The price of looking busy

The behavioural scientist Dan Ariely once found himself chatting to a locksmith with a curious problem. The better he became at replacing locks, the less he got paid. In the early days, he explained, he might wrestle for hours with a jammed lock, but because his inexperience made his job look difficult, his customers would pay without demur, often adding a tip. Eventually, however, he became highly expert, and could fix the same problem in minutes. Now his customers resented paying his call-out fee, and never tipped him at all.

Thirty years ago, companies buying a mainframe computer soon outgrew their first machine. The firm would duly write an huge cheque to a hardware provider to upgrade their struggling Zogvac 701a to a mighty Zogvac 709c. An engineer carrying fancy equipment would arrive at their premises and lock himself in the computer room for the day. What his hosts never knew was that their mainframe supplier, anticipating this upgrade, had already supplied a Zogvac 709c when the original mainframe was installed; a few lines of code had been added to restrict its processing power to that of the feebler 701a. All the engineer needed to do was delete those lines of code, then read the newspaper for the next six hours. The time and equipment were all for show. The value created would have been no different had he simply turned up, deleted the code and walked out two minutes later. But you can’t charge £400,000 for that.

I recently suggested an idea to a client which cost about £30,000 to implement and which made millions of pounds. What did we get paid for this? Nothing. Yet had we produced exactly the same suggestion via a ‘consulting project’, in which 12 MBAs spent months compiling a tedious 400-page report recommending the same idea, we could have charged £3 million.