A daily email about monetizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.
💡 Cattle consulting
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Browsing those never-ending stacks at Powell’s last weekend, one book in particular caught my eye: Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin. You can probably guess why :) I’ll be honest - I only vaguely recognized the author’s name from an old HBO biopic about her starring Claire Danes that I’d never seen. But, as you may know, Temple has been a high-profile activist for decades on the topic of autism. She’s also an exceptionally gifted visual thinker. And come to find out, she’s also an independent consultant. A very niche one at that. As she writes early in the book, as a consultant in the food-supply business:
…I am brought in basically to make sure plants are operating according to code and not violating any protocols. I look for signs of mistreatment of animals, equipment failure, and employee misbehavior. I’m in demand in my field because of the way I see things. Details, no matter how small, jump out at me. I’m known for spotting something as insignificant as a piece of string that may halt the progress of cattle in a chute, causing expensive delays. Shortly after getting sucked into the book, I went ahead and watched that biopic, which tells an inspiring story of how she was naturally drawn to animals and their treatment on farms and ranches. Through her research in the 60s and 70s, her keen instincts around empathy, surroundings and systems, heightened by her autism and visual thinking, allowed her to spot the root causes of confusion and distress among cattle. And just when she was getting laughed out of the room for “caring about how the cows are mooing”, she hit them where it counted. Explaining that with her proposed modifications to their operations, the animals would feel more at ease, making them more manageable, and thus less expensive. And shortly thereafter, she was no longer pawned off as some kooky animal researcher, but rather a respected researcher, writer, inventor and eventually a consultant and advisor. Now, perhaps Temple’s domain seems worlds apart from where you and I play, but her approach is a perfect example of the simple formula we each should be emulating every day: —> Harness the power of your unique lens —> Stay relevant to your client’s painful problem —> Communicate the value of your innovative solution If you’re interested in a consulting story far from our world of LinkedIn, Zoom and PowerPoint, the 2010 film Temple Grandin is currently on HBO Max. And I'm sure I’ll be back soon with musings from Temple’s 2022 book Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions 💡 -Wes |
💡 The Lightbulb
A daily email about monetizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.