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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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Interesting Post On Whether Selling Is Practicing One’s Profession

Ford Harding has an interesting post entitled, "Is Selling Practicing Your Profession?" He takes the side of the argument that those who sell (e.g., partners in professional services firms, senior engineers) are indeed practicing their profession. But there are those that may argue (e.g., in the case of an engineer) that such and such a person is no longer an engineer because he or she now sells.

I tend to agree with the spirit of Ford’s argument – that those who sell are practicing their profession. In management consulting firms, it may be more obvious in some of the small- to mid-sized firms where consultants get involved in sales processes as early as the manager-level (this is in contrast to principals and partners I’ve interviewed at some of the big, well-known firms where sales experience is very limited to partner-levels). In management consulting, the product is complex, and one really has to understand all aspects in order to sell. One needs to understand the methodologies that can be used, the importance of engagement structure, the value propositions, all the potential variations of situations, the client organization and capability to change, potential pitfalls, what’s going on in the industry, etc. The best people in selling consulting engagements are those that have been consultants, done many engagements, currently involved in engagements, and understand when and why a client should or should not use a consultant.

That said, I have found that many people have a hard time shifting gears from delivering engagements to selling engagements. For example during the sales process, consultants newer to sales will want to ask about a lot of details, in effect trying to solve the client’s problem during the presales process. But the purpose of the presales process is to establish credibility and rapport, identify the problems to be solved, create the link between the problem and the consulting engagement that will solve the problem, and sell the engagement. The presales process is not about solving the customer’s problem in a couple of meeting sessions. Granted it is important to offer perspectives, opinions, industry data, case studies, etc. during presales meetings, but those that have spent lots of time in delivery and little time in sales can lose sight of where one is in the sales process with a customer prospect and what questions absolutely need to be answered for the consultant to propose a scope of work and engagement structure.

Shifting focus from a delivery role to a sales role takes work. I never really appreciated the investment required until having to step into a sales role out of necessity in a startup. Of all of the sales books and sites I’ve seen and read, Ford Harding’s blog and books are some of the best things to check out if you are looking at professional services sales.

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Illusion

A wild illusion. The spinning silhouette mostly starts up clockwise for me.

Update (10/14/07): Lots of comments over here at Marginal Revolution. There is a reference to left brain versus right brain dominance, etc., but I’m not too sure … I like the comment about the person that tried filming it backwards … then when played backwards, the person still saw things going in the same direction.  🙂

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For My Diary: eBay Impairs Its Skype And Pays Founders

Close to two years ago eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion. Today I read the news that the synergies are not playing out (surprise, surprise) and eBay will take charges of $1.4 billion, most of which is attributed to the acquisition writedown. From Bloomberg.com:

EBay, acknowledging that Skype hasn’t performed as expected since acquiring it for $2.6 billion in October 2005, said in a statement today that it will write down the value of Skype by $900 million in the third quarter, as well as take an additional charge of $533 million to pay former shareholders under a provision of the takeover agreement.

To put things in some perspective though, Skype’s second quarter revenue is at $90 million. If you read through my past notes, 2004 revenue was $7M and 2005 revenue was projected (near time of acquisition) to be $60M+.

The Internet serves as a great record for these case studies. It it interesting to read some of stuff bloggers wrote two years ago about this deal. And bloggers like Paul Kedrosky (who seems to tip that the impairment may not be enough) and Om Malik are writing again today.

To digress a bit, I can imagine the discussions that are going on about whether the strategy was flawed or whether there was a failure to execute. I don’t know what the case was here, but I can almost hear chanting from my past colleagues and mentors that there was a failure to execute. Seems like execution failures are blamed more often than strategic failures (for better or worse).

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Delaying Decisions As Opposed To Being Indecisive

My family’s vacation was marked by an incident that led to my first 911 call in my life. I have reflected upon this incident for many days with a mixture of thankfulness for the safety of my family  (and others on the boat) and personal anguish that I could not have done more.

We were on a whale watching cruise miles off the coast of Monterey with about 40 other people on a 50-foot some boat. On the return trip back to shore, there was a malfunction that caused the exhaust pipes and roof to catch on fire. The engine was cut by the captain as it seemed it might have been a driver for the fire coming out of the exhaust. Life boats were on top of the cabin on fire. Life preservers were all in the cabin on fire (with the exception of the two preservers my two kids were wearing who had put some on at the beginning of the trip). All the fire extinguishers were spent quickly, and the flames just got worse as time passed. Shore seemed to be a long ways away, but at least we were not out 30+ miles (I’m guessing) from where we started. There were very few boats that we could see, and there was a lot of smoke coming off our boat. A 911 call was made from my mobile phone, and I handed the phone to the naturalist on the boat who was (potentially) better equipped to identify our location and condition. A number of people were panicking, and many gathered in the very back of the boat to distance themselves as much as possible from the fire and smoke. Things did not look good by any measure.

I had been in the water a few days before. The temperature was not too discernible from ice water from my perspective. I had seen seals, so I was hoping that there were not any sharks in the water.

A question raced through my mind a number of times. Was the situation bad enough that I should I pitch my kids into the water? Then there were intervening questions entering my mind … what happens if something explodes before I make a decision? The boat is rocking pretty violently … can I actually pitch them far enough from the boat that they won’t get walloped by the swaying boat? Would they survive long enough in the cold water? The questions going through my mind were endless.

I chose to delay my decision to throw them into the water. (After the trip, I realized my wife had the same thoughts going through her mind)

The fire continued to spread. Eventually the life boats were released. No sign of the Coast Guard. A small boat came alongside and threw us two fire extinguishers. The other boat was too small to take many people, and very soon the new extinguishers were exhausted. Smoke got worse. Maybe five minutes passed.

What to do?

At some point, the captain decided to restart the engine. Though I didn’t speak with her after the trip, I presume that she decided our chances were better if we tried to gun it to shore (even though speeding up the engine could have increased the fire). We gunned it towards the nearest point on shore. The increased exhaust may have served to cut some of the flames, but who knows.

We made it to shore to be greeted by the fire department and the local news (the incident was the lead story on the news that day and made the front page of the paper the next day). Coast Guard arrived 10-20 minutes later. Everyone was safe. No one needed to go into the drink.

Did I make the right decision to delay throwing my kids in the water? Was I indecisive? Did the captain make the right decision to take command and gun it to shore?

In my opinion, the captain made the right choice. We were out of options to put out the fire, and it was not clear that we were going to get any help in the near term.

As for whether I should have delayed my decision to throw my kids in the water, I am still at odds with that. True they are safe, and the direct threat at the time may not have been imminent, but in reality, I am a layman about boats, and the threat could have been imminent for all I knew. But delaying the decision to throw them in the water allowed me time to gather additional information, such as whether some other boat might come to our aid, whether the fire was spreading, or whether we would get feedback from the crew about our distress calls.

In numerous business settings, I have found that delaying decisions can be beneficial, more often in cases when one is trying to gather additional information that will make subsequent decisions more informed and definitive (e.g., you should posture yourself as ready to make a decision once information comes in as opposed to just being indecisive). Sometimes this can be counterintuitive to those in the business world, where things seem to be driven by a culture of being decisive and making decisions with whatever information is on hand.

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