Imagineers
The comparative advantage
For a Big4 challenger
Imagineers are a fraction of engineers. Such a small fraction that in a database of 42,000 IiT alumni, we could identify less than ten. This is a list with 5,000 dollar billionaires, thousands of PhDs and hundreds of large company CXOs.
Who are these imagineers ? And how are they trained ? Where do they work ? How do I hire one.
Imagineers are basically engineers with very high prowess in lateral thinking. There are standardised tests available to assess yourself on an imagineer index from 0 to 10. The average IITian is 5.2 on this index. The ten I mentioned are a perfect 10. Most are between 3 and 7. Less than 5% are between 7 and 10. Edward De Bono has done some interesting work on lateral thinking and is worth a read.
Imagineers are difficult to train in an academic setting. They don’t work in a corporate setting either. Some of them do well in sectors like advertising and journalism. But the very best are self taught.
When the IIT Alumni Council started work on SuperCA as a Big4 challenger – they started with superior raw material – the IIT graduates – and then used an inverted triangle organigram to create a structure. The Big4 are a pyramid. A very few bright people at the top and an army of average joes at the bottom. They use their branding to attract good family kids as interns who are paid little, made to work 24/7 and even have to get uncles or aunts to give the firms work. Else they go out. Kids die, their parents cry. But what does an average Joe do. Standing out among 140 crore people is hard. Doesn’t matter how hard you work.
The workplace is a great averager. The law of averages prevails. A great cook becomes a bad driver for two reasons – one he couldn’t get a cooks job. Two, the drivers job paid better. The end result is you lose a good cook and get a bad driver.
Let’s look at what a Big4 does. They essentially supply labour. Call it what u want. They hire then cheap, train them quick and tire them fast. And dump them at least cost. It is a treadmill where the system keeps everyone running just to keep standing. Clients love them. Kids aspire for jobs in them. And whoever the owners are (no one really knows) – probably make a lot of money. They also sell letterheads. Give us a conclusion and we will give you a study to justify it. The Big5 consulting firms do this even better than the Big4.
But what if you changed the game. And got supermen to run superCA. People you cannot afford to hire because they are beyond being on the job market. And what if you just removed all the interns and flipped the triangle to be just senior people.
A very valid question is “how will you make money?”. Fact is you won’t. But value you will deliver. And eventually that value when clubbed with ai interns will generate lots of value. A typical Big4 has maybe 800 to a 1000 partners and maybe 50000 juniors.
What if 99% juniors were AI