Inarticulate ramblings of a management consultant

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

Tag Archive for ‘Reward’

Due diligence in an emerging market…identifying the right channels of information, sticking to the 80% rule and managing your parent!

I’ve written this blog from the perspective of the business which is being acquired…all of the examples below are from real situations but not from the same deal. I challenge you to picture yourself in this scenario: You’re the first, professional, externally appointed CEO of a family owned manufacturing business in Indonesia. Your business has been built over 2 generations and occupies a prominent position in the sector you occupy, […]

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Re-employment, not retention – that’s the name of the game these days

It is extraordinary how age creeps up on you. In thinking about and discussing this blog with a colleague recently, I was suddenly aware of how over the course of 20+ years of work, the nature of my relationship with my employer has changed and more specifically how different it is from the new generation joining the workforce. So, like many of my peers, I’m left with a dilemma. Do […]

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Pray for some divine intervention – M&A may be coming back!

Whisper it quietly but it seems that the M&A market is finally returning to some very decent volumes again (http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/04/07/1821102/ma-is-back-ish/). No doubt the headline transactions will be the ones that everyone is focused on, not least because the old scourges of government intervention in the case of Alstom (or pure protectionism by another name) plus aggressive valuation in the case of Astra Zeneca are being played out in public. The […]

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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 […]

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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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