People have pointed out that there are lots of 'consultant stories' around other than the watch-borrowing one - I particularly liked this one from Stan Wright about a consultants take on an orchestra and this (rather old) one about the difference between a Japanese and American rowing eight.
Both jokes/stories make the point that if a consultant or organisation loses sight of the purpose of the organisation then they can very quickly destroy any value that it has. In bigger organisations it can sometimes see as though the majority of effort goes into looking at how the organisations internal processes function rather than concentrating on what actually needs to be delivered to customers.
The value of an objective view is that you can often ask the awkward questions, such as, 'why are you doing this?', 'do customers actually think your service is good', that internal staff are either deterred from asking by politics or don't want to ask in case they lose their jobs!
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