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One of my favorite magazines is The New Yorker. I'd like to say the main reason is because of the thoughtful, cogent, and provocative articles. Really, the magazine is very good. But that's not the reason. No, the main reason I subscribe to The New Yorker is much more unrefined. It's the cartoons. The New Yorker has the best cartoons ever!

Every bit as erudite as the most distinguished and knowledgeable columnist, a New Yorker cartoon can convey in one simple panel a thousand pages of wisdom and insight.

So, I was thinking about business the other day — specifically about my own profession, Management Consulting — and I was reminded of a New Yorker cartoon I saw a few years ago. There were these two guys, obviously detectives, standing over a dead body and one of the detectives was saying to the other, "From the brutal nature of the multiple stab wounds, I'd say the victim was a consultant."

Except for those times that I've suffered extended lapses of reason and agreed to step in and run organizations (primarily public housing authorities) that have become troubled, I have spent the better part of four decades plying my trade as a management consultant. Those have been good years and for the most part very rewarding. The profession, however, is not without its share of problems.

Fortunately (I'm knocking on wood here), I've never had a client who wanted to dispatch me, but I've met plenty of businesspeople who had horror stories about people who claimed to be consultants and who left them in worse shape than they were to begin with. That's why consulting often is so maligned as a profession — because there are so many charlatans out there claiming some sort of expertise and calling themselves "consultants". I mean, just because your Uncle Billy was a crackerjack insurance salesman doesn't mean he knows diddley about running an insurance company, or any kind of company for that matter! Yet, there are all kinds of Uncle Billies running around out there giving bad advice and in the process giving real consultants a bad name.

So, what to do? For me, the answer was to seek out fellow professionals and band together to show the world that we were for real. Lo and behold, I discovered just such an organization already existed — the Institute of Management Consultants USA. IMC USA had been in business for several years. Their primary focus was on establishing professional standards for the management consulting field and issuing a formal certification to those consultants who could meet those standards. Believe me; they don't make it easy to obtain that certification. But, then, that's the point, isn't it?