Steve Jobs Once Said Management Consultants Bring Very Little Value Compared To Business Owners: ‘You Only Learn A Fraction Of What You Could…You Never Really Get 3-Dimensional’

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time as well as a great creative personality and a visionary. He was associated with Apple for over two decades, with 14 of those years as the CEO of the tech giant. His management style is unique and he brought to the table the best of the worlds – the combination of being a creator and businessman.

In one of the speeches delivered in 1992, Jobs made no bones about the distinctive advantage a businessman has over an external consultant.

What Happened: Jobs went on to make the case for the business owner in his inimitable manner while delivering a speech as part of the MIT Sloan Distinguished Speaker Series in 1998. A clip of the video was shared by Bloomberg journalist Jon Erlichman on X on Tuesday.

After asking the audience to which industries they belonged and figuring out some of them belonged to the consultancy industry, he questioned the role of a consultant, given they neither own the business nor take up responsibility for their recommendations

“I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where someone has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate some scar tissue for the mistakes and pick one’s self up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can,” he said.

“You do get a broad cut at companies, but it’s very thin,” he added.

To make his case, he brought in the example of viewing a picture of a banana, which may present an accurate overview of the fruit but may not allow a taste of it.

“You never get three-dimensional. You might have a lot of pictures on your wall, you can say ‘Look, I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes.’ But you never really taste it,” Jobs said.

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Why It’s Important: Jobs, however, did not want to keep consultants completely out of the business. “The only consultants I have seen that I think are truly useful are the ones that help us sell our computers,” he said.

Sharing his thoughts on Job’s view on PrepLounge, a veteran recruiter and coach said a combination approach would be good. “Consultants are great to analyze the market, bring insights about the competition, find new opportunities… but the decision has to be made by the company, not the consultants,” he said.

“It’s all about the combination of the expertise of the two that brings success. Consultants bring the options and the evidence. But they don’t have the specific business experience,” he added.

Management consultants such as McKinsey, Ernst & Young and Boston Consultancy Group offer services to companies to improve their efficiency and accomplish goals, providing an outside perspective on problem-solving, best practices, and strategy to help companies improve their performance.

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