{"id":1038,"date":"2025-11-30T10:33:32","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T10:33:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/?p=1038"},"modified":"2026-07-17T17:00:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T17:00:47","slug":"bad-luck-or-a-pattern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/bad-luck-or-a-pattern\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad luck or a pattern?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You hired an external consultant. Six months later, not much has changed, and now you&#8217;re looking for someone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s not bad luck. It&#8217;s a pattern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over 25 years in management I&#8217;ve sat on both sides of the table, as the one commissioning the work, and as the one winning it. The problem isn&#8217;t the consultant. It&#8217;s how the owner or CEO frames the brief before the first meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An external leader or consultant can be excellent and still deliver nothing. Not because they&#8217;re incompetent. Usually because:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>You&#8217;re defining a problem, not an outcome.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;We need to improve our processes.&#8221; That&#8217;s not a brief. It&#8217;s an invitation to an expensive analysis with no commitment to change. The consultant delivers the analysis &#8211; because that&#8217;s what they were asked for &#8211; and you end up with a document nobody implements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A real brief sounds like this:&nbsp;<em>Within twelve weeks, I want to understand why our client onboarding takes three times longer than our competitors, and I want the first changes already in place.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>You&#8217;re choosing based on the presentation.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Slides you can buy anywhere. Every consultancy has a polished powerpoint and references from companies you recognise. But the real question is different: who will be sitting in your boardroom on a Friday at five o&#8217;clock when things aren&#8217;t working? The senior partner who sold the engagement or the junior with a laptop they handed it to? In consulting firms, that gap is significant. And you&#8217;ll rarely get it in writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>You&#8217;re looking for an alibi, not a partner.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">External help only works when there&#8217;s genuine willingness to change inside the company. A consultant can identify the problem, propose the solution, support the implementation, but they can&#8217;t want the change instead of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>You&#8217;re asking about price before you know what you&#8217;re buying.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Who will actually work on this project? What&#8217;s their experience in your industry? What happens if three months in we realise we&#8217;re going in the wrong direction?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These are the questions that separate a good brief from an expensive experiment. Most owners and CEOs don&#8217;t ask them. Then they pay twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-dots\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You hired an external consultant. Six months later, not much has changed, and now you&#8217;re looking for someone else. That&#8217;s not bad luck. It&#8217;s a pattern. Over 25 years in management I&#8217;ve sat on both sides of the table, as the one commissioning the work, and as the one winning it. The problem isn&#8217;t the&#8230;<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coaching","category-leadership"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1039,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038\/revisions\/1039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonymrocek.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}