on semi-retainer (really) and the kind of ideas that consulting firms push have also come to be the ideas and approaches of broader business world.

This would be great if the consulting firms were thought-leaders, but instead they have become too big to think - trapped by their own scale and success. When BCG introduced the growth share matrix and experience curve in the late 1960s these were additive innovations, but the firm was small and scrappy with less than 100 consultants. Now BCG has more than 21,000 people. McKinsey, more than 30,000.

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Put simply, the biggest consulting firms are now mature large and bureaucratic organizations and the types of people that succeed in these organizations long-term are not the types of original thinkers that helped shape the industry in the 1960s like Marvin Bower, Bruce Henderson and Barbara Minto, but the kind that can push incremental change within the currently successful business model. Original thinkers still work at these firms, but they almost always leave after a couple of years.

Latent Curiosity & Collective Experiments

While self-employed, its a good strategy to never be 100% “busy” like one might be when employed in a company. Having a buffer of time and mental space both enables you to stay sane on the inevitable ups and downs of being self-employed while also quickly joining interesting projects when they emerge.

Two weeks ago I was able to use this time to quickly step up and deploy my skills to a project on an emerging community called the Yak Collective which has emerged around Venkatesh Rao’s writings on navigating life as an independent consultant.