A Different Consulting Company

For a long time, I've felt there must be an alternative approach to work. It wasn't that I always knew what that alternative approach looked like, and to be honest I'm still figuring it out, but I did have that feeling.

However, over the last few years, I have begun to understand how another approach could work in practice. Through my work at ThoughtWorks, and some of the people I've worked with along the way, I've found inspiration. Books like Reinventing Organisations, Small Giants and It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work demonstrated a different operating model and now my friend Donal Spring has introduced me to Crisp who have found another way to run a consulting company.

Crisp is rather different. For example:

• None of the consultants are employed by Crisp.
• There are no managers, not even a CEO.
• Crisp’s main purpose is to enable consultants to be happy.
• Crisp doesn’t want to earn money from its consultants.
• The ownership model is designed to keep the company financially worthless.
• Consultants are 100% autonomous.

Crisp is so different that they have even open-sourced how they run their company. The Crisp DNA is a treasure trove of information, developed through their experiments to find another way to run a consultancy.

Even if you are not in consulting, I think there is a lot to learn from Crisp. Changing the way we work to help us all be happier and more impactful can only be a positive thing!