A little story to illustrate the roll of a consultant.
There was a shepherd looking after his sheep by the side of a deserted road. Suddenly a brand new Porsche comes roaring down the lane and screeches to a halt. The driver, a young man dressed in an Armani suit, sporting Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, a TAG-Heuer wrist- watch, and a Pierre Cardin tie, jumps out and asks the shepherd: “If I can tell you how many animals you have, will you give me one of them?”
The shepherd looks at the young man, and then looks at his large flock of grazing sheep and replies: “Sure.”
‘The young man parks his Porsche , connects his Apple MacBook Air laptop to the internet via his iPhone mobile hotspot, navigates to a live NASA satellite site, scans his location using his phone’s GPS coordinates, opens a database, selects a number of parameters and does a data dump to a spreadsheet filled with preset macros and pivot tables, and finally prints out an extensive PowerPoint deck on his high-tech wireless mini-printer. He ponders the information for a bit, turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.”
The stunned shepherd replies, “That’s correct, I guess you can choose your sheep.” The young man makes his pick and stuffs the animal in the back of his Porsche. The shepherd watches him and then asks: “If I guess your profession, will you give me my animal back?”
The young man answers, “Sure, why not?” The shepherd answers, “You’re a consultant.”
“How did you know?” asks the surprised young man.
“Very simple,” answers the shepherd. “First, you showed up without being asked. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew, and third, you don’t understand anything about my business… Now give me back my dog?”