Consultants Quotes

Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It's got students of all colors. It's got old people who keep history and tell tall tales. ~ Marcus Samuelsson

They only trusted the wisdom of people brighter and more worldly than themselves when it was expressed in the vocabulary and style of rural idiots. In his guise as Brazenydol, he had once had a contract with DARPA to teach a team of physicists the basic terminology of tractor pulls so that they could give an acceptable explanation of omniwavelength stealth to a Congressional committee that didn't understand tractor pulls, either. ~ John Barnes

The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls. ~ Charley Pride

Arbogast had then assembled a dream team of creative consultants and contractors to help make his bold claim a reality, luring some of the videogame industry's brightest stars away from their own companies and projects, with the sole promise of collaborating on his groundbreaking new MMOs. That was how gaming legends like Chris Roberts, Richard Garriott, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Gabe Newell, and Shigeru Miyamoto had all wound up as consultants on both Terra Firma and Armada - along with several big Hollywood filmmakers, including James Cameron, who had contributed to the EDA's realistic ship and mech designs, and Peter Jackson, whose Weta Workshop had rendered all of the in-game cinematics. ~ Ernest Cline

We tend to think of the mind of an organization residing in the CEO and the organization's top managers, perhaps with the help of outside consultants that they call in. But that is not really how an organization thinks. ~ Kevin Kelly

If a manager asks an academic consultant what to do and that consultant answers, then the consultant should be fired. No academic has the experience to know the context of a managerial problem well enough to give specific advice about a specific situation. ~ James G. March

Pro Publica distorts the relationship between organizations and their consultants, ~ Scott Raab

What do you think consultants do?' 'Tell you things you already know in a language you don't understand. ~ Keith Dixon

What got repressed-sometimes viciously repressed-by the strategy-concept makers, consultants, and data gatherers was a consciousness of people and their importance in the creation and execution of any strategy. ~ Walter Kiechel

One thing I point out is, a lot of people tooting the horn of amateurism, actually, these people were professionals. Some are professors who are employed full time. Others are marketers or business consultants. ~ Astra Taylor

The consultant buys a bottle of fake blood at a theater supply store and once every lunar month, for four days, imitates having a period by putting some of this blood into the vagina and preventing it from gushing out by using a tampon. After repeating this for four months, the consultant's period will return to normal. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes? ~ Mark Steyn

Mom-and-pop businesses have the same issues as the Fortune 500. The difference is that big companies spend millions on consultants to fix them. ~ Christopher Myers

Charlie and I believe our four criteria are essential if directors are to do their job - which, by law, is to faithfully represent owners. Yet these criteria are usually ignored. Instead, consultants and CEOs seeking board candidates will often say, "We're looking for a woman," or "a Hispanic," or "someone from abroad," or what have you. It sometimes sounds as if the mission is to stock Noah's ark. Over the years I've been queried many times about potential directors and have yet to hear anyone ask, "Does he think like an intelligent owner?" The questions I instead ~ Warren Buffett

If consultants followed their own advice, they wouldn't tell anyone. ~ Grant McLachlan

In the ideal scenario, consultants work for a board, and they're helping the board check on certain aspects of management. Their work is made public and transparent. ~ Matthew Stewart

A lot of our Democratic consultants have fallen into the self-defeating prescription that the candidate that runs the most negative ads wins. I have a new theory: Positive is the new negative. ~ Martin O'Malley

I am about to get involved with the biggest cancer hospital in Norway. They are building a fitness center to work with patients. I will be a consultant. ~ Grete Waitz

I'm not the geek in the family: I'm the organizer. But what I do know is that we have a very terrific team of consultants, former federal cybersecurity experts who are working with us to make sure we have a very safe system. ~ Donna Brazile

But all I could think was in New York that kid would have been stuck in a straitjacket practically from birth and dangled over a tank full of Educational Consultants and Remedial Experts all snapping at his ankles for the next twenty years arguing about his Special Needs and getting paid plenty for it. ~ Meg Rosoff

Businesses should absolutely set aside funding in their budgets for security consultants. Unless there is an expert on staff, and there usually is not, it needs to be outsourced. ~ Kevin Mitnick

I'm not handled. I'm not crafted by slick, high-priced consultants. I'm a real person, a genuine person, a struggling person in Connecticut. ~ Lee Whitnum

Results-only work environment (ROWE): The brainchild of two American consultants, a ROWE is a workplace in which employees don't have schedules. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time or any time. They just have to get their work done. ~ Daniel H. Pink

Companies preach creativity, hire for conformity and call consultants when they fail who tell them to be more creative. ~ Richie Norton

You can do anything, but not everything. ~ David Allen

There were IBM logos designed for the film, and there were IBM design consultants working with Kubrick on the layout of the controls and computer screens. ~ Douglas Trumbull

We don't use consultants at Landry's. We're our consultants. ~ Tilman J. Fertitta

Nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick.
-Robert Frobisher ~ David Mitchell

Get rid of all the cleaners, rubbish collectors, bus drivers, supermarket checkout staff and secretaries, for example, and society will very quickly grind to a halt. On the other hand, if we woke up one morning to find that all the highly paid advertising executives, management consultants and private equity directors had disappeared, society would go on much as it did before: in a lot of cases, probably quite a bit better. So, ~ Owen Jones

Imagine consultants coming into an organization to help people look at their most routine daily action … as extensions of the creative process. ~ Shaun McNiff

Ladies and Gentlemen. I should like to inform you on behalf of the nation state of Guyana, that we are going to resign from being a country. We can't make it work. We have tried. We have done our best. It is not possible. The problems are insoluble. From midnight tonight, we shall cease trading. The country is now disbanded. We will voluntarily liquidate ourselves. The nation will disperse quietly, a little shamefaced but so what. We had a go.

Different people have suggested different solutions. Do it this way. Try that. Let me have a go. Nothing works. We are at the mercy of the rich countries. A team of management consultants from the United States could not find the answer, and for not finding the answer, we had to pay them an amount that substantially increased our national debt. We give in, gracefully, but we give in."

And then he imagined himself, quietly and with dignity, putting his papers in his briefcase, bowing to the hushed assembly, returning to clear out his office and going for a walk with his wife along the sea wall. (The Ventriloquist's Tale ~ Pauline Melville

Political consultants are pugilists, masters in the dark art of negativity. Which is why it's surprising to hear Democrats such as Steve McMahon and Republicans like Rich Galen urging their presidential candidates to be more, well, positive. ~ Ron Fournier

So much of what passes for public life consists of little more than candidates without ideas, hiring consultants without conviction, to stage campaigns without content. The result, increasingly, is elections without voters. ~ Gerald R. Ford

A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice. ~ David Mitchell

And just what do you think that would do to incentive?"
"You mean fright about not getting enough to eat, about not being able to pay the doctor, about not being able to give your family nice clothes, a safe, cheerful, comfortable place to live, a decent education, and a few good times? You mean shame about not knowing where the Money River is?"
"The what?"
"The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it - and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts' content. And we even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently."
"Slurping lessons?"
"From lawyers! From tax consultants! From customers' men! We're born close enough to the river to drown ourselves and the next ten generations in wealth, simply using dippers and buckets. But we still hire the experts to teach us the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons, bucket brigades, and the Archimedes' screw. And our teachers in turn become rich, and their children become buyers of lessons in slurping."
"I wasn't aware that I slurped."
Eliot was fleetingly heartless, for he was thinking angrily in the abstract. "Born slurpers never are. And they can't imagine what the poor people are talking about when they say they hear somebody slurping. They don't even know what it means when somebody mentions the Money River. When on ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Balkanization is a feature of the ad agency industry, but it is not a universal phenomenon across all service industries. Somehow, management consulting firms (again!) expanded their technical capabilities and specialties under one brand name. They added specialist consultants, to be sure, but at the same time, they expect their senior partners to become adept at understanding a growing number of disciplines. ~ Michael Farmer

Social media teams tend to be decentralized - a motley mix of in-house experts, off-site consultants and international partners. The result: Confusion, rogue tweets, and off-message posts are almost inevitable. The worst gaffes live on in social media infamy. ~ Ryan Holmes

A physicist, an engineer and a psychologist are called in as consultants to a dairy farm whose production has been below par. Each is given time to inspect the details of the operation before making a report.
The first to be called is the engineer, who states: "The size of the stalls for the cattle should be decreased. Efficiency could be improved if the cows were more closely packed, with a net allotment of 275 cubic feet per cow. Also, the diameter of the milking tubes should be increased by 4 percent to allow for a greater average flow rate during the milking periods."
The next to report is the psychologist, who proposes:
"The inside of the barn should be painted green. This is a more mellow color than brown and should help induce greater milk flow. Also, more trees should be planted in the fields to add diversity to the scenery for the cattle during grazing, to reduce boredom."
Finally, the physicist is called upon. He asks for a blackboard and then draws a circle. He begins: "Assume the cow is a sphere.... ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

There is going to come a time when we have to accept who we are without the assistance of religion. That will be the dawn of true faith. We leave the big decisions to invisible consultants and pray we get the answers we are looking for. The late great George Carlin once said he gave up praying to God and started praying to Joe Pesci because his prayers to Joe Pesci were answered with as much accuracy and frequency as those to God. [ ... ] If we as people are still looking for answers, we should turn our eyes away from the heavens and look to each other. I know we do not play well together - hell, some of us do not even like being in the same room with each other - but the divine lies in all of us. We are miracles. We are "god." If we shared a little more, we would not be left feeling less. We hold the keys to our own destinies. It is time we started looking for the locks. ~ Corey Taylor

The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

[ ... ] we are on the payrolls of two dozen different companies as consultants, but we do absolutely nothing for our paychecks, just like normal consultants. ~ Kevin Hearne

USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it. ~ Zadie Smith

Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file. ~ Matthew Stewart

Traditionally games never used professional writers to create their narrative, so there's definitely a residual feeling that hiring a proper writer is somewhat of a luxury, rather than a necessity. Like a feng shui consultant. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

The consultant's first obligation is to the patient, not to his brother physician. ~ Burton J. Hendrick

Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories. ~ Ben Horowitz

The whole concept of dividing it up into 'value' and 'growth' strikes me as twaddle. It's convenient for a bunch of pension fund consultants to get fees prattling about and a way for one advisor to distinguish himself from another. But, to me, all intelligent investing is value investing. ~ Charlie Munger

Deferral of gratification may be an effect, not a cause. Just because some children were more effective than others at distracting themselves from [the marshmallow in the famous Marshmallow Test] doesn't mean this capacity was responsible for the impressive results found ten years later. Instead, both of these things may have been due to something about their home environment. If that's true, there's no reason to believe that enhancing children's ability to defer gratification would be beneficial: It was just a marker, not a cause. By way of analogy, teenagers who visit ski resorts over winter break probably have a superior record of being admitted to the Ivy League. Should we therefore hire consultants to teach low-income children how to ski in order to improve the odds that colleges will accept them? ~ Alfie Kohn

When the vast baby-boom generation exploded into adolescence in the 1960s, marketers exulted. Advertising consultants, always eager to coin a phrase, began happily explaining to corporations the difference between 'teenyboppers' and 'counterculture consumers.' ~ Charles Duhigg

Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company. ~ Scott Adams

The core of the consulting business is going in and essentially making yourself indispensible by eating the brain of the organization, meaning that the consultants go in and assume key functions in the organization. ~ Matthew Stewart

The best consultants in the world aren't worth a penny if they can't communicate with you. You need to be able to tell them your needs and wants and they need to be able to tell you what they're doing and what they need to do for you. Nothing is more frustrating than sending an email or calling a consultant and never hearing back. Make sure that you get a consultant that not only communicates with you but communicates well. ~ Google Consultant

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Consultants are people who borrow your watch and tell you what time it is, and then walk off with the watch. ~ Robert Townsend

These names mean nothing to Perowne. But he understands how eminent poets, like senior consultants, live in a watchful, jealous world in which reputations are edgily tended and a man can be brought low by status anxiety. Poets, or at least this poet, are as earthbound as the rest. ~ Ian McEwan

We did a variant of the intern thing. We hired people as consultants for a specific thing and then if they were good, offered them a job. ~ Joshua Schachter

Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order - and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface. ~ Alain De Botton

You know what they say about consultants, don't you? They know all the moves in the Kama Sutra but don't know any women. ~ Charles Allen

Most financiers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants are competing with other financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants in zero-sum games that take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another. ~ Robert Reich

I suppose that I was a kind of consultant for taste. Is it good taste? Or bad taste? I had an attention to detail, to what would tell best the story. Because many people get excited about the work and drift off from the story. ~ John Hench

I hate to see anybody be unemployed, but if there's a certain segment of society I think it's political consultants and operatives. ~ Rob Zerban

Law Number XXXII: Hiring consultants to conduct studies can be an excellent means of turning problems into gold, your problems into their gold. ~ Norman Ralph Augustine

22 of 52 top (FDA) officials have worked for regulated industries, or organizations that cater to those industries ... During a hearing held in 1969 by the House Inter-governmental Relations Subcommittee, it was disclosed that of 49 high ranking FDA officials who had recently resigned or retired, 37 joined or served as consultants to regulated industries. ~ Michael F. Jacobson

No one keeps track of the hours we work," said Ken Holberger. He grinned. "That's not altruism on Data General's part. If anybody kept track, they'd have to pay us a hell of a lot more than they do." Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing. ~ Tracy Kidder

Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant. ~ Mark Twain

Most people want Jesus as a consultant rather than a King, and He does not come that way. ~ Timothy Keller

Bush's life is that a fundamentally decent man presided over a moment when politics got meaner and rougher. '88 was the year of the handler, of bringing in political consultants who played very hard and very tough'. ~ Evan Thomas

Basically I was a theatre fanatic. I had a job with Home Box Office as a theatre consultant for a long time. ~ Rob Urbinati

How many consultants does it take to change a lightbulb? I'll have an estimate for you a week from Monday. ~ Garrison Keillor

A lot of politicians, not surprisingly, hire consultants to help them with their nonverbals, presence, generally how they come across. ~ Amy Cuddy

One of the things that I think you see sometimes in politics is a certain degree of caution. It's usually advised by consultants who don't want to see you march to the end of a limb. ~ Elizabeth Edwards

A consultant is only as good as their last project. ~ Jon Taffer

In their groundbreaking book, Tribal Leadership, management consultants Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright lay out the five stages of tribal development, which they formulated after conducting extensive research on small to midsize organizations. ~ Phil Jackson

I doubt if there is any single individual within the scientific community who could cope with the full range of [creationist] arguments without the help of an army of consultants in special fields. ~ David M. Raup

One thing became clear as I thought back to my stay in Quirishari. Every time I had doubted one of my consultants' explanations, my understanding of the Ashaninca view of reality had seized up; conversely, on the rare occasions that I had managed to silence my doubts, my understanding of local reality had been enhanced - as if there were times when one had to believe in order to see, rather than the other way around. ~ Jeremy Narby

You know you don't see hospital consultants going on strike, and I don't believe that teachers and head teachers should. It's within their rights, it's a civil right, but I think it is wrong in terms of the reputation of the profession. ~ Michael Gove

There is no waste in the world that equals the waste from needless, ill-directed, and ineffective motions. ~ Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr.

People always say, 'Well, celebrity spokespersons have private consultants'. Well, with Jenny Craig everybody gets a private consultant. ~ Kirstie Alley

I had let it all grow. I had supposed
It was all OK. Your life
Was a liner I voyaged in.
Costly education had fitted you out.
Financiers and committees and consultants
Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.
You trembled with the new life of those engines.

That first morning,
Before your first class at College, you sat there
Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the properties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. And the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny.

You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judges you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,
Were terrors that killed you once already.
Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.

That blue suit.
A mad, execution uniform,Ted Hughes

Poetry The Blue Flannel Suit