Blood Type of a Consultant

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Before getting into blood type, it's worthwhile to define the term "consultant" as I believe the industry has muddied the term to the point of confusion. Unfortunately, it is common today to refer to all labor external to an organization as "consultants." Consultants are hired to advise (or consult) in areas which are outside the body of knowledge inside the organization. Consultants will typically have either extensive first hand experience in the subject matter, or a research arm which identifies the issues and best practices in a leading edge area of business. Organizations hire consultants to provide their opinion and "advise them what to do" often for the purpose of driving highly material decisions

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Playing to Win

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I see many sports organizations consistently, year after year, playing to win - as opposed to playing to not lose. They will make the extra effort to ensure they have the right players are in place, but much more than that they will ensure the management talent is in place. They will have extensive recruiting networks, deep management talent at all levels (both at the professional and feeder teams), and cultivate a culture of success throughout the organization. In short, they have made the conscious decision to "play to win."

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Some Things Never Change

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The economic condition we are globally facing today is generally acknowledged to have been driven by greed. Greed at all levels. Greed of mortgage companies, brokers, real estate agents, appraisers, title companies, real estate speculators, Wall Street investment banks, securities investors, and even naive CDO investors who should have known better. At the same time there was greed in many of the people who purchased far more that they could afford. "Living the Dream" that they had convinced themselves they could afford.

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Types of Meetings - It Depends on Your Perspective

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The marketing guru Seth Godin describes three types of meetings which occur in business - Information, Discussion, and Permission meetings. I found this very interesting and somewhat of a parallel universe. In the business world that I am familiar with, management of Information Technology, I am used to four primary types of meetings, and a different set than Seth describes.

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Memories

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Recently, Seth Godin made a great point in Personal Branding in the Age of Google that while checking into applicants for a babysitting position he "Googled" each applicant and learned a lot about them through posts they had made on Facebook and other social sites. [A good read on this is Oh, What a Tangled Web Print We Leave, by Brett Popplewell] This is a great example of how people's behaviors on-line mirror their off line identities. At least for those people that use their own identities on-line.

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The Art of Building a Team

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Over the course of the last twenty years I've been part of and put together dozens of teams. Over the last few years I've been putting together teams more often. I've found that it is important to recognize that teams evolve. They take on an identity. They have a culture. At the beginning of a project they are a collection of individuals, at the end of a project the team is far more than the sum of its people - in ways that are difficult to predict. At its essence, teams are organic entities which are grown as opposed to assembled or built.

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Keeping Proper Perspective

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Two of the weblogs I follow had interesting posts recently. The fist post by Seth Godin was titled Do You Have 16 Boxes?. In this post Seth elegantly describes a method of keeping perspective by (and I paraphrase here) imagining 16 boxes with each box representing a part of your life. As one box is doing very well, others may be doing poorly. By looking at the bigger picture, meaning all 16 boxes, it is much easier to stay in balance.

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Cautious Steps Make Little Progress

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I read an interesting saying the other day, "People who take caution with every step make little progress." In my experience as a management consultant I have seen many people who require a tremendous amount of information before they make decisions. In some cases there are many uncertainties which need to be worked through and in others it is simply a management style.

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Bet the Company Thinking

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Business 101 starts with defining a business model that solves a real problem for a set of people, and doing so at a price which people will pay to address their need. This business model will account for risks, and a conscious decision is made to pursue the business (or not) based on these risks. In some cases, the risks are very high and the potential rewards correspondingly high. The most extreme of these are called "bet the company" decisions - and rightfully so, the risks are realized it could destroy the company. The fundamental concept that both extremes are possible serves as an internal regulator for decisions

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What Do We Look For in Our Leaders?

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Given that leadership is something that virtually all people look for, what does leadership mean, and is it different for each person? Is it as simple as understanding that people will follow a person who will make some aspect of their life better, or is there more to it? Do people look for some of themselves in their leaders or do they want something different? Do people look to their leaders to inspire them? Do people look for different things in their leaders in good times and bad?

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