Saturday, August 8, 2009

Business Consulting: the Ship Allegory





A big ship goes slowly and awkwardly whereas small boats do not. Unfortunately it is sometime necessary for big ships to get some extra skills:







The allegory of the ship I want to show here is that small boats can help big ships to head differently over the big blue. Boats can allow them to slip between obstacles such as i
ceberg or just at the harbour.
In this allegory or just in real life, a small boat such as a tugboat can be essential to a ship. On the one hand, tugboats are specially designed for the job they are supposed to do. Although a tugboat isn't exactly designed to make open ocean operations, some other boats will be better designed to.

But on the other hand, a big ship will have an upper vision that boats will not supposed to have. In the same way, big ships are carrying most of the sold goods, something that simple boats just cannot think about. That is to say, ships lead the world economic exchanges.

To sum up, without ships the boats are nothing, whereas the ships can survive without boats helping, but hardly as it would be a mess.


Well, so here is my thought. I think that it is possible to consider that the same thing can be transferred to Business and Business Consulting !

A consulting firm can help a big company taking decision or even changing direction, another one can be looking for appliers for a shipmaster position, and so on. Such things could be done on-board, but not as fast and as efficient that it could be by an external specialized firm.


However, consulting firms aren't supposed to do the whole ship's job, and they just do not pretend to have such skills .

But small and agile structures can bring precious skills and know-how to the big companies that fancy it... and who knows, the escape could then have a pretty happy arrival:






I was thinking about all this as I wasn't yet thinking about it until recently. I am french graduated from business school and I am living in Brazil.

Then, Brazilian executives have been contacting me as they are interested in doing business in french-speaking countries.

As I am starting up my business career, this would just a business idea to be considered, or not, among others, or not.

PS: My english skills aren't fine yet, thanks for your comprehension or just corrections.

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