HS067: The Right People to Have on Your Tech Strategy Team

Exactly who should be on your technology strategy team? From inside your organization, who should represent the areas that come into play: Business, development, operations, etc? And what about outsiders–what kind of external consultant do you want for your strategy team? Do you even need one? Johna and Greg cover it all in today’s episode.

Episode Transcript

This episode was transcribed by AI and lightly formatted. We make these transcripts available to help with content accessibility and searchability but we can’t guarantee accuracy. There are likely to be errors and inaccuracies in the transcription.

Johna Till Johnson (00:00:00) – Hello, I’m Johna Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research, and I’m here with my co-host Greg Ferro , the co-founder of Packet Pushers. And you are listening to Heavy Strategy, the show that gives you the right questions, not the right answers. So on today’s show, Greg and I wanted to talk quite a bit about the whole question of who should be engaged in setting a technology strategy. That’s not what the strategy should be. It’s not where the strategy should go, but it’s the who of the question. So, Greg, I know you have thoughts. I know you, you want me to be the protagonist and you to be the antagonist. But I want to suss out what your thoughts are on this. I guess the first question.

Greg Ferro (00:00:39) – We should just in case people didn’t get the last episode where we talked about, you know, what should your technology strategy focus on, right? Or what should the team be looking at? So I guess I would want you to explain here, who should your technology strategy team include? How does that differ? What is and maybe even some clarification around what is a technology strategy’s core?

Johna Till Johnson (00:01:00) – A technology strategy is, in its purest essence, the vision that guides you in making decisions about technology.

Johna Till Johnson (00:01:07) – And that sounds very fluffy. But let’s boil it down into and I like to present a good better best. So good is the answers to the questions. Your answers to the questions. What’s our overall goal with technology this year? What are we going to deploy and when? And what is it that we’re seeking to gain from deploying them. So that’s a basic good strategy. A better strategy has all that. Plus, how are we planning to adjust our technology plans in light of new emerging technology? So if something’s coming down the pike in three years, say, you know, the next iteration of AI or I know Greg disagrees, but just for the sake of argument, quantum computing, how would we revise the current strategy if this hits during their planning horizon? And the best. So that’s the better. The best is you have the today tomorrow look. And you’re also saying what is the optimum investment of resources in technology in the next 3 to 5 years, given what technology, where technology is going and what our overall business strategy is.

Johna Till Johnson (00:02:11) – So the more you take into consideration, the better your technology strategy is. Yeah.

Greg Ferro (00:02:15) – So one of the one of the when I was early in my career, I used to look at these strategy consultants and think they must have been the smartest or the bestest. And what I’ve learned since then is that most often they’re not. But what they are doing is focusing on a particular skill or a particular area that, as a practitioner or even as a senior senior designer, is not something you’re used to. That is. Standing back further to see strategic. Right. It’s that I mean I don’t… to corrupt the saying most people don’t know what a strategy is, but they know it when they see it. Is quite often how I looked at strategic consulting. It’s always I’ve seen bad strategic consulting and good, but I couldn’t tell you what it was that made good strategic consulting good. But I know what bad strategic consulting look like. So I guess the question here is how do we how do we know that we’re going to get good consulting? Because I couldn’t even tell you what what are the mechanics of getting to a good result?

Johna Till Johnson (00:03:16) – Yeah, let me back off that, because that’s actually not what we wanted to talk about today.

Johna Till Johnson (00:03:20) – We want to talk about who not not the what and the how, but really the who and what I think is really fascinating, Greg. And I know, I know why is every time we talk about strategy, you jump into talking about consultants, which is probably another episode or, you know, we can touch on in this episode. But the interesting thing is you don’t need consultants to do a strategy. The reason most people bring consultants in is exactly what you said, which is the forest and trees. And here’s kind of the kicker. Just imagine the strategy is being the drones eye view of the forest or the planes eye view of the forest. So, okay, if you guys keep marching along that path, you’re going to hit that giant mountain that you can’t climb over or you’re going to fall into the water, right? The practitioners often look down on strategists because they’re like, yeah, no kidding. There’s a mountain we know we can’t climb mountains. And oh, by the way, the strategists can’t tell the difference between a birch tree and a pine tree.

Johna Till Johnson (00:04:18) – How smart can they possibly be? And as you said, they’re two different things. And what I found in my role as strategic consultant is quite often the resistance to a strategy comes from people who don’t feel comfortable looking at the entire forest unless they can identify each and every tree in the forest, which is a loser’s game. You can’t. It’s not possible to do. And you it’s not necessary to do for what we’re looking at. So kind of that visual image is a good one to keep in mind. Because if you’re doing the drones eye view of the forest and looking out for the, you know, for the for the problems, the challenges, the things you’re going to have to go around, that’s a very different thing than trying to, you know, harvest the trees or grow the trees. It’s just a different, different perspective.

Greg Ferro (00:05:06) – There’s a young one’s referencing there that I’m going to stay away from. So, so, so if we’re talking about who to include on a strategy team, is this something that’s a full time, or are you more alluding to the fact that a it’s a project and you bring in people to participate in creating a strategy?

Johna Till Johnson (00:05:23) – Yes.

Johna Till Johnson (00:05:24) – How’s that for how’s that for a non-answer, a consultants answer? In fact, I would say it depends. No. I think the big challenge is that you must have somebody who’s whether it’s part time or full time, you have to have somebody who’s able to stay relentlessly focused on the forest, not the trees, and not get sucked into the trees. In theory, that can be any one of your smart people who has a systems engineering bent and likes to look at the big picture in practice. Anyway. One who has sufficient seniority at a large organization usually has been beaten about the head and shoulders to stop looking at the big picture unless they really understand the details, to the point where if you stand up and say something in a meeting and you actually show that you don’t understand the detail, somebody tells you to sit down and shut up and go away and do your homework. And so that is that is a.

Greg Ferro (00:06:14) – Real that’s a real thing. Yeah, yeah. Because you, you are hard to twiddle a knob or pull a lever.

Greg Ferro (00:06:20) – Right. And then all of a sudden to invite you to participate in a program which says, why do you pull the lever? Or why do you twiddle the knob?

Johna Till Johnson (00:06:27) – Or, you know what, we don’t even care about the knobs and levers, because we’re actually looking at the fact that the thing that you’re doing is about to come to a crashing halt because of extraneous events. So those knobs and levers will be irrelevant in approximately 18 months. That kind of thinking has been beaten out of you, and it largely so. Getting back to your question, is this a part time or full time job? In practice you need if you have somebody that’s a skilled strategist and has gone through the wars at other companies and gets it, that person can in fact be very good at splitting their time between being looking at the details of a particular tree in a forest and then breaking out of that and thinking about the strategy. But in but those those people are so rare that most of the time you need someone else to break you out of that, which is why consultants get pulled in the good and the bad and the ugly.

Johna Till Johnson (00:07:18) – Honestly, it’s not because we know anything more than you do about your own organization, it’s that it’s because we are literally constantly forcing your eyes towards the heavens. Or really, that’s a bad analogy given what I said, but causing you to look at the, you know, look at the forest and not the trees. And so in, in real life, more often than not, you need you need at least one full time strategist to maintain that focus. Yeah, that’s what I would say. And again, it depends on the people.

Greg Ferro (00:07:46) – Yeah. Well it also depends on the organization to sustain strategic consultants, an organization like to have them as full time head. Right and have money allocated to them implies that your company is large enough to justify continually adjusting the strategy, or reviewing the strategy, or preparing the.

Johna Till Johnson (00:08:02) – So here here’s the thing. Yeah, justifying their salary is one thing, and I understand. I completely agree that large companies have or small companies have a hard time paying somebody to do nothing but strategy.

Johna Till Johnson (00:08:12) – But I disagree vehemently that there’s such a thing as a company that’s too small to need a strategy. There’s no such thing. Even a one person company needs a strategy. And if you don’t have one, you run into all sorts of unpleasantness fairly early on. So the problem is, if you’re a smaller company, you’re bigger. Challenge is, how do I work around this without having the budget to hire someone full time? And that’s the topic of a different episode, which I think we already recorded. But we can come back to. But getting back to the question of who should be on it above and beyond, let’s say you’re big enough to have somebody, at least temporarily, a consultant or whoever lead the initiative, who should be on the strategy. And from my perspective, I’ll sketch out what I think is optimal. And then there’s kind of reality, optimal is getting everyone who is going to be affected by the strategy in on at least some of the meetings. So the classic mistake that most companies make is, well, it’s an IT strategy.

Johna Till Johnson (00:09:15) – So it should just be IT people. Nope. You need to be having regular… You need to be having liaisons to the business who participate. Not in every little detail about, you know, about okay, let’s talk about cloud versus on prem here. Let’s talk about the nuances of zero trust security there. But at least on a regular basis on regular out briefs that depending on who they are and how close to this, how much they’re going to be affected by the strategy, they may be getting weekly out briefs, they may be getting fortnightly out briefs, they may be getting monthly or quarterly out briefs. But they need to know that it’s their job to understand the technology strategy, to communicate that strategy and its implications to finance or legal or whoever is getting affected by it. And also, and this is the big one, to raise the alarm if there’s something about the strategy that’s going in exactly the wrong direction. So, for example, if you’re trying to build if your strategy is going to be heavily structured and not not flexible and not able to add new companies, if you’re on the finance team and you’ve discovered that your business strategy, like I just talked to a client the other day, who’s who said, we just bought another company and we’ll be buying a bunch more companies for the foreseeable future if the strategy doesn’t enable that, because it’s operating under the assumption that we’re not buying anybody for the next five years, that’s the kind of thing you want to ring the bell on really loudly and say, hey guys, fix it.

Greg Ferro (00:10:41) – So I guess what you’re saying there is that if you’re participating in a strategy, you’re not just talking to technology people, you’re also talking to people out of the business.

Johna Till Johnson (00:10:49) – So, absolutely.

Greg Ferro (00:10:51) – So if your technology strategy, maybe you’re talking to people in accounting about what they expect, is the accounting system going to get bigger or smaller? Are they sucking in more accounting systems? You know?, as you say, if you’re acquiring companies, then your technology strategy is going to say we have to be able to have a multi-vendor approach. Or do you say when we buy these companies, we go in and rip out everything and bring it in line?

Johna Till Johnson (00:11:16) – And by the way, both of those answers are completely acceptable. And I’ve seen very happy companies that have done both. You just need to know which one it is, and if you are a rip and replace organization, you need number one, a team that’s extremely good at airlifting in understanding their technology, understanding what it’s going to take to do the rip and replace.

Johna Till Johnson (00:11:36) – And it also helps if you have someone on the team who can communicate this to the new acquisition. Because generally people hate change, as you like to point out. And the first thing they’re going to say is, why did you buy us and then disrupt the great technology that we use to to create the greatness that made you want to acquire us? And you have to have a good answer to that.

Greg Ferro (00:11:57) – Yeah. You know, well, only if they’ve got it. I mean, I think that one of the mistakes I’ve seen people say is, oh, my technology works awesomely, you know, and they’re using, you know, brand X of servers and brand Y of networking and they’re using, you know, this accounting package. I think you could make an argument that the software is of value, but, you know, brand A or brand B of server makes no difference either way, right? It’s just a question of you.

Johna Till Johnson (00:12:20) – You could the problem is we’re dealing with human beings. So a rational argument isn’t relevant if I’m the IT director at an acquired company.

Johna Till Johnson (00:12:29) – I can’t help but I have to think that my great technology is part of what you wanted to acquire. And now you just walk in and say, hey, Johna, good job, we’re going to go slot you in. You haven’t lost your job. We’re going to go slot you in in our giant machine over here, and we’re going to rip out everything you’ve spent the past 5 or 10 years of your life building. Hi. Thank you for your service. The natural reaction to that is going to be, well, unprintable in a in a family podcast, I guess unsayable and a family podcast.

Greg Ferro (00:12:56) – People listen to us in the car with the kids in the car for that reason.

Johna Till Johnson (00:12:59) – So it is true. So that’s the kind of thing you that is the kind of thing you really want to predict and work around. And there’s some finessing which IT people are not necessarily great at the human finessing. Which brings up another thing., one of the cool things you can do in a technology strategy initiative is take the people that maybe are a little rough around the edges and encourage them to interact with the business more and give them constructive feedback.

Johna Till Johnson (00:13:31) – And I don’t mean air quotes, constructive feedback, I mean real constructive feedback. You know, when you said this, what happened to the body language in the room, that kind of thing., because nobody really wants to turn a a deep, deep geek person into a slick sales person, but having a little bit more polish on that geek expertise can actually enable that person to be incredibly more useful to the organization. And quite frankly, if you’re that geek to you personally, you don’t ever need to change fundamentally who you are.

Greg Ferro (00:14:05) – Yeah. If you’re if you ever planning on being a consultant or doing consulting, you, you you absolutely need some sort of empathy,, you know, or some sort of awareness of people and humans. It’s not all about the technology, I guess.

Johna Till Johnson (00:14:20) – Exactly. So, okay, we’ve kind of established that you need participation from the business and participation from technology. The question is, who in the technology team should be represented?, I think maybe it goes without saying, but perhaps it doesn’t, that every technology silo should be represented in some way, shape or form.

Johna Till Johnson (00:14:42) – And typically when we build a strategy, you know, we don’t even at a very large company, you can’t have someone come in from servers and someone come in from storage and someone come in from networking, and someone come in from cloud and someone come in from wireless. Like, that’s too many people. So essentially what you do is you pick someone who has a decent degree of knowledge, who’s obviously going to be deep in one of those fields, but can sort of be have a decent degree of knowledge or come up to speed very quickly. And the other fields and that person’s charter is let’s say we’re taking somebody who’s super deep in storage just for the sake of argument, okay, that person needs to quickly locate liaisons in all the other areas wireless cloud networking, whatever that he or she is covering. And go to those people for subject matter expertise. When we get too far down the lines that we need that subject matter expertise. So that person’s job is to represent multiple silos. But behind the scenes, outside of the strategy effort, he or she needs to be actively integrating with the other people.

Johna Till Johnson (00:15:43) – Yeah. Go ahead. Greg.

Greg Ferro (00:15:44) – Yeah, I was going to say one of the challenges with picking the right person to prepare strategy or participate is that they should be probably experts, but you don’t actually want subject matter experts. You want generalists in a way because you they need to be considering adjacent issues. They need to be business literate to some extent, understanding, you know, the sort of conversations. But I think the and we’ve alluded to that and we sort of, you know, I talked about empathy and you talked about having a breadth of skill set and being able to communicate effectively. I think the next area of this is what about, consultants from organizations. So we see…

Johna Till Johnson (00:16:23) – I don’t make this all about consultants because every time you try to drag it into third party, you know, I think the third party does have a role to play in jumpstarting the initiative and keeping it on track., I want to hold off the whole question of discussing third parties until we’ve got the who, and then you can kind of figure out where you might have gaps.

Greg Ferro (00:16:44) – Well, the reason I’m talking about third parties is because getting consultants from a branded, you know, agency, like a company like Gartner or IBM is very popular. They haven’t, those organizations have announced huge increases in their consulting revenue where companies have gone out and said, yeah, no, we definitely want to get a third party to do this. Is that because those people then get access to other resources? Are the consultants employed by those companies better in some way? Are they trained? Are they updated? Are they, you know, is there some value in that. So when you’re talking about who do you.

Johna Till Johnson (00:17:19) – Yeah, I mean I was I was going on a particular path. But I’ll, I’ll, I’ll stop and go on your path for a second. The, the value of third party consultants is number one. They’ve done it before so that presumably they’ve done it before. And that’s, that’s actually a question. And that gets to how you negotiate. In fact, we probably need to have a whole conversation about third party consultants because I know it’s top of mind to you.

Johna Till Johnson (00:17:39) – But, part of it is that presumably they’ve done it before, and they know the pitfalls they have. They may also have subject matter expertise that you don’t in areas you wish to get into. So in other words, clearly you have subject matter area expertise in your existing technology. But if part of your strategy is to deploy a brand new technology, you may be looking for someone with subject matter expertise there. I would say though, the single biggest value is that they do have this relentless focus on the on the forest and not the trees, and they will keep you uplifted. And frankly, if you’re the person doing the hiring, you know the old adage you never got fired for hiring, you know, bringing in IBM or Cisco or, you know, whatever could be Accenture or Gartner. It kind of puts the the seal on your effort. We hired Gartner. We paid them a lot of money. Therefore it’s got to be a good strategy., you know, and I know that doesn’t necessarily follow.

Johna Till Johnson (00:18:36) – But sometimes in order to get the buy in, that’s necessary. So I think when it comes to third party consultants, the main thing to do is ask yourself, be very clear with yourself whether you’re looking at the more like a coach, like we need you to keep our heads out of the weeds and keep us focused on the stuff that you consider right from looking across many clients and and the technology., or are you really expecting subject matter expertise in an area you’re not good in? Which means you better be damn sure you’re getting that subject matter expertise, because the dirty little secret of third party consultants is they usually don’t have specific subject matter expertise that you lack. And case in point, we got a a strategy gig at a very large organization that had brought in a name brand consultancy., and the first thing these consultants did was recommend that they rip out the data center network and replace it with wireless. And it’s like, that’s so bad an idea. We don’t even know where to start.

Johna Till Johnson (00:19:44) – Right.

Greg Ferro (00:19:45) – Well, you could always use HPE. HPE for a while was working down a technology strategy of using light. Remember like, well.

Johna Till Johnson (00:19:52) – There you go in.

Greg Ferro (00:19:53) – The data center.

Johna Till Johnson (00:19:54) – Actually actually I do not. But okay. But oh, and that’s that’s actually another issue though, because, even including Gartner, one of the questions you have to ask yourself are who are this organization’s clients? Because technically they will represent themselves to you as objective third parties who are beholden to none.

Greg Ferro (00:20:13) – Okay. So what you’re saying now is you should choose your consultant on who they’ve worked with, because if they’ve had experiences in other companies like yours, that’s not.

Johna Till Johnson (00:20:20) – No, no, no, I’m saying exactly the opposite. I’m saying if Gartner or Accenture is in bed deep with HP or in bed deep with name your vendor, their strategy is going to involve bringing that vendor into you because they get a lot of revenue from that. That company and that company is wanting them to promote their interests and they’re not objective.

Johna Till Johnson (00:20:41) – So essentially, you’ve got to be very careful that to understand any constraints on your on your consultants, you know, objectivity. And typically what’s going to happen is the consulting arm say, oh, yeah, well, IBM’s a client, but that’s a whole different branch of the company. And there’s no chance that we’re just going to go in and recommend IBM. Yeah. Right.

Greg Ferro (00:21:01) – Yeah. Like you don’t want to hire a consultant who’s specialist in, you know, making Coca Cola so suddenly your technology strategy. That’s an extreme example, but you also don’t want to be setting a technology strategy for a company that’s exclusively focused on manufacturing. And.

Johna Till Johnson (00:21:19) – No, no, no, that’s really. Not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is you want to look at who the vendors are that that consultancy is in bed with, because the chance is that consultancy will be pushing those vendors and claiming that they aren’t, and that that’s great if those vendors actually are the right solution for you. But they might not be.

Johna Till Johnson (00:21:39) – And that’s that’s why you really want to know these things. So, so leaving aside the whole discussion of consultancies, because I think we really just need to talk about that. I want to come back. You know, we’ve talked about the fact that within your organization, you need a leader who can think about the forest, you need active engagement with the business. You need technology generalists who are able to get deep or rope in the technology specialists where necessary. The other piece that most people leave out is something that DevOps really got its arms around, which is you need somebody who’s in operations because the risk that all technology strategists, strategists have is they come out and they sketch out a strategy that isn’t necessarily unworkable, but represents a radical shift in operations across the board. And you need somebody forceful in operations to raise their hand and say, okay, that’s great. But we have 30 people doing X right now. And in order to do what you just said, we have. Have to take all those 30 people and have them do y, which means we’re going to have to retrain them.

Johna Till Johnson (00:22:45) – And oh, by the way, X still has to happen as during the the ramp down period. So we have to temporarily, you know, we have to somehow temporarily hire people. So essentially the cost of doing what you’re talking about just doubled or whatever. And that’s that’s where I was going before you, you brought up the discussion of consult outside consultants because I think it’s the pieces that people mostly miss are the business and the operations folks. Most technology groups are really good at having technologists.

Greg Ferro (00:23:13) – They fail to reach out beyond the boundaries of their own team. You want a cross team strategy, not your own strategy.

Johna Till Johnson (00:23:18) – Exactly, exactly.

Greg Ferro (00:23:21) – But I guess the flipside I wanted to say, like when you’re talking about who there’s two things. I guess the question then becomes there’s two things about the who, there’s who. Your strategy consultants, consultant or consultants. You may have multiple are and they’re a key part of the who because it’s very much. The deliverable of a consultant or a consultancy like this is usually very driven by just one person.

Greg Ferro (00:23:45) – The consultant who does it like a strategy consultant is not normally.

Johna Till Johnson (00:23:48) – Greg. Greg, can you stop referring to a consultant? Because I want to really reiterate the fact that that you can build a strategy internally. There is not a necessary requirement to have a consultant. It’s common, but it’s not necessary.

Greg Ferro (00:24:03) – I understand what you’re saying here and aspirationally, yes, companies can do it internally, but I have never seen a company successfully do strategy, develop a strategy and sustain it internally. I think that’s false economy.

Johna Till Johnson (00:24:16) – I have seen it happen, quite a lot, usually after I’ve gone in as a consultant and pointed them in the right direction and show them the skills., but then it happens, but it.

Greg Ferro (00:24:26) – Never sustains it. Never.

Johna Till Johnson (00:24:27) – That’s an interesting point, because I’m not sure you’re wrong. How’s that? Greg?

Greg Ferro (00:24:34) – Okay, so. So what I’m saying is that nearly always you need an external consultant to come in, not not because they have special skills or they’re better than you, usually because it’s the only time that the organisation stops what it’s doing to focus.

Greg Ferro (00:24:45) – So one of the things you’re talking about is an external consultant is much more likely to get engagement from other business units. Right. To go and talk to the CEO, the CFO, go and talk to the head of the business units.

Johna Till Johnson (00:24:55) – What can I tell you?

Greg Ferro (00:24:57) – Yeah, that’s right. And you have a certain credibility and you’ve got a position, you know, when you ring them up and say, I’d like to chat to you on the consultant brought in to do such and such, you can get a meeting. Whereas if you’re a, you know, if you’re an internal person, you might get bumped right or pushed out or whatever.

Johna Till Johnson (00:25:13) – Well, okay. So here’s my reaction to what you’re saying. And I think that’s actually really interesting because number one, I have to think about this because I’m not sure I think you’re correct that it actually isn’t sustainable. It can last for 5 or 10 years max, but then it goes drifts off the rails for the reasons we just talked about. Second, I don’t know why I keep arguing against you, because all you’re saying is you need someone like Johna.

Johna Till Johnson (00:25:35) – Okay, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. Guys, if you want someone to help you with a strategy.

Greg Ferro (00:25:40) – You need somebody like Greg.

Johna Till Johnson (00:25:42) – You know? Yeah, you need somebody like Greg. You’re seriously in trouble.

Greg Ferro (00:26:30) – For all of the strategic consulting that I’ve done and also been on the other side like received, a lot of it is down to just the person. This is why the who is important and sometimes to me the who is, you can bring in one person who’s good at it, and sometimes you bring in a company so that you can rotate out the who’s, I’ve worked with organizations who send in a strategy consultant and then sent them back and said, he’s no good, send me another one. And the next one comes along and she’s no good or she’s not. She’s got no, she’s not forging relationships with this part of the business, or she’s not forging relationships, or she’s got no way to communicate with the technologists. She’s just not got that skill to understand what they’re telling her and send her back, get another one. Those are, those are. And let me assure you that when you tell somebody like Gartner that this consultant isn’t working for you and send me another one, there is hell to pay.

Greg Ferro (00:27:19) – That is just because Gartner just picks it. A consultant sends them out. They don’t expect you to push back, but you absolutely should.

Johna Till Johnson (00:27:26) – You absolutely should. And I think the other piece comes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is if you have some hidden expectation that the person you’re bringing in the door is somehow deeper in a technology than you are. Make damn sure that’s correct. That’s right. Grill. Grill them. Grill them on their history. Grill them on their past. Grill them on how they, you know, particularly if it’s a brand new knowledge. Okay. Somebody walks in the door, says I am an expert at implementing LLMs in IT organizations. And I’ve been doing it for the past ten years. You know, they’re lying, because nobody’s been doing that for the past ten years. Yes. But that said, if they come in and say, look, I know, you know, LLMs have been a big thing for only about 18 months, but I was involved in, you know, March of, of 2023, doing it with company X and August of 2023 doing it with company Y.

Johna Till Johnson (00:28:20) – You can legitimately assume that they have a little more expertise than you do. But if if you’re looking for them to have generalized expertise and you’re just expecting that specific expertise, excuse me, and you’re just expecting that from the brand name, then that’s a mistake. And once again, if you don’t like the consultant, if you don’t click with the consultant or if they don’t have the expertise, you were expecting pushback. Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, most of the time I go in, I go in with my team and one of us will connect because we have very different personalities. One of us will connect super well with the client and I will always get the feedback. Johna, your team is absolutely great, but you know this person. The funny thing is it’s never the same person. Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s someone else.

Greg Ferro (00:29:13) – One of the biggest problems, of course, is the consultants often have, very, are not used to being called out.

Greg Ferro (00:29:20) – Right. They’re not used to being told they’re not fitting in. Yeah. And, they often have an inflated sense of their, their worth as well. No, that’s me too. I’ve suffered from that, I didn’t suffer, but I learned that that would be a better word. I learned that I had a my ego was oversized. And, so it is a very difficult thing to do to call that out. But I do think customers don’t like, you know, custom clients of consultants don’t do it enough.

Johna Till Johnson (00:29:46) – Yes, I would agree with that. And I would also say, and at the risk of being age discriminatory. You want to watch out for people in their 20s and 30s and 40s, because early 40s, anyway. Because there is still too much of the smartest man or woman in the room tendency on a consultant. And what’ll happen is there they will get super defensive if either you are able to point out some technical weakness or something they didn’t think about, they get their ego is hung up on being smart.

Johna Till Johnson (00:30:22) – By the time you hit. Now and again this is a vast generalization. There are some very wise 20 year olds and there’s some very arrogant 50 year olds. My god I can think of a few. But but as a general fact, what happens when you get a little bit older is you’re like, you know, not only do I not have to be the smartest person in the room, that’s actually the most boring thing in the world. And the only reason I’m still consulting after 20 years is because I get to work with smart people. Like my clients. Yes, and they inspire me. And once you’ve made that ego shift that not only do you not always have to be proving you’re the smartest person in the room, but it’s actually boring to do that, and it’s much more interesting to draw out the innate intelligence of the group, the clients. That person is going to be much more valuable. That said, you as a client also have to get over this idea that if the consultant doesn’t have deeper technical knowledge than you do, they’re idiots, like they’re not giving you.

Greg Ferro (00:31:18) – I mean, I have an approximate rule. I’ve worked with some very young consultants from big firms, and I found them to be largely incompetent. They just don’t have the years of experience, they often not good listeners, they often have a lot of energy, a lot of drive, a lot of motivation. And they’re just in the wrong. They just haven’t had time. Like I would generally say, as a rough rule of thumb, your consultant should be old and bitter and cynical as an approximation, at least old.

Johna Till Johnson (00:31:47) – You know, I think wise and sympathetic and understanding works. But there’s there’s a reason, guys, that in fantasy the wizard always has a white beard, even if it’s a woman, she has a white beard, because because there is a sense of there’s you know, if you think about the archetype, the wizard has concentrated power, but wisdom to know how to use it. And they’re not out there being the hero. Very rarely..

Greg Ferro (00:32:16) – They’ve made mistakes and learned from them. Right.

Johna Till Johnson (00:32:21) – So, you know, whether they. Fell into the gap, guys, you know, it happened. Right?

Greg Ferro (00:32:24) – Right. So I think that’s that’s also a thing. Right? So if you’re if somebody sends in a, you know, your local reseller sends in a, you know, 25 year old to strategize your business strategy, that’s, that’s not that’s not how. Right. Yeah.

Johna Till Johnson (00:32:40) – Yeah. And I mean, you know, I don’t want to be to adjust because I certainly am the first person to get angry if somebody is standing there saying, only young people can be subject matter experts, but there is a natural division of labor that kicks in here. And, you know, just if you have.

Greg Ferro (00:32:53) – A higher level of confidence that somebody who’s 55 or 60 has had,, has achieved emotional maturity, if not naturally, then the hard way.

Johna Till Johnson (00:33:01) – Then hadn’t beaten into them. Yes. And for for unrelated reasons. I’ve been on the phone for the past couple of weeks with some incredible luminaries, you know, people who pre-date the internet and fathered the internet.

Johna Till Johnson (00:33:14) – And these people with I mean, I’ve read their books, I’ve, like, worshipped at their altars kind of thing. And the one thing I’ll tell you is they’re infinitely more approachable, friendly, humble kind than your average, you know, 40 or 50 year old,, head of architecture who basically will treat me like I’m not worthy to kiss his boots kind of thing. And it’s interesting because it’s like the people that actually have the chops are super humble, and the people that are, you know, deep down inside, insecure are arrogant. And I think we’ve probably hammered this to death. Yeah. But hopefully as you’re listening, you’re looking at your own team and you’re kind of looking at it with new eyes because you can say, all right, this person who’s very young but is also very thoughtful and doesn’t push himself or herself forward, maybe we can groom that person to be lead strategist in a couple of years. This person over here, I think we need to let them fail a few times and call them out on it so that we can beat the arrogance out of them.

Johna Till Johnson (00:34:16) – And maybe they’ll be good at strategy.

Greg Ferro (00:34:19) – Sadly true.

Johna Till Johnson (00:34:21) – Right. It’s, and the last thing I would say about this, and this does get away from the who, but it’s kind of, you know, it gets us into the what? One of my favorite sayings, and I’m butchering it a little bit comes from the military, and I can’t remember it was some German, you know, of course, because it’s always the Germans who said, essentially, tactics are very simple, executing them in war, very hard. And generally that’s important to keep in mind, whether you’re doing it internally or… Only because the actual strategy may sound so simple that you’re tempted to say, we paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for that. And what you look for to gauge is, has that strategist thought through what it takes to implement it in your environment with the stresses you have, and is there a plan for implementation realistic?

Greg Ferro (00:35:18) – Yeah, there’s there’s so much of that. Evaluating the outcomes is absolutely something that I’ve seen many companies fail to do.

Greg Ferro (00:35:24) – But we’ve got one more topic in this series of three. What’s the point of a technology strategy is the last one. And the previous one we did is what should your technology strategy team focus on?

Johna Till Johnson (00:35:33) – Greg, I think we need a fourth one, which is really a deeper dive into consultants because, you know, the fact is, every time we have a have this conversation, you always bring in the consultants. And on this show you made the point. And I am forced to agree that most of the time you will need a third party. I’m a bit more idealistic and think you might not, but I think you’re correct and we should sort of dig into that as perhaps a fourth one. But in any event, thank you for joining us today. If you’ve got feedback or a follow up (FU) for us on this topic, send us a message at Packet Pushers dot net slash FU.. We are totally happy to take anonymous follow up. We just want to hear from you about your experiences, your opinions.

Johna Till Johnson (00:36:13) – Tell us about the best consultant and the worst consultant you’ve ever worked with. Also at Packet Pushers dot net, you will find the Network Break podcast, which helps you stay current on the latest tech news and what it means, which hopefully is very relevant. And there’s a whole lot more on the site. More is popping up day by day. So if you last looked at it a couple of months ago, please jump into the site and see what else is out there, what other channels flip your bits and if you want to talk to me, go ahead and hit me up at Nemertes dot com. You can fill out the form for the community and I will answer because I get those. Greg, where can they find you?

Greg Ferro (00:36:49) – You can find me on Twitter or at the Packet Pusher’s Slack. You go to Packet Pushers dot net slash Slack. You can go and chat to me in our Slack channel, along with a couple of thousand other people and Johna’s there as well too.

Johna Till Johnson (00:37:00) – So I am, I am, and I will answer you in Slack.

Johna Till Johnson (00:37:04) – So that’s probably the best place. I think we’ve mentioned Twitter and LinkedIn, but go there. Go to, go to Slack. See you there.