№ X
Honest to a fault
On telling clients hard truths — including when we're wrong, including when it costs us the engagement.
The most useful thing a consultant can do, most of the time, is tell their client something the rest of the org has been carefully avoiding saying out loud. The price of doing this well is the willingness to occasionally be fired for it.
We’ve been fired for it. We’d do it again. The alternative — taking the money and quietly building the thing we know won’t work — is the kind of trade that catches up with you, and that we’d rather not make.
A short list of things we’ll tell you
Placeholder — examples: “this project shouldn’t exist”, “the team you’ve hired can do this without us”, “the bug you’re chasing is downstream of a process problem we won’t fix in code”.