Blood Type of a Contractor

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True contractors have a specific blood type. It is a different blood type from that of a consultant, but a blood type none the less. True contractors also are distinguished from people who work on a contract while between full-time employees (contractor by convenience). I differentiate contractors from consultants by a simple rule of thumb. An organization will hire a consultant to advise them on a course of action. An organization will hire a contractor (or many) as a source of external labor to execute against a pre-defined plan. In the IT arena roles of project manager and programmer are frequently filled by contractors.

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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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E2.0 Fundamentals

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Over the last few years I've been connecting dots, data points actually. These data points relate to innovation and the opportunity presented by Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) technologies. While there is a tremendous amount of evidence from companies who have started navitgating down this road that these technologies, individually and collectively, provide great benefits and are seen as potentially game changing. With these new technologies companies are learning why and how to best make use of them within their organizations.

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The Problem With Ease of Use

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Ease of use is something which is highly desired. Industries are built around it. Intellectual property laws allow entrepreneurs to innovate to make almost anything easier to do. In the 1980's and 1990's companies would spend a great deal of time and money on business process (re)engineering. The end goal was to have processes and systems which were easier to perform and easier to use. While it was recognized that this would be expensive, the elusive "ease of use / ease to perform" was thought to be well worth it when all was said and done.

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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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