Three years ago I wrote a post entitled "Leadership Is An Innate Skill?". In that post, I essentially avoided the core topic (because I didn't have an opinion), but I made some anecdotal points about how one could foster one's leadership style (which I thought was a more important point). My views on leadership haven't changed fundamentally since my original post in that I believe that some leadership skills can be learned, there are many different leadership styles, and contextual and organizational items play a role (e.g., can influence one to diverge from one's own leadership style or enhance it).
That said, reader Tom Hartly has brought to my attention a new book entitled, "Leadership Is Innate". I've not read the book, but one can peruse a bit online and figure out which side of the coin is being argued. The description reads:
Top CEOs will tell you that leadership traits come as "part of the package" and "can't really be taught". Scientists have recently begun to discover how genetic differences contribute to key leadership skills.
Whether to use consultants versus interim managers can be a bit of a loaded topic, and I'll choose not to address every angle in one post. Here I will just scratch the surface and paint some color by relating some anecdotal experiences. Depending on interest level, I may follow-up this post with additional discussion at a broader level.
To set the context, here's a couple of working definitions that I'll offer up:
Consulting – use of a third-party (potentially a team) to help a company solve a particular business problem (for example, evaluate business opportunity for offering mobility applications to consumers, provide an independent assessment of a failing call center)
Interim Management – use of one or more experienced individuals to take or play the role of a manager or executive within the company (for a limited period of time or trial period).
Now my deeper attention to the term "interim management" first started when I worked back in the 90s at the management consulting firm, PRTM. As context for those not familiar with PRTM, I characterized PRTM (back then at least) as firm that balanced strategy and operations engagements. As such, the firm got involved with both early strategic planning and later-phase, tactical design of business capabilities. At risk of oversimplifying, PRTM consultants were not just pure strategy guys, but they were often people with actual implementation and management experience. There used to be a firm motto that floated around to the effect of, "Results, Not Reports". This motto was essentially a shot at strategy firm practices of delivering stacks of analyses and reports that never had an impact. One of the partners (who had just rolled off an assignment as interim CEO) described to me his view on interim management something to the effect as follows, "Interim management is something [infrequent] that the firm only does for special clients. Unless approached correctly interim management can create a dependency between the firm consultant and the client that is hard to wean the parties off of. But interim management can offer a variety of benefits, particularly when a company wants to move forward with operational execution immediately."
Since then, here's a few examples I've heard from clients over the years which are indicative of a lean more towards use of interim management over consulting approaches:
"We don't have the management skill set internally, and we need to fill three management roles in finance, services, and technology pretty immediately while introducing more sophisticated practices that can be transferred to the larger organization as we grow."
"We are exploring this new geography for our products and services, and we need someone to help us as a general executive (covering all entity and operational requirements) to see if we can get things to pan out."
"Our marketing VP will be going out on parental leave, and we need someone to fill the role for six- to nine-months."
"We need someone that can fulfill the corporate development function with total dedication, but we need the option to release this person once we have met the objective of securing a beachhead in the North America enterprise market."
After March 3, I plan to leave my current gig to pursue freelance consulting for awhile, along with a number of colleagues. The exact vehicles and logistics are still in the formative phase – fortunately the administrative logistics for consulting businesses are not too arduous.
I find it useful to revisit a post I wrote a couple of years ago on independent consulting because I don't have the sales prospecting scale I use to have within a larger firm. I think that a lot of what I wrote about independent consulting is still true. I might have one additional add, and that is I think that social networking tools are getting better for helping consultants. Just the other day I was just contacted by a CEO of a technology company because of my LinkedIn profile and updates I had made to my status (which stated "Steve is looking for new contract or employment opportunities"). The CEO has been looking to grow his business and is looking for general management, finance, marketing, business development, and account management assistance. Although the lean was toward a full-time hire position for me, the geography is unlikely to work. So now the impetus is on me to work with him to determine whether I can help in either a consultative role or interim management role. Now in all fairness, the CEO knew me from before from venture-related circles and consulting, so this is not a cold networking opportunity. That said, I didn't have to reach out to him for the process to get kicked off. I was able to use social networking tools. And as compared to having to compete against 300-1000 applications for a job (I'm a normal guy and have *never* won in that kind of environment), one has to think about how to measurably change the odds of winning.
Of course, I've probably jinxed my personal opportunity by talking about it in the open. But given that we are in a terrible recession and that freelance consulting is the "new unemployment", I wanted to elevate the discussion.
Background: Management strategy consulting professional David Dalka, Florian Hollender, and other management consultants are using Twitter. Ford Harding, world-renowed author and expert on sales (e.g., for consultants and other professional services folks), also has two very recent posts on using LinkedIn and Twitter as part of the business development and sales process.
Based on that context, I've started an account to get hands-on experience with Twitter. I think my home page is here. I can't stand to use instant messaging (although I do use it), so I'm not sure a federated "blurting"-thing is going to stick with me. That said, I'm willing to see whether carpal tunnel or Twitter wins out. I am also interested in developing my thoughts on both how Twitter communities form and how businesses might capitalize on Twitter.
Update (2/24/09): Link to approximately 8,414 consultants that Twitter? Side note: compare this to approximately ~1.2 million consultants on LinkedIn.
Plan to wear a pair of decent shoes on the plane, and don't just pack dress shoes in your baggage.
I have had to let my boss wear my shoes to a client site when his got lost during international travel. Since he took the nice-looking ones, good thing I wasn't left to wearing a bunch of sneakers to the client site!
Gautam Ghosh has both a good find and interesting comments on management consulting recruiting in the current environment. A few themes permeate his post: 1)laser-specific recruiting, 2) hybrid experience, and 3) focus on productivity. I can't really comment on #1, but as for #2, I have known a number of ex-consultants return to their prior consulting firms after having left once for operating companies (in some cases, the returns have been even more numerous than once). For whatever reason, returning to your prior firm (or even to the consulting field again for that matter) used to be much more rare. On #3 regarding productivity experience, this has been confirmed by account executives that I work in conjunction with – the turndown in the global economy has really created a stronger demand for those with operations or cost reduction experience (over other areas such as growth managers).
Update 2/20/09: An older post of mine that may be interesting to reflect on in a down market … "Don't Become An 80s Rock Drummer"
Awhile back I had a post on triangulation, and although I had received a number of questions on how this might be depicted, I never got around to showing it. The attached picture below is pretty good and is motivated by an engagement involving wireless spectrum valuation. The basic idea is that we used three methods to get the range of potential dollar values for each wireless spectrum property. The chart below is the summary chart that ties the results of separate analyses together. The first method of valuation on the left (historic comparables) involved looking at past government auctions for similar properties and coming up with high, low, and in-between values. The second method of valuation (economic model) used a statistical regression model trained on a priori auction conditions (e.g., number of bidders, amount of money ante) and ex-post results (e.g., property values), and here we basically used the model to predict what might be the outcome of a new, unseen auction. The third model (financial metrics) basically took a look at recent market transactions (e.g., outright asset sales) or values imputed by the stock market value of wireless-heavy companies (e.g., by taking enterprise value and normalizing by spectrum holding amount).
When one plots these three different valuation methods on the same chart, it becomes possible to "triangulate" and see what a competitive values for the wireless properties might be. We basically added two horizontal lines to depict the expected minimum amount of money to pay to be in the game and also the maximum amount of money that should be spent (e.g., based on balance sheet of company and financial capacity).
Update 7/30/09: Been made aware of another posting on the net regarding triangulation and the football field method. See here.
Disclosure: In early March, members of my team and I will most likely be casualties of the economic downturn and inferred strategic changes by our employer, Nortel. This post reflects my perspectives only and not necessarily those of my employer and colleagues.
As background, the past few weeks have been quite tumultuous at Nortel. After many years of work in trying to turnaround and restructure the company, Nortel filed for creditor protection on January 14, 2009 (under the Chapter 11 code for the U.S. region). For those folks that will continue with the company, turnaround work is not yet done. Although I've worked in a number of environments, prior to this experience I have never lived *within* a company that has filed under the Chapter 11 code. I write this post simply to share some thoughts on both social media situations and management styles I've seen in this environment. In no particular order:
Companies need to be aware of blog posts by directly involved parties. Here is a blog posting that chronicles communication of the ex-Nortel employees with the CEO, Board, officers, and the Monitor. The content of the posting is written professionally, and it seems to both chronicle a sequence of events and communications that indicate a number of "disconnects" in the communication process between employees and CEO (primary target it seems). Given the electronic environment that is a regular part of our lives, managers and workers need to know that histories can be traced more than ever before. I, for one, never saw this thing kind of thing ten years ago.
Third party blog sites should also be monitored. For example, blogs such as All About Nortel cover the happenings in the industry with specific focus on Nortel. Whether one loves the AAN site or not, I have found that employees to look to these sites both for information and as an outlet. People discover things that they did not know (of course many things need to be verified). For example, in one of the comments sections of a recent All About Nortel post, I saw a disturbing comment by a potential distributor and customer of Nortel. I forwarded that information to a regional manager I knew - soon the blog post had circulated to a VP level for escalation and verification.
Managers should treat their employees like adults where possible. Sounds like a basic one, but as an example, my manager gave me (and my team) straight talk and opinions during the process (outcomes which are still unfolding). Even when things weren't set in stone and when potential results were ugly, he managed to be up-front. On the other hand, in another situation at Nortel I did have a manager in the chain who (from my vantage point) chose to gather information to make himself look good while "rolling people under the bus" without having an adult conversation with the affected parties first. Little did this manager know that people were willing to be rolled under the bus for the cause but instead felt betrayed when the adult conversation never occurred and they were simply rolled over.
Although I didn't really address anything about the issues related to creditors, suppliers, and partners, from the above, my largest takeaways would be that fairness, transparency, and communications are critical things to balance in a company under duress.
Update 2/11/09: As sample exhibits, I also wanted to point out some user-generated video on the Internet. Here is a YouTube video (apparently posted post-Chapter 11 filing) covering a pep rally as part of the "I Believe" grassroots campaign within Nortel. To contrast this is a more cynical YouTube parody as related to the blogpost/letter I cited above in point #1.
Update 2/15/09: CEO provides a YouTube update to the "public".
Update (6/21/09): The end of Nortel is near (post).
Update (8/10/09): CEO of Nortel (Mike Zafirovski) to step down. Another era has ended. Note the slideshow provides an historical view of a great Canadian company (more than 100 years old) that has come to an end.
