Dom for Hire: Cummings Offering Consultancy Service

Dom is back as an adviser – on Substack. For a mere £10-a-month, or for a discounted £100-a-year, you can subscribe to his advice and receive his pearls of wisdom:

More recondite stuff on the media, Westminster, ‘inside No10’, how did we get Brexit done in 2019, the 2019 election etc will be subscriber only. Subscribers will also get some extra features like community/regular ‘ask me anything’, and a serious dissent section — I’m interested in the best arguments against what I say. Subscribers will find out first about new projects that I make public. Only subscribers can comment.

That’s not all, he also available for hire as a consultant too. If you have problems that need fixing of a certain kind, such as

1/ You want to win an election.

2/ You want to improve your marketing / communications / digital marketing. E.g A big thing in marketing/campaigning will be ‘causal models’: i.e models based not on normal statistics but on causal models that can answer counterfactuals like ‘did our ad cause the purchase/vote and if we had not run it would the purchase/vote have happened?’. Very few are working on this, almost no normal marketing/political companies have the skills to do it.

3/ You have management problems.

4/ You want to predict something but don’t know how.

5/ You are a government minister/CEO-type figure in an organisation and want to shift from the old world of Powerpoint + Excel to: code + prediction/keeping score + dashboards (and dashboard of dashboards!) + ‘Analytical Private Office’ of the sort I set up in No10 to support the PM: i.e a team with the skills for data-intensive science, reasoning under extreme uncertainty and supporting project management. Few public or private organisations (including No10 before we set up the A.P.O) now do the basics of data right therefore they are not able to deploy advanced tools such as machine learning or causal models.

Something that resonates with Guido is Dom’s diatribe against corporate Powerpoint/Excel consultants – which is basically all of them from McKinsey down. Dom’s consultancy will be different; data-driven, generating actual models with code that predicts, and dashboards that reveal. Unusually for this kind of consultant’s pitch there are none of the platitudes from past clients giving Dom endorsements. Possibly because he has spectacularly fallen out with most of the people who have engaged his talents…

* This article was originally published by Guido Fawkes

Who will be Next to leave the EU? Check out who is leading in our exclusive poll Poll