WHY Consulting Is a Waste of Your Mind | Steve Jobs At MIT On Consulting

Steve Jobs talks about Consulting at MIT.

A mind is too important to waste …. You should do something… The only consultants I have seen that I think are truly useful are the ones that sell our computers. No 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 up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fractions 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…. You do get a broad cut at companies, but it is very thin. It is like a picture of a… banana! You might get a very accurate picture, but it is only two dimensional; and without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three dimensional.
So, you might have a lot of pictures on your walls. You can show it off to your friends… You can say, look! I have worked in bananas, I have worked in preaches, I have worked in grapes. But you never really tasted it.