Roger L. Martin spent 13 years at Monitor during the 80s and 90s, serving as co-head for two years towards the end.
Monitor was a consulting firm co-founded by Michael Porter in 1983 on the back of his best selling-book, Competitive Strategy. At the height of its success, the firm employed around 1,200 people and competed with McKinsey, Bain, and BCG.
During his time there, Roger came to the realisation that Monitor wasn’t in the business of providing answers as many consulting firms think they are.
Clients were the experts on their business, not Monitor.
What a great consulting firm should offer a client, according to Roger, was help to reflect on their situation and think through a specific answer to a specific challenge under a set of circumstances the client knew far more about than the consultant.
He banned his team from thinking without the client present.
“Any answer to any business problem is the product of an extremely long logical chain.” Roger L. Martin with Oliver Cummings on Nurole
Roger recognised that consultants at top consulting firms are often smart people, and what they’d do away from the client was work on a long logic chain to provide an answer to the challenge the client was experiencing.
Then, they’d enter a conference room and present their very well thought out solution to the client.
The problem was, the consultant was delivering the solution having arrived at step 50 in the logic chain. Meanwhile, the client on the receiving end of the advice was sitting at step one, not seeing what the consultant sees because they didn’t go on the problem solving journey with them.
The consultant would often return to Monitor HQ and bemoan the defensiveness and lack of foresight on the part of the client for not seeing the genius behind their analysis. But, as Roger put it, “No, they just didn’t have the chance to go through all 50 steps that you did.”
Roger’s consultants worried that, if they started problem solving with the client, the client would see how the sausage was made. But once the team thought with the client in the room, they never reached step 50 and heard, "I don't know about that." In Roger's words, "Never!”
Roger left Monitor in 1998 to become Dean of Rotman School of Management. Since then, he has written 13 books. One of which that he co-wrote with A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win, became a Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, and modern-day classic according to HBR.
When I heard what he had to say about thinking with clients in the room, I realised that this is a fundamental purpose of publishing insight and curating a cohesive body of work.
If you have a book or a podcast series, you get to sit with a future or present client “in the room” and talk them through a logical chain of how you think about a frustration they would like to resolve or responsibility they have to deliver on. You lay out the thought process behind your contrarian takes and diagnosis of their situation. Sometimes that happens in one sitting, with a book. Sometimes it happens over months or years, one email or episode at a time. Either way, it happens in their time.
All of which means: If the material is relevant, the right people come to you, when they’re ready, already sold on how you think about their situation and how you help them solve the challenge that they face. They're ready to buy from you. They view you as the expert because they were in the “room” with you when you did your thinking.
Build the logical chain by mapping the terrain.