If the experts are late to the party, are they still experts?

It was a moment of weakness.

I was facilitating a client meeting, trying to get the group to a consensus. I asked everyone to suggest key points or insights the solution should be cognizant of, and wrote each point on a flip chart.

One participant had a point, and he made it. Over and over and over again.

I paused the discussion, and in place of a bullet marker I wrote a number next to each point on the flip chart, instructing everyone that, to save time, if they wanted to make a point that was already on the flip chart they should just speak the point’s number.

The next time the participant in question started to make his point again I interrupted him. “9?” I asked. When he continued, I wrote “9” on the flip chart and asked for any additional thoughts that needed inclusion.

As a counterpoint, in one of his essays Richard Feynman wrote, “It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best—summing it all up—without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.”

Which brings me, briefly, to this week’s dilemma: The most important event of the week was, without a doubt, Donald Trump’s indictment. Given its importance, and that events involving current or former POTUSes often lead to more broadly applicable leadership insights, a part of me figures I ought to be applying the KJR treatment to the situation.

But then I tried to come up with anything I might say that hasn’t been said by at least a dozen professional opinionators, not to mention the Internet commentariat echo chambers.

I didn’t succeed. So please accept my apologies for not covering the story here. But I promise you this: If you bring up your browser and type “Trump indicted” in the search box, you’ll find everything I might possibly have written somewhere on the list.

Advanced Placement Exercise: Do this same with ChapGPT.

Speaking of repetition, this just in, from McKinsey & Company: “For IT to become a real driver of value, both business and IT must work together as partners according to McKinsey’s Oliver Bossert and Björn Münstermann.”

Let the ridicule begin, starting with an observation: Saying that both business and IT must work together as partners suggests it’s possible for only one or the other to work together as partners. Or, as they might have said, “Either the business or IT must work together as partners.”

Let’s agree to forgive this lapse. On to the next one: The sub-head in McKinsey’s emailed synopsis adds this wisdom: “Treat IT as strategic capability.”

It’s advice that might have been valuable had it been offered a decade ago, when “digital” first started to become a noun, and mainstream business leaders started paying attention to IT beyond its traditional role as scapegoat and necessary organizational evil.

Oh, wait. Treating IT as a strategic capability was offered as advice back then. Were McKinsey’s scholars serious about all this they might have read Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21^st Century Information Technology, which offered similar insights in 2009, or There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project, which covered this territory more thoroughly four years ago.

But here in the KJR institute our goal is to offer useful advice, not just to whine about McKinsey & Company taking credit for our good work. So here’s some advice you can use: Forward the McKinsey & Company essay to your company’s executives and point out that, thanks to your visionary thinking, your company is years ahead of the industry.

Bob’s last word: Speaking of what we won’t whine about here: Gartner has, following its usual pattern, introduced a new catch-phrase so as to claim ownership of what many of us have advised for decades. The new catch-phrase is “citizen developer,” which Gartner defines as “An employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units.”

Gartner’s advice: IT should support citizen developers.

KJR’s advice: As a steadfast KJR subscriber you’ve already been taking this advice for the past 20 years or so (for example, “Preventing value prevention,” InfoWorld, 1/20/2003; or search KJR for “shadow IT” or “Value Prevention Society”).

Now available on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide:“4 hard truths of multivendor outsourcing.” Of every aspect of managing an IT organization, outsourcing probably has the worst book smarts to street smarts ratio. Here are some street smarts to help you along.