Following up on the Disgorge the Cash x John Seddon post, here is a really good discussion of Clay Christensen, pointing out that his real unique selling point is that he has a theory of innovation that asserts the authority of management, calming the fears evoked by the theorists who demanded worker empowerment as a precondition of innovation.
Have you ever read ‘Platform for Change’ by Stafford Beer? It is an astoundingly odd book even by Beer’s standards (FWIW I think Beer is an awful writer on the whole).
In it, in one of the weird blank verse sections, he says that he tried to interest some big organisation in some grandiose scheme for something or other, I forget what and it isn’t relevant in this context, and eventually they got back to him and said ‘your ideas have inspired us to look again at our use of telephones’. Which I think sums up my experience of old-school British management over the years superbly.
But anyway, I once went to a company meeting where there was a speaker from a bit of BT called ‘Tallis Consulting’ (IIRC) who appeared to have a USP of offering unthreatening consultancy to companies about their use of telephones. I thought there was a lot to be said for having a business model of ‘we offer unthreatening consultancy so you can feel good about doing something but not changing too much really’.
Obviously a lot of consultancy is implicitly about this but I did like the way they had made it reasonably explicit.