Yet most organizations find it impractical to keep permanent staff for each specialty through times of dramatically fluctuating business conditions. There are often equally dramatic shifts in the needs for skills from project to project. Modern executives are becoming less akin to factory managers and more akin to movie producers. Far from the entertainment field, the logic of assembling teams of specialists has had a strong impact on projects building military systems. Recent defense procurements have strongly favored collaborative efforts at the organization level with the objective of getting the skills of the most qualified specialists for each project.
Team efforts provide customers with finely tuned products on tight schedules.
The team managers benefit from reduced project risk, and from reduced investment in staff training and equipment. Team managers can thereby reap higher profits from their investments. The terminology does not offer rigid distinctions. Roughly speaking, consultants, job shoppers, and temporary help are distinguished by how much supervision the hiring organization expects to supply. In our view, the term consultant is best reserved for top talent expected to work collaboratively with a client on a high level, receiving instructions mainly about the objectives to be achieved and seeking inputs only on key decisions.