Category: Corporate Blogging

Hat tip to Mark Lin on pointing me to leading management consulting firm, Bain & Company, and their Management Tools 2007: An Executive’s Guide publication (note PDF). As context from the publication (bracketed text added by me for clarity):

Every year or two since [1993], we’ve interviewed senior managers and conducted research to identify 25 of the most popular and pertinent management tools. We’ve defined the tools in this guide and, based on a detailed survey of managers, we explain how the tools are being used. We determine the rate of success for each tool. We also conduct one-on-one follow-up interviews to learn the circumstances in which each tool is most likely to produce the desired results. …

Our efforts to understand the continually evolving management tools landscape have led us to add five tools to this year’s guide—Consumer Ethnography, Corporate Blogs, Lean Operations, Mergers and Acquisitions and Shared Service Centers. While none is new, per se, each tool is growing in use and playing an increasingly important role in today’s business world.

I wanted to point out a couple recent posts and blogs that relate to topics that I’ve touched on before:

• Poweryogi’s post on interviewing experiences with consulting firms. I sympathize with his experiences – interviewing in B-school is not a fun process in many ways. I had an earlier post that described how interviewing can in many ways be like the "Pepsi Sip Test".
• A blog on Intranet blogging, by corporate intranet blogger at Intel, Ricardo Carreon. Beth Kanter, thanks for forwarding the info! I had back in 2005 worked with companies regarding intranet blogging as well as created a whitepaper on intranet blogging here (note PDF file).

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.

Bartłomiej Owczarek points me to Accenture Netherland’s blogging space for employees. Very nice (and rare) discovery of a blog community that is very informal yet connected to a well-known corporate brand. Bartłomiej also shares his hypotheses on why there aren’t more management consultant bloggers out there:

• because of time constraints
• because they want it to be perfect from the start
• because they live in a world full of policies.

I hadn’t really thought about Bartłomiej’s second bullet point before, but I could see how that might play a role in areas of a consultancy.

Bartłomiej, thanks also for the mention. Best!

Update (11/30/05):  Stephan starts a naked conversation and shares his thoughts on blogging under the Accenture umbrella.