The best advisor is the one who can advise you to do nothing

For years, consultancy had a fairly simple relationship with execution.

A problem was analysed, a recommendation was built and, very often, the recommendation gave rise to further work. A new campaign, a rebrand, a platform, a project to implement.

It is an understandable model. In many cases it works perfectly. I say this from experience: I have often seen these dynamics at work.

There is, however, a question a CEO should ask even before assessing the quality of the proposal:

could the person advising me comfortably conclude that I do not need to buy anything?

There is an old English saying that captures the problem well: never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

The issue is one of incentives.

And anyone sitting at the board table should understand them before making a decision.

Advice changes when it generates the next piece of work

Every economic model creates incentives.

If an advisor’s recommendation can turn directly into a second engagement, that incentive inevitably enters the decision-making system.

The problem of incentives is, after all, serious enough to have been formalised in precisely those sectors where independence of judgement is essential. In financial auditing, for example, the SEC counts among the criteria that can impair independence the existence of conflicting interests and situations in which a professional ends up reviewing their own work. The context is different, of course. The underlying principle is useful here too: when advice and execution generate linked financial interests, it is worth making that relationship explicit.

This does not make a piece of advice wrong in itself, but it is important that the context is clear.

A company may ask whether it is time to change its positioning, overhaul its identity, increase investment, replace a supplier, rethink its communications or rework its brand architecture.

Decisions like these can generate hundreds of thousands of euros of follow-on work.

That is why, even before considering the solution, it is worth examining the position of whoever is proposing it.

There is also evidence of how incentives can influence professional advice. In an audit study of the financial advice market, NBER researchers observed advisors who were more inclined to recommend products with higher fees and, in some cases, to reinforce clients’ beliefs when these aligned with their own financial interest. It is a different sector from ours, and it would be wrong to transfer those findings automatically to business consulting. It does show, however, how naive it is to treat incentives as extraneous to the quality of a recommendation.

A recommendation should be robust enough to stand even when it generates no execution at all.

There is also value in the things we decide not to do

Part of Advisory is hard to show.

A rebrand leaves behind a new identity. A campaign leaves creative work, content and results. A new website leaves a visible product.

A good decision, however, may simply leave behind something that did not happen, such as a supplier retained or an identity that was deliberately protected.

Its economic value takes the form of a cost avoided, a risk reduced or capital that can be allocated elsewhere. This is where it becomes useful to distinguish the quality of Advisory from the volume of activity it generates.

Advisory should improve the quality of a company’s decisions. Sometimes that decision leads to a major intervention. At other times, it may lead to a much simpler choice: wait.

Doing something always carries an opportunity cost

Every business decision competes with other possible decisions.

A million allocated to a rebrand cannot also be used for an acquisition, product development, commercial expansion or improving the customer experience.

The same applies to management’s time. A major transformation absorbs attention, resources and capacity.

That is why the useful question is rarely just: can we do it?
We need to ask: is this really what creates the most value right now?

The ability to deliver a project and the merit of delivering it belong to two different moments.

The first concerns execution. The second concerns judgement.

AI multiplies the possibilities. And therefore the things to rule out

This distinction will become even more valuable in the years ahead.
It is the collapse of the cognitive class: as a growing share of execution is automated, value tends to shift towards judgement, accountability and the capacity to govern.

Producing content, generating variants, analysing data, building benchmarks and automating processes is becoming ever cheaper.

The direction is already measurable. According to a Gartner survey of 402 CMOs, the share of marketing tasks automated through AI is expected to rise from 16% in 2026 to 36% by 2028. In US agencies the change is even more visible: Forrester finds that nine agencies in ten already use generative AI and around half use agentic systems.

That is why, the further we go, the more the number of things a company could do or not do will keep growing. After all, when the options are few, selecting is relatively simple. When they run into the hundreds, judgement gains value.

The core of Advisory is therefore shifting towards selection: deciding which initiatives deserve capital, time and attention.

A good advisor protects the right not to intervene

In marketing, we are used to associating value with movement.
Doing. Producing. Changing.

But when the value lies not in movement but in consolidation, a valuable Advisor must be able to choose to protect what already works.

For me, this is where independence comes from: having enough freedom to always choose what produces the best decision for the business.

Even when the outcome of weeks of analysis is a very simple sentence: for now, better to do nothing.

And for a CEO, that statement makes all the difference in the world.