“Tell me again, what is it that you actually do for a living?” Asked my Dad for the umpteenth time. For an 80 year old who left school at 14 and worked until he was 75 with racehorses, he found it difficult to get to grips with how someone like me spends his day and why any sane person would pay me to do it. At the end of the conversation, he remarked, exasperated, “that doesn’t sound like work, it sounds like pinching money”.

Being a consultant is like being a eunuch in a harem.

You get to see all the action but don’t have the wherewithal to get involved. Sometimes you wistfully think about what you would do if you were running the organisation. What if the day-dream came true? Well it turns out that you have less and less time to make a difference and this day-dream may quickly turn into a nightmare.

According to Mark Gottfredson, Steve Schubert and Hernan Saenz in their February 2008 Harvard Business Review article ‘The New Leaders Guide to Diagnosing The Business’ they pointed out that 1 in 5 of the CEOs who left their jobs in 2006 had only been in position for 8 months. This is hardly enough time to get your new office furniture, the corner room redecorated and your Blackberry fully functional.

Business Intelligence is a misnomer.

A lot of implementations that I see, and the discussions that I have with practitioners who have implemented them, seem to offer little to the business and display only a passing acquaintance with anything that could remotely be termed as intelligence.