Book Review: The Secrets of Consulting
I don’t think that the book is named correctly.
It would be better titled “The Secrets of
Problem Solving”. That’s a more accurate
title, but it’s boring and probably
wouldn’t sell as many books. I can see many
consultants reading this book due to the original
title. However, I believe that the target audience is
for anyone that needs do overall problem solving in
organizations (which is everyone, isn’t it?).
Weinberg assumes that most problems in organizations
aren’t primarily technical ones. Rather, most
problems are people-based and exist or continue to
exist through people’s actions or inactions. If
you ignore the people the problem won’t get
fixed. Makes sense to me.
The book is broken down into several chapters
describing major categories of problem solving.
Chapter titles like “Being effective when you
don’t know what you’re doing”,
“Seeing what’s there”, and
“Seeing what’s not there” give you
a good idea of the content. Each chapter covers
problems by telling a humorous story. It then gives a
set of rules or guidelines that the author learned
from that story.
For me these guidelines are the best part of the
book. It’s difficult to find a book that has
good distilled knowledge. A reader usually has to
read many books and can pull a gem or two out of each
one. This book is filled with them, and you
don’t have to do as much work because
they’ve been generalized for you already. There
are other books I know of that do this well, for
example “Metaphors We
Live By” and “Simplicity”.
In the computer field I can also think of design
patterns and refactoring principles. Books like
this are rare, though.
I also like how the book is structured so you can
easily pick it up and put it down. Each guideline is
broken up into a separate mini-section and they are
all listed at the back of the book with page
references. This makes the book very easy to use as a
tool, rather than something you read once and put up
on a shelf to dust.
Here’s a couple of examples: “The Why
Whammy” and “Marvin’s Second Great
Secret”.
“The Why Whammy” says “We may run
out of energy, or air, or water, or food, but
we’ll never run out of reasons.” There is
a lot in this one sentence. Apply this guideline when
you are trying to figure out “why” a
problem is occurring. While it is true that asking
the question “why” is very useful for
obtaining facts, Weinberg states that it does not
give you the underlying principles that led to these
facts. Due to The Why Whammy you can be asking
“why” forever and continue to get more
facts without getting you closer to a solution.
Weinberg is not stating that you should not ask
“why”, rather that you should do it
judiciously and not assume that it in and of itself
will solve your problem.
A second guideline I like is “Marvin’s
Second Great Secret” which states "Repeatedly
curing a system that can cure itself will eventually
create a system that can't." So before interfering
with problems, think a little bit about the overall
problem solving health of the organization. After
all, many problems are solved in an organization
already otherwise nothing would get done
(that’s related to “Rudy’s Rutabaga
Rule”, which I won’t cover). Weinberg is
reminding us to avoid going in and meddling in
problems that the organization is perfectly capable
of fixing. If you do so often enough, then you create
a dependency in that organization and it loses it's
ability to independently correct a problem. Many
executives would do well to understand this
guideline.
Many of the guidelines in this book are great and I
think I will need to read the book a few times to
learn and apply them properly. I can immediately see
where many of them apply, from diagnosing an existing
problem and preventing problems from occurring in the
first place.
The humour in this book makes it even more appealing.
Guidelines can be dry and thus difficult to learn and
remember. These ones are told with simple funny
stories, which greatly increases their appeal. After
all, who wouldn’t want to know more about
“Brown’s Brilliant Bequest” or
“The Orange Juice Test”?
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to
add general problem solving skills to their toolbox.
The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to
Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
Gerald Weinberg
1985, Dorset House Publishing
ISBN 0-932633-01-3
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