Inarticulate ramblings of a management consultant

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

Forecasting

Divorce – the failure of two high profile transactions

Two interesting tales of failure this week. The first, the sell off of Worldpay from FIS following a disastrous integration has that rare commodity in any form of transformation programme, a counter factual with the acquisition of First Data by FISERV happening at the same time with similar market condition..but a dramatically different result. The second following our earlier podcast on Project Everest is a little summary on the break […]

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Changing your organisation – using the science of ‘segmentation’

As the UK election looms, in what looks to be one of the closest elections in many years, I’m drawn to speculating what the new swing vote category is going to be called…we’ve had ‘Worcester Woman’ from Tony Blair and ‘Basildon Man’ from Margaret Thatcher some years ago so what next? ‘Portsmouth Pensioner’? The grey vote appears to be a major battleground ‘Teviot Teenager”? Does the momentum of the Scottish […]

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Top down or bottom up? Developing a strategy which actually gets implemented!

Now there’s a question! Let me say upfront that as someone who comes from a programme and project management background (and therefore implementation focus), I have an inbuilt bias to this problem but will try to put a rational and as usual, highly cynical case to this problem. By the way, I don’t mean challenge, issue, risk or distraction, but serious, business / career destroying, crisis inducing, health impacting problem. […]

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How Circumspect Should Quantitative Forecasters Be?

Originally posted on Dart-Throwing Chimp:
Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion on the use of technology to prevent and document mass atrocities as part of an event at American University’s Washington College of Law to commemorate the Rwandan genocide.* In my prepared remarks, I talked about the atrocities early-warning system I’m helping build for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide. The chief outputs of…

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