Choices Redux

In December 2023, I described our values and their impact on our choices as a company. I am reflecting on those guardrails again as we approach another spring. As a leadership and management consultancy, strategy is at the core of our approach, process, and delivery: simply put, we help leaders and institutions make better choices. Strategy is the fancy word but it is no more or less than the sum of one’s choices, usually aligned with, and guided by, enduring and foundational values. So how do my values and choices hold up over a year later since I first shared them with you? How is our strategy at MehtaCognition?

Below, I’ve copied and pasted the full text of the post from December 2023. Original text can be viewed in quotes with current reflections underneath.

A year in, here is what I know and what I've learned about consulting.

Feast or famine.

You eat what you kill.

Phrases consultants are all too familiar with, a reality you accept for benefits, such as freedom and flexibility, the gig offers. 

The freedom and flexibility are real. I spent three months in India visiting family and friends last year. The commitment Neeti and I have made to doing so each year is possible simply because I answer to no one but myself. However, this flexibility is not absolute: I have micro-flexibility, not macro. I can reorient my calendar for a doctor’s appointment or lunch with a friend, but taking large chunks of time off comes at a cost. As I explained to one head of school, there’s no PTO when you work for yourself. Any time off is unpaid time off. When you support a team, as in our case, this is even more critical as time off on my part can affect the team (compensation, workload, guidance and communications) and clients (unavailability in times of need). I learned this lesson from my dad who runs his own business. I don’t report to someone but I still have obligations and commitments to others.

I have never had a high regard for consultants, yet I now find myself as one, an unwilling choice made three years ago due to shelved plans during the COVID pandemic, but for the past year, a free and voluntary one. My low regard for consulting as a profession is based on my own experience of hiring several practitioners of it over 15-years of leadership in schools, disappointed at most turns because of the lack of depth and rigor, mediocre output, ignorant of or inexperienced in the leader’s reality and accountability, silo-ed processes, or standard and predictable outcomes.

Most leaders hire consultants for three reasons:

• Extend capacity where their own team is lacking in time, experience or expertise, or resources.
• Leverage someone else’s voice and expertise in the room as one is rarely a prophet in their own land.
• Create momentum on a project by bringing in an outside catalyst.

I still maintain a love-hate relationship with consulting. Consultants get to pontificate on how things should be, but it’s the leader who bridges the gap between possibility and reality. Consultants get to walk away when the job is done but the leader does not. They have accountability even when they delegate responsibility.

A few years ago, when I was still head of school, a colleague who had come from a career in corporate consulting explained the difference between leading an organization and consulting as follows: Leaders lead people and organizations while consultants lead the work. I remember I had scoffed then, possibly even with a bit of derision in my tone. It felt too impersonal to me. A head of school, not long after I left my own post, called consulting “the graveyard of former heads.” Perhaps she didn’t realize in the moment what she’d said to me, or maybe she did and meant to do so. Those who won’t (or can’t) lead, consult?

Consulting was not my first choice when I left The Children’s School in June 2020. Even a year in, around summer 2021, I resisted calls from colleagues, friends, and mentors to expand my team and practice. Consulting breeds distance. You have influence but not impact, the work is usually either too narrow (like an enrollment audit or a leadership team retreat) or too broad (strategic planning). Implementation, where details live, usually eludes the consultants. We are not there enough to navigate the relationships of a place, know its traditions, and plant seeds for visions yet to be fulfilled.

Consulting is not scalable unless you add more people to your team. There’s limited capacity because there’s limited time any one individual or team can give to another. Too often, consultants will promise quality but team incentives are set to reward volume.² So you can either go broad or deep, but small teams cannot do well at both. At MehtaCognition, we’ve decided to go deep on strategy with select clients. We have chosen quality over quantity. 

But something happened in spring 2022. I was unfulfilled in my work as an executive recruiter; a port in a storm, it had served me well and for as long as it could. It was time to make a move. By late 2022, not ready to leave Atlanta where we were well-settled and MehtaCognition as a concept and practice beginning to take root, I was ready to take the plunge. I knew what and who I didn’t want to become, defining myself and our company norms and values initially more by what we would not be instead of who we could be. Over the last few months, we have gained a lot of clarity in what works and what won’t, what we are willing to trade and what we cannot, what we will accept and where we will not compromise. Our thinking was simple: If we are going to work for ourselves, then it has to be on our terms - not our clients, and definitely not our peer consultants and competitors. Those terms are laid out below; whether you call them choices, norms, values, or just standards for now - it’s our list, the yardstick that keeps us straight, that ensures I know as the founder what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. The list also has something to say about what we will say no to and why, although I don’t think I’ve pushed myself and our team enough on this one.

Ps Do read the footnotes.

Saying no, as strategy requires, is the hardest part and a main reason why 70% of change initiatives fail. Saying no is also hard in a model whose incentive structure is based entirely on “you eat what you kill.” (See footnote #2.) This is, admittedly, a struggle but a discipline I’m resolved to continue to cultivate in myself and our work.

The Choices We Make (and Won’t):

• We don’t choose the projects we want to work on; we choose the people we want to work with.
  • It was true then and it’s truer now.
• We only take on reasonable people as clients.
  • The team will tell you there have been unreasonable clients with whom we won’t sign any new projects. During our summer retreat, we created a list of who succeeds at MehtaCognition: teammates and clients.
• The team won’t all reflect the same background; we don’t silo ourselves or limit our counsel to organizations.
  • As one head of school reflected back to me last week, “we [MehtaCognition] take an ecosystem approach” rather than an individual one.
• We hire with a team-first mindset. If the team wins, the individual wins.
  • Every project has a team of two on it, rarely three. Working as part of a team is non-negotiable. You’re accountable to the team and the client.
• We prioritize long-term work because that is how we convert our influence to impact. 
  • We don’t take one-off projects anymore unless we have an existing relationship, or I’m doing it as a favor to you.
• We don’t set revenue goals; instead, we manage our costs.
  • This has been the biggest ah-ha: Everyone assumes that businesses must grow because growth is a clear sign of success. I’ve learned through observation that unrestricted growth frequently kills.
• Growth is good, profit is better, and quality is non-negotiable.
  • Yes, yes, and yes. We haven’t always been successful at each but come pretty darn close on all three. No surprise here but it has directly impacted the first two when we have fallen short on the third.
• We want to be the better choice, not the default one.
  • When we lose a project, it’s usually because of one of two factors: 1) cost or, 2) we don’t have hundreds of examples of doing any one thing. I look at the second as a compliment, not a dig; it’s a feature, not a bug in our system when we create something for you from scratch. It’s also directly relevant to reason #1.
• And, at its core, MehtaCognition is, and will remain, a lifestyle business. Its purpose is to add immense cultural and strategic value to its clients and leaders, and enable purpose-filled personal and professional lives for its team.
  • There’s a tug of war here. In the midst of working hard, we have also made time for our individual families and for other pursuits.

I know these are the right set of choices for us. We will do well if we first do good and exude joy in our work and relationships, and in 2023, we did them all.

We launched The Impact Fund Fellowship in January 2024 using a percentage of our net profit to support current and aspiring leaders in our independent schools. It’s the only thing you have to look at to judge whether we have done well and done good.

Unedited Footnotes From the Original:

1. Relationships, and the people leading the organizations we serve, are our primary focus and deserve our full commitment and capacity. If we do this right, then good work, and enough work, will naturally follow.
2. Like life, there are twists and turns, and when there are, we double down because we like these people.
3. Leaders don’t operate in silos, so why should we?
4. Our compensation incentivizes teamwork, unlike every other consultancy model we researched that pushes individual remuneration and hustle above the team, creating internal divisions and competition.
5. We don’t control our revenue from one project and year to the next, but we control our costs. Cost-management, as any personal finance advisor will tell you, is the not-so-secret secret to doing well in life.
6. I’ve gone back and forth on this one as I don’t like either/or’s. Lots of reading, observations, and conversations have all led to this insight for now: in service-based businesses, growth is constrained by your overheads. You can only take on as many clients and projects as your headcount and workload limits allow; I can’t 10x an employee’s capacity through efficiency measures because this isn’t like manufacturing a phone or car. So growth requires adding team members, but not all growth is good. In fact, several heads and association executives recently warned me of the same, using examples of new and established consultants whose reputations have suffered as they pursued growth at the expense of quality. Uncontrolled growth creates overhead, dilutes culture, and scrambles values, all of which create stress, uncertainty, and pressure, and removes our ability to make choices on our terms. There’s an inherent tension between growth, profit, and quality for consultants, and more of us, including our team, would do well to keep that in mind at all times.
7. See above. Over the last few months, I’ve received several calls from heads, CFOs, and association executives lamenting the availability of consultants who do high-quality work. Many, it’d seem, are looking for more and better alternatives to the current state.
8. This year alone, I have spent 12-weeks in India visiting with family and friends. That’s more time in one year than the last 15+ years in sum. Another colleague has revived his band and plays in shows locally and nationally. One more has found the flexibility to take time off and visit her daughter and alma mater for special events and occasions, long weekends and weeks spent with family at times otherwise not possible in a traditional job or consultancies with KPIs and metrics and big budgets.

And, Two New Ones...

1. The best consultants (employees, too) are builders. Builders don’t get to walk away from the project until it’s fully done.
2. Charlie Munger said, “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome”. He also said, “If you have a dumb incentive system, you get dumb outcomes”.