Are there potential benefits to offset the dangers of using management consultants? We need to consider them carefully.

Say we’ve become sufficiently out of touch with what’s going on in our organization that we feel we need somebody from the outside to come in, study it, and explain their findings to us. Might it not be better to more directly address the sources of our own virtualization, rather than paying stratospheric fees for what may turn out to be only a different form of virtual reality?

Or say we’ve decided to move the enterprise in a new direction, and our own staff seems to be dragging its feet in the preparation and planning for it. Consultants do tend to take a more upbeat, “can do” approach   to unfamiliar assignments. But this can be overdone, and is not always in our best interests.

To use a somewhat exaggerated example, if we’ve taken it into our heads to turn a dairy farm into a nuclear power generating facility, consultants will tend to plunge with almost eerie good cheer into the tasks of formulating transition plans and estimates and so forth that our own employees seem so uncooperatively reluctant to produce.

But if we’re faced with this kind of internal unresponsiveness, maybe it would do us more good in the long run to pause and reconsider whether our bold new plans really do make any sense.

Sometimes what we find so appealing about consultants is at base only a greater willingness on their part to compliment the emperor’s new clothes.