With Strazdin's testimony hounding the CDU, we went back to Ward Johnson at Sojourner Farms. How valuable is the advice to "eat your own dog food"? Johnson believes that people don't need to be told to do something that comes naturally to them. "Our food is made of all human-quality ingredients," Johnson says, "so it's no big deal to eat it. We don't have any kind of formal taste-testing program. The fact of the matter is that our dog food is a lot healthier than what I normally eat. One of our employees likes it quite a bit and routinely eats it, as well as our other treats, for lunch."
The CDU canine conclusion: Eating dog food is no great achievement. The advice factories charge per hour and per book to say at great length something that we can dismiss in one kibble-size nugget: Make it with something good, and dogs -- as well as people -- will eat it. In the dog-eat-dog world of consulting, it's a real treat to charge for something so obvious, bland, and easy to digest. And that's a bone that's hard to swallow.
David Dorsey (dedorsey@aol.com) is a frequent contributor to Fast Company.
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