Inarticulate ramblings of a management consultant

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

Leave a comment

The bubble….why does it continue? Our poor forecasting capability or collective amnesia?

I was listening this morning to the Forum on the BBC which had an archectural theme to it, notably including Stephen Bayley, a commentator with whom I had dealings some years ago and whose opinion is always worth listening to. He made the point that the completion of very large, eye catching buildings seemed to frequently coincide with an economic downturn and quoted Dubai and various buildings in London, the […]

Continue Reading →

1 Comment

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 […]

Continue Reading →

5 Comments

Working from home….management’s last bastion of control

The nature of the office workplace has changed almost beyond recognition in the last 30 years. The pace of change in terms of activity, responsibility, speed of communication, access to information and people, and complexity of the ‘transaction’ whatever the company might be engaged in, are all vastly different. Gone are vast numbers of manual tasks and with them activities and roles in the workplace. What is required these days […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

Compensation structures – still stuck in the dark ages

As I get older and the needs of my family change, the inherent inefficiency of traditional reward structures becomes more and more obvious. What I mean simply is that the requirements I had of both salary and benefits when I was 20 or 30 are no longer relevant to me, indeed more importantly than their practical purpose is the reduced perceived value that they offer. Much has been written and […]

Continue Reading →

7 Comments

Why bother with organisational structure?

For those of you who’ve worked with me in the deals / post merger integration environment, this rant will be very familiar and i apologise for repeating myself in this forum…but I was reminded once again of this in a conversation with an old colleague. Let me take you through the way the discussion normally goes, the participants being an HR person and me in a operational due diligence and […]

Continue Reading →