Steve Shu – Page 18 – Stephen Shu, PhD

February 9, 2006

Schools Of Thought In Management Consulting

These days I’m in an environment where I’m working with other management consultants, working with those formerly with other management consulting firms, and experiencing the second-order effects of management consultants currently in the business. Being immersed in all of this led to an interesting discussion on two "schools of thought" in management consulting regarding styles of either 1) laying out options for clients or 2) making recommendations. (I should note that by highlighting these two schools of thought, I don’t mean to imply that every engagement lends itself to one style or the other – for example, many implementation consulting engagements may simply be change management oriented or facilitative. Strategy engagements, on the other hand, typically lead to decision-making crossroads, etc. where a pre-dominant school of thought would play out).

Now sometimes people have drawn similarities between consultants and doctors in the way that advice should be dispensed. Now, I’m no medical doctor, but I doctors are typically trained to lay out options for patients, not to make decisions for them.

I am generally with that school of thought. That consultants should lay out options for clients with the qualitative and quantitative tradeoffs, risks, and benefits. It is the client’s responsibility to make a decision. In fact, some clients would be put off by an outsider telling them what they should do.

But I see that there is another school of though that depends on either the consulting partner leading the engagement or the client wishes. Frankly, some clients believe that if consultants work for them that the consultants should also state their own opinions on how to proceed, e.g., what would the consultant do if the consultant were in the client’s shoes.

This is delicate ground, but to be frank, I have at times stated my personal opinion while distancing my personal opinion from the facts presented. I also make sure to caveat my personal opinion with any biases that I may have, while also emphasizing that I have kept personal biases out of the analysis given to the client.

Maybe people have different opinions on how they’d like consultants to treat them. Or perhaps people have opinions on what they prefer doctors do when giving diagnoses. I have not seen any scientific analyses of how the school of thought I’ve presented affects client satisfaction or client propensity to enlist services from a consultant, but I would venture to say that perhaps I’m too old school on the consultant and doctor front.

February 7, 2006

Blogs In Management (Also Management Consulting Blogs?)

I just discovered the blog of management guru David Maister, acknowledged as one of the world’s authorities on the management of professional services firms. I particularly like David’s Fast Company article from 2002, "Are All Consultants Corrupt?" because it touches on topics that one needs to address regularly as a management consultant, particularly about how can one ensure that one produces services that one can be both proud of from an ethical point of view and a quality of product perspective. To this, all I can say is that one should leave the management consulting profession if ethics and quality can’t be met.

But the real purpose of this post was to point to David’s post on internal blogs as a management tool. His text here gets at a real pain point linked to diseconomies of scale in management:

As firms get larger, more dispersed and more complex, the disaffection of partners (in professions and businesses of all kinds) is becoming more evident. I get calls all the time enquiring about my availability to consult on the issue of partners’ unhappiness and their feeling that they are treated like employees in an increasingly corporate culture.

I am a believer that blogs can help with this sort of thing (essentially flattening the communication structure associated with complex organization structures). That said, blogs are not a panacea for organizations and managers that do not know how to 1) use written communications to complement the management style and 2) deal with the semi-structured and dynamic nature of the blog medium. These latter items are table stakes in my opinion, but they can be easily underestimated.

In the comments section of David’s post, I was also encouraged to learn of a tip that Ernst & Young may be using blogs internally. I have blogged before about consulting firms using/not using blogs (e.g., here, here, here). It’s good to hear of more activity in the consulting area and to learn of consulting/management blogs like David’s.

February 1, 2006

How Empathetic Are You?

In a prior post, I mentioned how empathy plays a role in consulting. But I wonder how many consultants are really empathetic a la this test? I tested as a 47 (average for women is 47 versus men is 42). One person (past consultant) I know very well basically tested as an autistic (score of 25). Interesting.

February 1, 2006

Musings On Surviving The Bends When Moving Between Small and Large Companies

The "bends" refers to decompression sickness and is often associated with divers who surface from a dive too rapidly (e.g., because of an emergency like running out of oxygen) and where the pressure transition of moving from deep to shallow water can be so shocking that it cause gases to bubble out of one’s blood – very painful. Though I haven’t read up on the facts on how many people die from the bends, for one reason or another I often associate the experience as very traumatic experience with a high probability of casualty (which may not be true). In any case, I spent lunch the other day with a successful entrepreneur that I work with (who raised tens of millions of dollars from top VCs in two ventures), and we shared some stories about our own startup and big company experiences, other friends’ experiences, etc. The talk made me reflect upon how people can switch between entrepreneurial ventures and large corporations (both directions) and not get the equivalent of the "bends".

From my vantage point, there seems to be a high probability of people failing to make the transition.

Here are some example sickness conditions that one might find when switching from small company to large company:

getting frustrated with (perceived) excessive processes
failing to recognize sensitivities associated with chain of command or organizational structures
having to hold specialist positions that may not see end-to-end workflow (such as beginning of customer prospecting through contract closing and delivery)
moving from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond (and the associated reduced scope of control)

For this post, I’m going to ignore the positive aspects of switching between small and large company, and I’ll turn to some example sickness conditions that one might find when switching from large company to small company:

having difficulty operating with no to little human resources (e.g., VPs in big companies where they had people working for them and not knowing what to do when they have to deliver on their own)
wanting to expand the organization prematurely (e.g., building up large sales teams before product is even close to alpha)
working with colleagues who may neither have the experience of working with large companies nor speak the same language
getting accosted by management for failing to realize that a small company may have much smaller margins for error

For myself, I found that imagining how life was going to be on a day-to-day basis before I made the switch had helped quite a bit. For example, before I first left the management consulting field to work for an angel-funded startup, I told the CEO something to the effect that I was mentally prepared to scrub toilets and live life by eating only canned beans. I knew that in a transition from a well-paying management consulting job to a bootstrap – well things were going to feel financially different. On the other hand, when I returned back to becoming a management consultant in a large company, I knew that there would be more processes, organization, etc. to work with. Projecting how life would be back in a large company had helped me to make the transition.

What I suggest is an internal readiness testing of sorts.

To digress a bit, I have seen some folks apply interview testing (or sorts) to see whether a large company person would work out in an small company/entrepreneurial setting. The test might have been to have a candidate for a VP of Sales job develop a sales presentation (or revise the startup’s existing sales presentation) and present the deck to the startup management team and board itself.

If the transition can be accomplished successfully, great things can happen. Sometimes business connections and credibility from someone from the big company world can be leveraged quite nicely into a small venture. Soimetimes entrepreneurial attitudes and fresh blood can help with large companies that need a revival. These are just tips of the iceberg in terms of potential benefits.

But transitions can be rocky. The bends exist, and they need to be actively managed before, during, and after a transition. At least, methinks so.

January 29, 2006

My Brief Notes On The Avian Flu

This past week I was researching some telecom reports, and I happened to run across an outlier in the corporate mix that caught my eye. It was a Gartner report, entitled "Prepare for Avian Influenza: Our Interview With the World Health Organization’s Dr. David Nabarro" (sorry – subscription required).

Now I don’t follow the management consulting and other firms that specialize in risk management and human resources that closely, so I thought I would check their sites out for a peek. Marsh has some information on the avian flu here. AON has something over here.

Companies and organizations do not seem prepared. A survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions appears to indicate that 66% of companies do not feel adequately prepared (poll of 179 companies). Instapundit points out how hospitals could barely keep up with the normal flu here. When I step back from the business aspects and whether companies can withstand prolonged labor shortages of 30%+, etc, I am a bit more concerned that communities and families may not be prepared. At least I find myself not quite fully informed to a level that hits close to home, despite all of the press.

So I have started to make some mental notes from research reports, like those from Gartner, that hit close to home. Maybe readers will have other sources of info to share.

From the Gartner report (note Dr. Nabarro is the highest medical authority, the U.N.’s top official for global pandemic response planning), here are my key notes:

"in the last 200 years, there have been pandemics at intervals of every 30 to 40 years, on average" – so if even if one doesn’t have to be concerned about it, there could be an impact on one’s children or their children
"modellers are [saying] that it may be as few as 21 days from the initial appearance of the virus to it being a full-blown pandemic" – note that the increased mobility of people shortens the cycle-time of viruses spreading ; I ask myself, how and how fast would I personally react once something hit the continent, country, or city I live in?
Dr. Nabarro indicated he is not sure (because he doesn’t know enough about how corporations work) whether corporate CEOs should assign senior executives to coordinate their response to avian flu

It seems the World Bank estimates economic damage from an avian flu pandemic could cause $800 billion in economic damage. To put that number in perspective, Hurricane Katrina damages were estimated at $125 billion. A sickening of 90 million Americans as stated here – gee, that would be out of a population of 296 million Americans according to the CIA World Factbook. My wife and I can barely control flu in the household between kids let alone if one of every three people in the entire US is sick. What would you do?

I suppose after writing all of this down, I am not more prepared for an avian flu pandemic than I was before, but I do find myself at a heightened level of awareness. That’s probably at least one step forward.

Update (1/29/06): As an aside, raders have choices of stockpiling N95 masks approved by the CDC or apparently, Kimchi (which I despise the smell and taste of).

January 24, 2006

Perceptual Mapping: What Does Your Cell Phone Say About You?

Last week I was reading a detailed research report regarding cell phones in order to get a more structured understanding of the consumer marketplace as it relates to upstream B2B vendors.

Now in business school (e.g., in a marketing analytics course), one may learn about concepts such as perceptual mapping, a combination of numerical factor-analysis and marketing technique that may be used to graphically place vendor products in a two-dimensional chart, where the products may have many more underlying features which actually makeup the products. Wikipedia has a sample chart here, to give you an idea of what perceptual maps look like. What is nice about certain-types of perceptual maps is that the charts are borne out of people’s actual market behaviors or expressed preferences (as opposed to some ad-hoc or opinion-driven marketing method).

In the report I was reading, there was a picture of a less-frequently used perceptual map that grabbed my attention. Basically instead of products, the perceptual map placed cell phone features (e.g., calendar, push-to-talk, text messaging) on a two-dimensional map with the axes ranging from a) low- to high-technological advancement and b) high-entertainment to high-utility.

Based on the features (each a point) on this perceptual map, one could identify five primary clusters of points. These clusters were essentially viewed as market segments of mobile phone consumers and were divided as follows:

Picture people (camera phone lovers)
Gotta-have-it-all types (e.g., Motorola RAZR types)
Plain old telephone people (basic phone users)
Organized telephone people (e.g., like calendar features in the phone)
Always on-the-road types (e.g., like productivity & synchronization functions)

It’s funny when you look at the high probability demographics for these mobile phone segments (and I will take some liberties here to boil down the paragraph of demographics to a few words – note: demographics match the listing order above and have *not* been written to be politically correct):

females, without children, poor
males, dumb, low income
females, married, dumb, poor
females, married, poor
males, married, highly educated

I fall into the organized telephone or plain telephone crowd with my basic Siemens flip-phone. What does that say about me? I’ve never really cared too much about image, but what am I communicating to people by my use of phone? Is your ringtone a mating call in disguise? What does your phone say about you?

Update (2/15/06): Zoli, I can’t log into your blog to comment on your post since I forgot my login, but I have to say that the idea is creative. Why be canned in by what’s already been done? Maybe it’s the next category leader. 🙂

Continue reading “Perceptual Mapping: What Does Your Cell Phone Say About You?”

January 16, 2006

Black Cats, White Cats, & Diversity Musings In Consulting

This Martin Luther King Day I reflect upon my family’s white cat and black cat. The younger white cat picks on my much older black cat – can’t quite say that it’s a state of harmony, but at least there’s no blood. I enjoy both cats, each for different reasons.

The term "cat" is also used by musicians quite a bit. One of the (black) drummers that I am currently studying is Dennis Chambers. In his 1992 book, "In the Pocket", Dennis wrote, "One thing I liked about Miles [Davis] is that he finally realized that there are some funky white cats. A long time ago when I was coming up, if you wanted somebody to play funk, you hired a black guy. It was unheard of for a white guy to play funk. White guys were playing rock and roll or whatever."

Now the term cat is not really used to refer to management consultants. I’ve heard other terms used, such as "guns", "mercenaries", etc. What I will say is that the management consulting field tends to be a white male-dominated profession. When prepping for interviews with consulting firms during b-school in the late 90s, I recall looking at some of the brochures and websites of management consulting firms, seeing the non-diverse pictures of employees, and thinking something to the effect of "entering the consulting field is going to be a little bit of a shocker". Now I’m not the only person that has observed the non-diverse aspects of the management consulting field. For example, check out this message board post and this article.

Now the skewed demographic makeup of the executive ranks of Fortune 500 companies has been covered by many others. So perhaps the makeup of many consulting firms should not be a shocker. Whether the makeup of many consulting firms and corporate offices is right, I dunno, but I will say that when finding role models to follow within these businesses, I’ve often had to look at people who are nothing at all like me, when I would have preferred to have had at least a larger set of people to look at.

January 14, 2006

Leadership Is An Innate Skill?

I saw a recent post that raised the question as to whether leadership skills are innate (and cannot be learned). Leadership is a bit of an ill-defined term, so I’m not exactly sure about the context of the original discussion triggering the post, but at face value I have to say that innate skills can help but instilling a continuous learning process about one’s own leadership style (and that of others) can also help dramatically. What I share below intends to illustrate not only that one can build knowledge to help with leadership skills but also that one may find little progress on a day-to-day basis until one day when it all comes together

Two areas that created an “ah-ha” for me with respect to helping me recognize my leadership style were related to going to business school and getting support from a client executive to develop the business skills one of his line managers. Had it not been for these two events, I probably would have turned out as an engineer focused on individual contributor work as opposed to a person focused on business within the technology space. While either of the outcomes is perfectly fine, I am happier that I have found the business slant is more the “natural me”.

The first step in going to business school helped me to develop my leadership skills by explicitly forcing me to focus on thinking about and analyzing business issues, as opposed to passively addressing business issues while working on the job. Business school also gave me an extra level of confidence in knowing that I had spent dedicated time to try to improve my knowledge.

The second step may have occurred, in part, by chance. During a management consulting engagement I was involved with, I was sitting in a three-person, executive review meeting with one of the partners of my consulting firm and the president of the company. The upshot of the meeting was that one of the functional managers was not performing too well and both the president and the partner wanted me to coach the functional manager to help him take his management skills up by an order of magnitude or the functional manager would be fired. What followed from there was some behind the scenes work in analyzing how to approach the situation and then direct assistance with the functional manager to improve the business. After that particular client engagement, things started “clicking” for me, and I was able to get into both interim and direct management roles more regularly to foster my leadership skills.

The upshot of all this is that combining knowledge, practice, and a real environment to foster one’s management and leadership skills helped me to breakthrough and reach a new level (one-time, discontinuous improvement as opposed to gradual change). While the process of improvement may have taken many years with slow growth, I was suddenly able to get things to click together.

I have found similar discontinuous improvements in other areas of life. For example, in tennis, I remember going to tennis camp and getting a breakthrough on getting better control with my one-handed backhand. In drumming, I started to study a completely different style of music (jazz fusion instead of just progressive rock music drumming). The knowledge had to sit for awhile, but one day it all clicked and took me up a notch when I least expected it. If I hadn’t prepared for the time when the conditions and environment were right, I wouldn’t have reaped the benefits. Sometimes I think working on leadership skills might be in the same vein.