Good advice isn't meant to be followed. It's meant to make you question your assumptions and build your own mental models. When a consultant suggests something, the real win is when you interrogate why, explore what else might be true, and reshape how you see your market.
Don't take advice, transcend it. The best counsel that I've given companies, the ones that I think have had the biggest impact on their businesses, are the ones where the client didn't actually take the advice as given, but rather it started dominoes falling in their thinking, or was part of their sequence of dominoes falling, and it contributed to this elevation in the way they would see the world. I might say, have you considered X? And then not only do they consider X, but then they start thinking about why should we consider X and what else is like X and how else can we be looking at the market differently? And then their whole thinking process has changed and improved. And now they have an internal mental model that they are using to be guiding their business in a much better way. So if I can be helping out with one or two of those dominoes, I know that I've done the best possible job. So don't just take advice, ask how you can go beyond it.
