If you want to be a consultant, you don't need any skills except maybe make a few powerpoint presentations. You also need to learn the lingo. Be sure to wear a suit and tie at all times and pepper your speech with these choice words and phrases:
Moving forward,
Righstizing,
Rationalize,
Touching base,
Syndicate,
First to market,
Synergy,
Think outside the box,
Ping,
Low hanging fruits,
Apples and Oranges,
Cloud,
Bandwidth,
Facetime,
Let's take this offline,
FTE,
Work smarter not harder,
Quick wins,
Efficiency,
Deliverables,
80 20 rule,
Leverage
Lever,
Core values,
Alignment,
sea change,
gentle reminder,
It does not matter if you don't know what these terms mean, the more you use them, the higher you can charge for your daily rate.
Now if you will excuse me, I need to think out of the box for some low hanging fruits that I need to synergize and syndicate for some quick wins.
Leverage... that's one that always gets me. I wonder how many people remember there are three kinds of levers (simple machines, physics 101)? Leverage is the force you apply by using a lever, as in "We used leverage to lift the fallen tree off the poor hiker's broken leg. First we pushed a stone over near the tree, then we used a big stick as a lever with the stone as the fulcrum... The tree never would have come up otherwise... and we could get the hiker out that way without further injury."
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear other people using "leverage" as a verb ('We're leveraging....') it makes me cringe. It shows laziness on the speaker's/writer's part. It's taking a shortcut around clear speaking, and it seems like it's usually done because people don't REALLY know what they're actually talking about. If they did, they could explain well and still be concise. As in, “I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter.”-Quote attributed to Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, and others.