Inarticulate ramblings of a management consultant

the day to day experiences of a consultant operating in weird and wonderful client situations

Complex transformation

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Management information in projects – a meaningful source of data or post rationalised intuition?

Much of my work in recent years has been to work with senior managers who are looking for some kind of a magic bullet to give them an insight into their organisation…a data set which: They can trust where the ‘provenance’ is clear and consistent. The consistency in particular has to relate to qualitative experiences they’ve had with their employees or other relationships they have internally or externally Relates to their own experience either […]

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What’s the value of a plan?

It may seem strange to those of you who know me that I’m in the profession of planning otherwise known as project / programme management. For years, my life was anything but planned, work opportunities seem to occur through a combination of chance and happy circumstance. Obviously it’s been easy to post rationalise my various moves (!) but the reality was very different. That was not however due to a […]

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The messy business of retention in merger integration projects

I suspect that the phrase most often heard and rarely delivered against in the transactions world is ‘people are our most important asset‘. It’s right up there with ‘there’s a natural cultural fit between our two companies‘ and ‘this acquisition will be earnings accretive in x years’! Why does the tendency to make statements based on zero knowledge and little chance of delivery continue in a market situation which has […]

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Mergers and acquisitions are here to stay

I often think that I’ve dedicated the last 14 years of my consulting career to an activity which is entirely defined by the famous quote about madness…to paraphrase, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why is this? The reason is simple: Mergers and acquisitions offer opportunities for CEOs in every type of situation; defensive, growth orientated, focused on the need to diversify geographically or […]

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An Opposite Angle: When Asia’s giving the orders

While we’re learning more about Asian style and culture as a result of companies shifting manufacturing and other operations to China and other Asian countries, there’s a big gap in our understanding about the allocation of capital, how Asians make decisions, and how they run their businesses that could turn out to be our undoing. For more than two centuries, capital has traditionally flowed from European countries and the United […]

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