This site has been undergoing some trackback attacks today. IP numbers seem random, but post selection does not (?). Some issues connecting with TypePad server for admin, etc. Perhaps others are encountering the same issue. Depending how extensive this turns out, I may need to shut down the blog for awhile.
Management Consulting: The Spring Cleaning Method And Getting Over Humps
I had a lunch meeting the other day, and my contact and I talked briefly about one method that a number of management consulting firms use. I used this method now, and I used it at PRTM and prior companies. I suspect the method may be more typical in execution-oriented management consulting firms as compared to pure strategy firms. The technique never had a formal name, but I call it "The Spring Cleaning Method". It goes with the time of year, and it captures the spirit of the idea. Note that method should not be confused with the Al Dunlap ("Chainsaw Al") version of "cleaning house" though!
The Spring Cleaning Method of Management Consulting consists of an executive- or management-level meeting (e.g., 1.5 days) to talk about the business in great breadth, capture issues (no-holds barred), rank issues, strategize, and divide and attack.
The basic value of a Spring Cleaning management team meeting is as follows:
- The meeting forces people to think proactively. While management may have regular weekly management meetings, it becomes easy to become caught up in the day-to-day grind and push off things that people don’t have time for but know are important.
- The manager (e.g., CEO, COO, President, GM) that oversees the functional line roles has an opportunity to reset expectations and goals. This can be psychological or real. Whatever works to get people moving and thinking actively.
- Involvement of a management consultant provides both an independent (non-political) fresh look and extra, versatile, project bandwidth. The management consultant may be expected to work with all of the above parties above to prepare information in advance, facilitate the meeting discussion using standard- or firm-specific business frameworks (or choke, create one on the fly), gather notes, organize and triage, and develop a proposed project plan and/or a traceable set of issues and action items. The management consultant is generally brought in to be a right-hand man to the sponsoring manager/executive.
In the Spring Cleaning meetings that I have worked on, a typical meeting may last 1.5 days. Roughly speaking, the first meeting is brainstorming and getting the info out. Through the night the consultant works to organize the notes, data, perform analyses, etc. The next half-day is spent working through the high points, prioritizing, and drilling down next steps.
While different clients vary, post-meeting the management consultant may be retained both as a generalist for project managing things forward and as specialist for working with a specific functional group (e.g., that has more items to work on, less bandwidth, more time critical items, more need for competitive or quantitative analysis). In change management, the goal of the organization is to get over humps or change course while running the business – not to employ a management consultant for the long-haul or create a dependency of the organization on the consultant.
As a final note, the project management aspect should not be underestimated (a form of overconfidence bias). As with many change management efforts, there is tremendous value to monitoring, measuring, and cracking the whip. Professional sports players (e.g., golf, tennis) don’t cut corners on coaches when making critical changes in technique. Why should a company be any different? If there is enough value to resolving issues, make sure that someone signs up a diplomatic and detailed-oriented person to make sure things drive forward.
Steve Shu
Don’t forget to subscribe to Steve Shu’s blog now (click icon)! Business and technology information for everyone.
Sapient CTO Says Blogs Are Digital Equivalent Of Pet Rock
Sapient, a business consulting and technology services company, speaks out on blogging. As posted by Jupiter Research:
It was bound to happen. Blogger backlash has set in. Witness
Sapient, a leading business consulting and technology services company,
issuing a “media alert” with the headline, “Blog tech doesn’t live up
to blog talk, according to Sapient CTO.” Ben Gaucherin, the CTO in
question, says blogs “are a fad fueled by pop culture’s desperate
search for the next big thing.” When I spoke with Gaucherin he was even
more emphatic than he was in his news alert. He told me that blogs are
the digital equivalent of the pet rock. [InfoWorld: Columnists]
Although I have never thought of Sapient as being a traditional consulting firm (kind of a hybrid like Scient, iXL, Viant, Diamond Technology Partners, etc.), Sapient is one of the few branded consulting firms I have heard speak out on and against blogging. Will be interesting to see if other consulting firms speak out.
Hat tip: Scoble
For The Blog Museum: Email Signature Block Footer Of The Past Versus Present
Past footer for corporate emails:
The information contained in this transmission may contain privileged and confidential information. It is intended only for the use of the person(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or duplication of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. To reply to our email administrator directly, please send an email to [email protected]
Present footer for corporate emails:
This email is [] bloggable [X] ask first [] private
Original source for present footer: I don’t know. Two steps removed is Ross Mayfield.
Google Makes CIA-Funded Technology Available So US Citizens Can See Their Own Houses
CNN reports that prior CIA-funded technology can now be freely used to view your own house (satellite image quality only covering the US) from 6 to 12 months ago … an efficient way to spend taxpayer money washed in the public equity markets and now available to the world via Google.
The Blogosphere Concludes The MBA Is Worthless
These results irk me to no end (because I have a lot of professorial friends in the b-schools that look to improve their programs all the time), but the blogosphere consensus as seeded by Seth Godin appears to be that the MBA is not an education. He is not alone in his claim. He is supported by a number of other prominent MBAs referenced in blogosphere conversations (click here, but note that the Blogpulse computation may take a while).
Note there are some potential measurement errors here in terms of what is tracked (looks like only formal trackbacks are included) because other conversations have clearly been spawned from Seth’s thread.
That said, presuming the Blogpulse measurement is representative of the crowd consensus, is the wisdom of crowds correct here? I’ve casually thrown in the "crowds" argument to support some of my prior posts, so I can’t have it both ways if the crowds argument is a valid argument, and the crowd concludes the MBA is bunk. Have any pre-conditions for the wisdom of crowds been violated in the Blogpulse chart?
A Few Link Pointers On Venture and High-Tech Compensation
Some of these are older references, but these contain information on stock options (Be forewarned that one needs to be very careful that one is comparing apples to apples when looking at this data or getting compensation benchmark information.):
- Brad Feld – on board compensation for directors (no cash for you early-stage directors)
- Ed Sim – on HBS compensation study
- Salary.com reference – here (one of the most detailed breakdowns I have seen on the net albeit potentially biased to include companies that have filed S-1s)
Other sources I have used for getting this information from: law firms, serial entrepreneurs, VCs, CFOs, other execs, and sometimes executive recruiters. Stock option compensation can be a bit of black art in my mind (as I mentioned in comment section of Brad’s post).
Weblogs As A Game – Musings On The Levers (Long Post)
I blogged previously about Michigan Business School’ s foray into corporate blogging by having MBA students help a small enterprise. Real kudos to Bud Gibson and the others involved in this bootcamp effort.
Bud’s post made me pause to think about and write down what I have learned about corporate blogging, building blog traffic, getting cited by opinion leaders, etc. My thoughts are based on personal experience, analysis of best practices in other blogs, some loose benchmarking, and search for cases which defy what most people think of as best practices. My thoughts are a work in progress (it is hard to do this kind of research "as a side effort"). I have tried conducting some controlled experiments to see what factors result in different "outcomes". I use the word "outcomes" because blind recommendations don’t work in blogging – not everyone has the same goals in what they want for their blog. People should just be aware of how different levers work and then experiment and apply what works for them.
Here are some thoughts (I reserve the right to change my mind!):
- Some people say write original content: If one wants traffic, then perhaps the statement is mostly true, but then I would qualify this to say that one needs to write original content from time to time. I have found that I can get away with this on my blog. I have seen more successful bloggers (if there is even such a measure of any blog being better than another) do it too.
- Some people say post frequently: I don’t think this is a necessary condition, but posting semi-annually is probably too infrequent. There are bloggers like Ed Sim (venture capitalist) that are reputed for having quality, thoughtful posts on a less frequent basis.
- Anecdotal experience on getting cited by experts or uber bloggers: Offline networking works best for me. My wife and I met Virgina Postrel a couple months back (her husband is a business school professor with my wife). When Virginia cited my blog a couple of times in the past, there were thousands of hits to the blog posts.
- Some people say quality of writing matters: Poor writing style doesn’t help, but I suspect good writing style may not be as important as some people think. I have seen people write way better than I do (not hard to find I might add) and have less traffic. I have also seen myself write great posts (or similar posts on another platform) that get little traffic compared to poor posts I have written that fit into the blogosphere better. What I have found is that contributing to dialogue matters more (in the way of using trackbacks, writing something about things currently on people’s minds in the news, having an angle, having a different takeaway, etc.).
- Some people say commenting on other people’s blogs helps: I have found that trackbacks tend to work better by 2X or so. My writing style was largely the same on my old Tripod blog (ignore the ads that weren’t there previously), but that blog didn’t support inbound or outbound trackback. When I shifted to my new blog on Typepad (well writing efficiency went up), I found that traffic and commenting went up very measurably in about 1/4 of the time.
- Some people say having commenting capabilities on one’s blog helps a lot: Not sure on this one although intuitively I would like this to be true because I like to respond to people (whether by email or response post). People like the concept of intimacy. While I feel having commenting can’t hurt you if you know how to respond to it effectively (see Bob Lutz’s blog at GM), it may be sensitive to how much clout one already holds (by way of what position you hold, what company you work for, what name you’ve established prior to blogging, how much traffic you already have). Seth Godin is a perfect example of someone that does not have commenting on his blog (yet he supports inbound trackback), and he has something like 2%+ of all Typepad traffic on the Internet (as reported by Alexa).
- Some people say use blog "electrification programs" like Carnival of the Capitalists: There is a good account of how traffic peaks for the host (I couldn’t locate it offhand – was done earlier this year). There are also sites that report increases in temporary blog traffic as the linked-to blogs. How sticky the readers are after the click-through, and how many of those readers become continued blog readers varies.
- Some people say don’t use blog magnet or traffic explosion programs: Here you get readers that aren’t sticky. Likely true. But if your model isn’t based on stickiness (e.g., impulse buy), then heck, it’s another tool to be aware of. The tool is not my style for this endeavor.
- Be aware of the mechanics around "The Tipping Point": If the goal is to get word around virally, here’s a great post on how a blog post got diffused through the net.
- Some people like Robert Scoble say use granular posts so that word can spread around: Conceptually, his idea sounds good to me having been an engineer (breaking things down into components and thinking about the concepts of ideaviruses also make sense). However, to be frank, I have not researched whether this is statistically true and borne out in actual data. Requiring granularity strikes me as a little weird though because political blogs are some of the most popular blogs, and these can be the wordiest/most packed blogs out there at times. That said, if one recounts how blogs became legitimized in the political area (e.g., in Hugh Hewitt’s book on Blogs), there does seem to be a role for distributing concise fragments of blog ideas.
- Some people say write a manifesto that can be passed around: Robert Scoble’s manifesto and Seth Godin’s free pdf book on unleashing the ideavirus come to mind. Need I say more here. Manifestos can really work if you can invest the time and find an angle from which to write.
- Learn about how things like search engines and the folksonomy software interact with blog traffic: This is probably a moving target given how rapidly blogs and search software are evolving. My current anecdotal experience is that this works better than commenting and about the same as trackbacks (in some cases much better than trackbacks). How sticky the traffic is … well, my impression is that trackback methods are stickier, but then I don’t have good sources I can cite to back this up. A little bit gut feel. Not a real strong gut feel yet.
- Link policy: No conclusions here, but it does have an impact. Need to think about this one. I posted my policy here. Jennifer Rice has some good thoughts on her site (see link to her link via my post).
- Placement of sideboard items: No conclusions here. Stickiness seems to be influenced by how the blog is laid out, and prior concepts about websites do not necessarily seem to carry over to the blogging world. On a somewhat related subject related to layout, consider Seth Godin’s post on having a sticky top line post.
- Hosted blogging platforms need to make advances to support corporate users: YES! Please do. RSS integration needs to be easier (e.g., adding Feedburner). Being able to track what people click (as opposed to having to add some funky php code) needs to be easier. Being able to add things like "email this post to a friend" should be there. Being able to automatically suggest other posts should be available. Being able to subscribe to commenting updates should be available to readers. Being able to interface with email updates (e.g., via Bloglet) should be there. Adding search engine capability … the list goes on and on. Without going into agonizing detail on this, there are improvements that seem like they can be made to improve viral spread and ability of bloggers to create stickiness. Unfortunately for the end user, hosted blogging platform R&D doesn’t look like it’s going into this area yet. Bloggers currently need computer science degrees and versions of HTML babblefish decoder rings to add these features in the aftermarket.
I have many more thoughts on this subject, but I just wanted to bang out some of the blogging levers that immediately popped into my mind. I guess my main thoughts are that depending on the game or business model one wants to create, then there are levers that are consistent or inconsistent with those goals. There’s no one way to skin a cat.
Hope this helps some future Michigan MBA students get some additional ideas.
Steve Shu
Don’t forget to subscribe to Steve Shu’s blog now (click icon)! Business and technology information for everyone.