Quote of the Day: Arnold H. Glasow on Success

Before he became a go-to source of boardroom one-liners, Arnold H. Glasow spent years in the unglamorous grind of selling and running a business, learning, the hard way, how quickly “expert advice” can turn into an invoice that eats the very gains it promises. Out of that lived skepticism comes his dry, surgical quip: “A consultant is someone who saves his client almost enough to pay his fee.”

The joke lands because it describes a familiar emotional math. A consultant arrives with frameworks, audits, and confident language, and by the end there’s often evidence of improvement, just enough to feel prudent, not enough to feel victorious. Glasow isn’t claiming consultants never help; he’s pointing to the razor-thin margin where perceived value is engineered to meet the price tag.

That matters because it exposes a broader business habit: outsourcing certainty. When leaders feel stuck, they buy reassurance in the form of expertise. But expertise is notoriously hard to measure, and the easiest metric becomes “savings.” If the savings roughly match the fee, the client can say the engagement “paid for itself,” even if the organization didn’t truly move forward. The quote is a reminder to demand clarity: outcomes, timelines, ownership, and what success looks like after the slide deck is closed.

Arnold H. Glasow earned the right to be funny about commerce because he lived inside it, an American businessman and satirist whose sharp observations distill how incentives actually work, not how they’re advertised.

No need for a commemorative date to make this practical: in a September season of budgets and planning, apply Glasow’s wit by insisting on measurable leadership and pricing tied to results, then keep a little room for humor, the quickest way to spot a deal that’s mostly smoke.