One of my wife’s professorial colleagues in the business school, Dr. Steven Postrel, has a post over at Organizations and Markets (hat tip: Virginia Postrel), which starts off by posing the question, "What contribution does management make toward producing output?". One item that drew my attention (snipped a little out of context) is:
In other words, management’s effect on capabilities is best understood as avoiding incidents of inconsistent behavior.
Consistency analysis can be an important tool to use in management consulting. I refer to a different flavor of it in an earlier post as one fail-safe method (method of last resort) for approaching management problems when one cannot rely on external benchmarking information or clear business theory. I will say, however, that seeking consistency at a tactical management level presumes that consistency is the right strategy in the first place (which may be considered a leadership or portfolio concern)!