Inarticulate ramblings of a management consultant

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

Tag Archive for ‘innovation’

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Time – an effective way of charging for consultants?

Like many of you reading this, I’m beholden to the clock….from a work perspective, time is the only key performance indicator which has commercial value in a consultants life. Everything else, like creativity, intuition, relationships and network, analytical ability, highly specialised knowledge about certain sectors or subsectors or processes or functions, or specific transformation events like mergers and acquisitions, is merely a precursor to the ultimate target, which is charging […]

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Work or life – less of a balance, more of a succession of activities!

I’ve always struggled with the concept that these two dimensions should in some way be balanced. The definition of itself is wrong..the implication that work somehow isn’t part of life is surely incorrect? There’s also an implied assumption that these activities have a time equality on them in order to achieve that balance and that without this equality, our life is somehow reduced either in its value or in its […]

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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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To Diagnose or not to Diagnose?

The usual story about consultants checking your watch and telling you what time it is, has preoccupied me for a while now…primarily because it’s often true. The presumption behind the story is that the client knows his issues well and doesn’t need any diagnostic. In fact, increasingly consultants don’t do diagnostic or analysis any more, at least not officially and primarily because clients don’t want to pay for this service. […]

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