There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

We are faced with many choices every day. At work we are faced with tough choices around whom to keep, and whom to let go; whether we cut back on learning expenses to manage the bottomline today but coming at the cost of a less skilled future workforce; whether we incur the cost of engaging clients to get more robust and thoughtful outcomes or overload our teammates today with additional special projects.

We can be tempted to take short-cuts today, or skimp on some employee benefit, or even buy the lesser but adequate quality material or product. Please do consider what is the lasting effect of these choices on your brand, reputation and association. Do you want to be known as the firm who cuts its staff pay, whilst increasing the CEO’s pay? How do you think that your customers will react if you replace your in-country consultants all with consultants based overseas in a different timezone and culture, making it harder to contextualise the advice? What do you think will happen if you don’t fly those airplanes to be able to re-certify the pilots for their licensing?

There is no such thing as a free lunch.