SWIPE

Being a new junior consultant, my company decided I need some Consulting 101. This guy was flown in from France – worked for the largest consulting firms in the world, graduated from INSEAD, speaks five languages and just steals the show during his sessions. On the first day, we were discussing consulting basics and he said it can be partly explained in this five letter word: SWIPE. I scanned my brain for any scientific definitions and finally figured it means chopping your client’s neck off when they cross their fine lines with you. When we all failed to guess, he wrote: Steal With Pride

He said that because consultants are typically bored people who read and flip through anything they see, they can easily create slides and concepts from various things they have seen before. This “mosaic” is customized to fit the current, specific problem and normally this impresses their clients – and hence “with pride!” I gaped in utter shock. This guy is advocating plagiarism! I was ready to storm through the door and didn’t mind stepping on him on the way out.

I later went back to work and started adding a reference list at the end of all my presentations and reports. When my team had issues with it, I would mention the reference verbally to the client. I referenced every single thing I used. A month later I was assigned to a softer/less technical work stream – managing change. Google “change management and you’ll generate half a million hits if not more! And then it sank in – my mosaic skills were improving! I was creating so many concepts and frameworks out of nothing – from things I just stumbled upon – the idea was to stop reinventing the wheel, somebody out there must have done it before! (sales pitch).

Last week, I worked very hard on a workshop. By ‘hard’ I mean, a mosaic of some old slides plus a few other projects’ slides plus some random surfing – tweaked the output a bit and VOILA! Only one slide was missing. I looked everywhere for something similar that I could ‘customize’ but NONE, ZILCH, RIEN! I finally gave up and decided to actually create something from scratch. I wasn’t really sure whether I was ever going to upload that slide on our intranet for somebody to ‘swipe’ it. I had ideas about copywriting it or probably even putting it in the hidden folders on my laptop.

Today, I reopened the file to make a few changes and mistakenly deleted the slide. I could not undo. I lost the slide. I got frustrated and started blogging this. In being so tight on time, the next time I work on it, I will definitely swipe it….so much for personal ethics...anywayz!