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The Guru

By Alan Weiss

I’ve seen wonderful human resources work done in some of the firms I’ve had the good fortune to modestly assist: Revlon, McGraw-Hill, Chase, Fleet, State Street Bank, and Textron, to name a few, have made intelligent and serious investments in developing their human resource capabilities to be proactive, professional, consultative, and partners with their clients. It’s been enough to give this cynic some real optimism.

Yet, human resource consulting is one of the most dramatically growing of all fields for the large consulting firms (source: Kennedy Information, publishers of Consultant’s News). My own practice has grown significantly in areas where internal resources have traditionally been utilized: performance evaluation, succession planning, coaching, educational designs, and communications strategies.

This should not be surprising, because I’ve also witnessed, first-hand, human resources mired in the banality of the programs du jour and the psychobabble of our times. I’ve watched “open meetings” become aimless drifting, and presumed experts actually suggest that breathing out of alternating nostrils improves creativity, when it will actually do little else than make you hyperventilate. I’ve heard people piously intone that “results are the fourth level of measurement,” as if any other measurement were important to anyone in a responsible position. (“Yes, our results are poor, but I’m extremely happy about our attitude measures.”)

I’ve watched “outdoor experiences” take the place of pragmatic skills building. (A human resources manager asked on the Internet the other day if anyone had background “replicating outdoor experiences on an indoor basis,” since his team couldn’t travel offsite!) I’ve agonized while a “future search” burned through $400,000 of corporate salary in useless explorations of irrelevant information before anyone had the courage to declare it a failure and cut the losses.

A lot of people besides the emperor are not wearing any clothes.

What’s a poor consultant to do, bemoan the state of the art, or regret that he just can’t grok the true meaning of organizational, human resource life? Am I a stranger in a strange land? Am I Paul Revere or Chicken Little?

I had the opportunity to appear on the platform once with a well known “guru” who I’ll call Carl. I’ve known Carl for twenty years, admire his intellect enormously, and have used on occasion his book in one of the graduate classes that I teach for MBA and Ph.D. candidates at the University of Rhode Island. While my work has been primarily with line executives, Carl’s has been highly influential with human resource professionals, and I was anxious to see what his take on the state of the art would be.

What I saw was semi-mystical, nearly incomprehensible, and mostly dangerous. Carl painted the typical American organization as a demonic place, where generally malicious managers were conspiring to mute creativity, deny freedom of action, disempower at every crossroad, and undermine the talents of the oppressed masses. He told the audience that they had to resist this through their own empowerment, and suggested not a partnership—which was the theme of the meeting—but, in my view, an adversarial relationship, in which enlightened human resource people would stubbornly resist the dark forces of line management.

When asked for examples (my informal poll revealed that a quarter of the audience found him “inspirational” and three-quarters didn’t know what he was talking about) Carl had the audience change the configuration of the room, which resulted in minimal change. (He constantly asked for learning points from this and other seemingly pointless exercises that generated little enthusiasm, and from which he received virtually no audience input.) He gave this as an example of “shifting power,” although when questioned by some of the astute listeners about his dictating the exercise, he admitted, “Well, I really never give up my power, either.” When a participant stated that he didn’t agree with Carl’s point, Carl said, “I can agree with you,” and used this as an example to the audience that, when disagreements arise, the best thing is to simply concede and avoid confrontation.

Alan, please call home.

Carl, a learned man with solid credentials, went on—sometimes profanely, by the way—to explain that our organizations are not established to share power and that such a reality is both malicious and incompetent in its origin. His charge was for people to seek “authenticity,” and to “create power,” and to realize that we can learn as much from each other as from the presenter. His empowerment wasn’t based on skills acquisition or customer satisfaction or anything as pathetic as profitability, but rather on changing interpersonal dynamics, taking charge, and claiming “self-authenticity.” Training doesn’t have to have a payoff or measurable result, he said, it is intrinsically worthwhile. Why should we be forced to justify it to those conniving, malicious managers who really don’t understand the true organizational dynamic?

Maybe so, but I think those of us presumptuous enough to mount a platform and dispense wisdom ought to appreciate that our duty is to provide pragmatic skills, techniques, and ideas that the audience can use to improve its lot. Human resource people, suffering already from fads, foibles, and fancy, deserve more than gurus profiting from the equivalent of verbal patent oils and elixirs.

While I was impressed that some audience members asked some confronting questions, I was shocked that so many sat quietly and patiently, assuming they were hearing insights and intelligence merely because a guru was in their midst, or perhaps under the foggy impression that the conversation was simply too deep. The conversation wasn’t deep, it was delusional.

There is plenty to do in organizational America to occupy both internal and external consultants. But if this trend continues, I’m going to have more work than I can handle and HR is going to continue down the outsourcing exit ramp. The sky isn’t falling, but the British are coming, in the form of good, talented, ethical executives who have had it up to the gills with knowledge management, open meetings, left brain/right brain, fractals, INTJs, future search, and all the other gobbledygook. (Are there germs of useful ideas in these concepts? Yes. Do they form a cogent base for a discipline? No.)

Organizations are not demonic. Management is not malicious. And the organizational world is run neither from the mountaintops nor from behind the looking glass. It’s run in the trenches, and we’d all better be willing to get dirt under out nails.

You heard it here, they’re coming by both land and sea, and please get out of my horse’s way. I have miles to travel.

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Alan Weiss, Ph.D. is the author of twenty-five books, including Million Dollar Consulting, which appears in seven languages. He runs the unique Million Dollar Consulting™ Colleges three times a year. You can reach him at www.summitconsulting.com, where you can also download hundreds of free articles.