– How many of you are from consulting? Oh, that’s bad! Yeah. A mind is too important to waste. You should do something!
– Why is it bad to be in consulting?
– The only consultants I’ve seen that I think are truly useful as the ones that help us sell our computers, but other than that, seriously, I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil in consulting; I think that without owning something, over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes, and pick oneself off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can. Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better.
Steve Jobs at the MIT Sloan School of Management, spring of 1992. And that’s so very true, both then and now.