Author: Steve Shu

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Some Additional Links and Resources on Management Consulting

Dr. Robert Lahm, Jr. (Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship with Western Carolina University) looks like he may have organized some links and resources on consulting here. There are a number of blogs listed along the right hand side of his web page, a number of which I have never covered on this blog before.

Additionally, about midway down the page there are some links on "Consulting 'How To'" and "Starting a Consulting Business". In the "How To" section, Dr. Lahm not only references a popular post of mine on client facilitation skills but also provides a presentation on "Consulting Basics (Class 2 Slides)" (note PPT). That Powerpoint presentation sheds even more light the importance of soft stuff in an engagement. It also provide some concrete advice on the cadence of a (desirable) consulting engagement.

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Financial Times ComMetrics Global 500 Blog Index

For what it's worth (FWIW) – I just ran across this Blog Index (Alpha). Not sure when this was introduced (perhaps vintage 2008?). I don't fully understand the scope and rankings yet, but I find the discovery interesting given my time away from actively being involved in the corporate blogging space. Notes to self: one consulting firm (Accenture) on the list at #18 of 48, heavy tech in top 10, and mixed industries in top 30.

Update (2/7/09): Dr. Urs (CTO associated with the technology) contacted me to inform me that the tool is still in Alpha phase. More info on how the tool works can be found here. Registration and accounts can be obtained here. The is also a Twitter stream covering tool improvements, etc.

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ConsultantNinja Post on the Consulting Job Market 2008-2009

ConsultantNinja has an older but excellent post painting a picture of the prospect for jobs in the consulting market. The upshot of his annecdotes are that demand (for candidates) is down and supply is up. (Note: ConsultantNinja also has a later post that characterizes the current market as "the worst time in the last 20 years to try and get into consulting").

I'd complement some of his thoughts with a couple of things I've seen at the business schools and with clients:

  • As a gross simplification, I think of many of the business schools (pre-market collapse) as placing roughly 1/3 of folks into each corporate, consulting, and investment banking positions. If you have talked to any of the b-school students receiving investment banking offers this past year, a ton of offers were rescinded after the global economic collapse. Those one third of students that were seeking i-banking jobs – now they have become competition for consulting jobs (although I am mixing apples and oranges and cutting some corners, that one-third has now become two-thirds). With that context, is easy to see why one of the BCG recruiters that ConsultantNinja captures in his annecdotes indicates that attendence at (presumably recruiting) events has doubled.
  • Although the global downturn has probably affected more than double the number of countries as compared to the "typical" post-war recession, money still appears to be alive and well in the Middle East. My team has had some engagements and activity in places like Dubai/UAE, Egypt, and Morocco, and themes have been around launching new services and infrastructure upgrades (as compared to cost-cutting themes that seem to have top-of-mind in many other geographies). So I would concur with ConsultantNinja that those seeking consulting opportunities may want to look to the Middle East.
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Personal Account of 1 Year of Blog Atrophy

It's been over a year since my last post. At the beginning of 2008, I basically burned out on blogging. My hands hurt, I developed other interests, there were too many blogs out there, and I needed to spend more time with my family. None of that has changed for me, but outside of those areas there are some things that have changed that are making me reconsider blogging again on a more regular basis:

    • Need to stay up-to-date with the times on a professional basis: In 2005, I noted that blogging as a corporate skillset was in its infancy. In 2009, I got feedback that I should have included my blog address on my CV/resume. In 2009, I also ran into a marketing and sales situation where expertise with social networking tools was a key differentiating need.

    • Need to feed my support structure and network on a passive basis: By suspending my blog, I lost some touch with my larger family, relatives, and friends. Now as context, I don't just keep in touch with these people via computer technologies. That said, content on my blog helped to keep my network passively in touch. It also helped to serve as a conversation piece when we got to talk live.

    • Need to stay up-to-date with technology on an active basis: When I was blogging, I was much more in the know about social networking tools and their real implications (social and economic). Now, my knowledge has become a little stale on things like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. I'm sure that refreshing my knowledge will be like riding a bike, in that it all comes back to you, but having been away for one year, I have been feeling more disconnected with the power and pulse of the Internet community.

Each year I have reconsidered my motivations for blogging and the angle that I would take. Do others have observations about their own experiences in the past year?

Bonus link: For readers interested in consulting, there's a new management consulting blog by ex-McKinseyite Kevin Gao at http://managementconsulted.com. Looks like a very unique stopping point on the web in the consulting space.

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A Perspective On Client Facilitation Skills

When I first started as a management consultant back at Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath, one of the hardest things for me to grasp was the concept of "client facilitation". Many of the consultants I knew where eager to apply standard MBA frameworks like Five Forces (for competitive and profitability analysis), NPV and financial analysis tool, statistical regression, and the marketing 3Cs/STP/4Ps, but few talked about client facilitation in explicit terms.

In my mind, client facilitation refers to the processes (and skills) that a consultant uses to get a client organization to critical decision points, deep understanding, and committment to move forward or redirect.

A master of client facilitation is a person that can:

  • Master analysis skills of the trade: use top-down logical reasoning, use many analytical frameworks, work analyses from multiple directions
  • Communicate well: whether it be via face-to-face conversation, writing, phone, or instant messaging (yikes)
  • Teach and frame things properly: because interactions with parties may be varied, quick and because parties may have varying levels of knowledge, one must be able to ramp-up conversation levels quickly and put them in the proper context
  • Recognize where the organization is at and how decisions are made: is the marketing department behind in their understanding? who does the CEO look to as his/her right hand? if so, what are the steps to getting the right hand on-board or up-to-speed? how do we get things to tip? can we get there in one step or will it take two steps?
  • Lead people *without formal authority*: can you educate people, empathize with the organization, get the organization to trust you, and pave a vision and/or outline a set of tradeoffs with such clarity that motion must happen?

In my opinion, the last skill is probably the most important aspect to master regarding client facilitation. I daresay it is the essence of client facilitation, but I am pretty damn close to it. Client facilitation skills are specialized leadership skills which are all about leading people without formally being in charge.

Update 2/20/08: Gautam Ghosh points me to one of his posts that does an excellent job of discriminating between other types of "consulting" and "facilitative consulting". Again, this topic is not one that I’ve seen many people write about outside of more terse, academically-oriented publications. That said, the subject of facilitation is a very, very important aspect of management consuting and in my mind applies to more than 90% (just to pull a number out of the air) of the engagements I have ever been on or run.

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The Kellogg Post MBA Program

I just ran across Kellogg’s Post MBA Program, which is targeted at people that have MBAs that have aged more than ten years. This is an interesting market to target, and not one that I’ve seen before.

A more detailed curricula is outlined in their brochure, which is prefaced by text including the following:

The curriculum for the Kellogg Post-MBA Program has been created for executives who already have earned an MBA degree and want to gain a fresh perspective on leadership. The first two weeks of the program address a broad range of recent management developments such as globalization, hyper-competition, outsourcing, the shift to a knowledge-based economy, the growth of innovative financial instruments, the appearance of truly global capital markets, distributed information processing capabilities, and new communications technologies. Five months later, participants return for a leadership week that focuses on developing one’s own personal leadership capacity while also equipping people to lead change in today’s complex environment.

What is interesting to me is the characterization of recent developments. As time passes and if people don’t adapt, it can be easy for workers to get stuck in old ways, whether that be having historical prejudices, using traditional management styles, or carrying about old conceptual models on how things work.

The spirit of the Kellogg program seems good. It is great to reflect on how things have changed over the years and how one needs to adapt continuously.

Of course seeing the first curriculum item of "The Sarbanes-Oxley Act" nearly made me pass out …

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