The early morning sun is beaming through the coffee shop windows. Looks like I’m the first customer of the day. It’s quiet and the tables are empty. I got up early after a late night of back to back meetings last night downtown. Hit the gym and over to a local coffee shop. I’m looking […]
2015 Into 2016 is a post from: Consulting Success
“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.”
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850
New Years Eve, the final day of 2015 in the modern Western calendar. For me the year we are about to put behind us was both the best in my life and the most unexpectedly challenging. Hopefully the new year will revive the good and bring less challenges, but what if this is a matter of subjective personal preferences and not objective truths? Maybe after all, reality is pre-determined and not for us to change, as I wrote about three years ago in this article.
Pondering the meaning of reflection, I think I better focus on some easier questions to solve, like how I can make 2016 a happy year for my family, or like the question if there is intelligent life in the Universe. Well, maybe it depends on if we count in Earth or not, or does it?
Below is an entertaining, crystal clear treatise on the latter subject by The Economist.
The post The Greatest Question in Science appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
Well we made it, today is the last day of 2015 and it’s been another big year for us all. From the core team here at ConsultingSuccess.com we just want to take this moment to thank you all for being part of this community and supporting us as you do. We look forward to bringing you […]
Wishing You All a Happy, Healthy, and Successful 2016 is a post from: Consulting Success
Dear reader of this blog, we want to thank you for following The Bearing Wave in 2015. We had 59,000 visits during the year, as we published 181 new articles. In total, the blog now has an archive of 863 posts. Many of them are articles that we think may remain interesting reads also for years to come, as we can see from the statistics of articles published earlier in the seven year history of the Bearing Wave.
Now in the last days of 2015, we wish you a Happy New Year 2016, and many more! May you realise your ambitions and take time to recognize and enjoy each and every success. – Your friends at Bearing Consulting
The post The Bearing Wave in 2015 appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
I was listening to Charlie Rose interview George Lucas yesterday on Bloomberg. Did you know that the first Star Wars almost never got made? More on that in a just a second… Lucas of Star Wars and Indiana Jones fame has an estimated net worth of $5.1 billion. He’s been a successful filmaker and entrepreneur […]
Star Wars Consulting is a post from: Consulting Success
Trends tend to creep up on us, not noticeable at first, and then one day we realise things have changed and the World is no longer as we thought it was. We often speak about four mega trends which affects our work. They are the demographic change (on average we are getting older), urbanisation, globalisation and climate change. Within and in parallel to the mega trends many other changes are going on, at an increasingly fast pace.
The Economist has brought a futurist, a demographer and a museum curator together to spot the currently recognizable trends that will affect the way people live and work.
The video is about ten minutes and will provoke some new thoughts.
The post Trends Which Will Affect Our Lives in the Future appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
Seasonal holiday time, a time with few work e-mails and even less phone calls. A time to reflect, rest, catch up on writing and not the least a time for family.
This year my son is visiting New York and other family members are away with different priorities, so I have plenty of time both for catching up on work and catching up on reading.
Every year since the 1980s, one of my Christmas rituals is to lean back in a good reading chair and indulge in The Economist´s annual Christmas double issue.
Most weeks I read the Economist newspaper on my iPad while travelling, but for the holiday tradition I unwrap the paper issue to enjoy a few hours of the really intelligent journalism which only The Economist seems able to produce. The Economist is and always has been a publication of sometimes radical opinion with a reverence for facts, which is something I like.
There are a few newspapers and magazines, and now also websites, which I read regularly. My favourites are The Financial Times, Monocle, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and The Economist, and if I had to choose only one, it would be the latter.
The Economist also publish an annual supplement with excellent articles about the new year to come. This year they have also made a half-hour video, and I recommend a watch. Click on the video image below to enjoy.
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The post Seasons Greetings! appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
We live in a time of constant media coverage. Nothing can be said or done on stage without public knowledge through the news, and if no journalist is around then the news is spread by civil society on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, WeChat and a myriad of other social media platforms.
At this time, it is sad to see the contemporary lack of leadership in both the public and business sectors. Where are the charismatic orators of the past? Where are the Roosevelt’s, Churchill’s, Thatcher’s? Philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Georg Henrik von Wright? Where did unique personalities like Gandhi and Mandela go? Or if we look further back, imagine how a Caesar or Bismarck could lead the EU to consensus and prosperity, or how a new Peter the Great could finally lead modern Russia to reforms and modernisation?
As there is a war in Ukraine, civil war in Syria and terror in many other middle east countries, rising inequality in United States, open corruption hampering development in Africa, business ethics floundering, and not the least normal human care in families and society at large increasingly falling apart, where did the good-hearted, public leadership go?
Some say we are in a dark age of leadership. With so many challenges facing the world, now more than ever we need better leaders. But what does “better” mean in todays world?
Several of today’s leaders are visionary, many possess noble values and the ability to manage severe disruption. But there is one key quality that is too important to disregard, and missing in many of today’s most powerful people. Personally, I think about it and have tried to encompass it as the quality of purpose. According to Claudio Cocorocchia at the World Economic Forums Global Leadership Fellows Programme, the right quality is meaningfulness.
According to Cocorocchia, some of history’s most prominent and talented leaders had a larger picture in mind than their own personal or movements goals. Napoleon Bonaparte’s regard for social equality spurred him to design the Napoleonic Code of legal reforms. Abraham Lincoln’s mission to end slavery in the United States and reunite the country was a fundamental pillar of his leadership. Almost 100 years later, Martin Luther King continued Lincoln’s legacy, becoming the voice of the African-American people crying out for racial equality.
Having meaningfulness is different from having a vision. Vision inspires action, but meaningfulness is the bedrock behind that action. A vision can be designed and constructed. A vision can be borrowed and made yours. A vision does not necessarily need to come from a leader’s heart and soul, but meaningfulness does. In this sense Cocorocchia´s definition is better than my own thoughts on “purpose”, as meaningfulness is the synergy between heart and soul, and you either have it or you don’t.
As a human being, is it possible to be meaningful and also happy? I think being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. Satisfying one’s needs and wants increases happiness but is largely irrelevant to meaningfulness.
Happiness is largely present-oriented, whereas meaningfulness involves integrating past, present, and future. Happiness is more linked to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaningfulness goes with being a giver rather than a taker.
In many ways, our conceptions of leadership are shaped by the zeitgeist of our times. Leadership in the 20th century was largely defined in the context of public leaders or large, hierarchical, industrial organisations leaders. How will our conception of leadership evolve in the 21st century? It feels almost like leadership through the increasingly selfish “me, me, me” generation has become collectivised, and major trends and directions are now shaped by collective opinions, rather than through strong, outspoken leaders taking a stand from their heart and soul and leading from the front.
Maybe personal leadership in the 21st century is about how you lead yourself in your own life? It’s about the decisions you make and the actions you take from your own heart and soul, whether people are watching or not. It is about learning to trust your own actions so that others can learn to trust you.
So in an age where religion and ideologies no longer show us the way, and when selfishness seems to be a new mantra, how can we find a path to live a full life without stepping on or hurting others, instead in meaningful ways acting and winning respect as collective leaders?
I think it is about developing the habit of doing the ethically right thing all the time, even when it causes you inconvenience, expense, embarrassment or short-term pain (which can equal less short term happiness), and, I think, it is above all to take other people and their well-being into account in actions we take.
Consistency, to not waver from decisions, to not on purpose hurt other people, to be a bedrock of stability, that can make a purpose- and meaningful life.
The post The Key Quality of Leadership appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
From Michael Zipursky, and the whole team at ConsultingSuccess.com we just want to wish you a happy holiday season and a happy new year! 2015 has been a great year for the community of ConsultingSuccess.com and we’d like to thank you and we’re looking forward to continue working with and serving all of you in […]
Happy Holiday Message and Video From ConsultingSuccess.com is a post from: Consulting Success
One of the classic Christmas holiday movies is Ben Hur (1960). I remember I watched it with my father around Christmas-time one year in the 1970s.
The movie is an historical epic drama which portrays a wealthy Palestinian Jewish merchant who clashes with the Romans at the time of Christ. Ben Hur´s actions sends him and his family into slavery, but an inspirational encounter with Jesus changes everything. The hero played by Charlton Heston finally meets his rival in a chariot race at Circus Maximus in Rome and rescues his suffering family.
Ben-Hur still holds the title of the movie with the most Oscars, sweeping 11 of the 12 categories it was nominated in, although Titanic (1997), tied the record nearly 40 years later.
The racing-vehicle of the movie, the chariot, was a light vehicle, usually on two wheels and drawn by one or more horses. It was most often designed to carry two standing persons, a driver and a fighter who used bow-and-arrow or javelins.
The chariot was the supreme military innovation in Eurasia roughly from 1700 BC to 500 BC, although in the Roman Empire chariots were not used for warfare but for chariot racing, especially in circuses, or for triumphal processions when they could be drawn by as many as ten horses.
For two thousand years since the days of Ben Hur, vehicles were powered by horses. Horses were the primary mode of transportation, and they were killing our cities. Not only were cities densely populated, but horses had to be stabled and fed amongst the human population. Virtually all goods and services had to be transported by horse, and as society developed, rising incomes and trade meant horse power was even more accessible to a broader number of people and businesses. In a way, horse carriages were more intelligent than modern cars, as the horses by self-preservation steered away from danger.
Then in the past 100 years, human innovation, ingenuity and technology brought us modern cars propelled by petrol or diesel combustion engines, allowing for a tremendous increase in mobility. However the petrol-fuelled cars also resulted in pollution far worse than horse poop.
If we are now to implement the recently signed COP21, then converting our car fleets to electric vehicles will be a necessity, and now in the 21st century, innovation is hitting the vehicle industry as fast as it did at the origin of commercials cars, 100 years ago.
In 2014, I wrote an article about The Rebirth of the Car, and I mentioned Elon Musk´s company Tesla Motors in California as one of the up-and-coming new niche players. Tesla Motor has done many things right, from how they work with innovation to how they in June 2014 opened up their patent portfolio for competitors and asks for nothing but goodwill in return, and in the process making sure they set the new standards.
Then in the past year, we are rapidly coming closer to the holy-grail of vehicles, how we can make them safer and traffic on our congested roads more orderly. The break-through of Big Data and the Fourth Industrial Revolution enables innovations which allows the car to share the driving with the driver.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk said in a Fortune Magazine interview, that Tesla will have a fully autonomous vehicle on the road, which can drive more safely than humans, within two years.
The Tesla Model S can already drive itself when the new Autopilot feature is installed, using cameras and sensors to keep itself in the right lane on the road and steering away from potential accidents. The car can also park itself. Now Musk believes this technology will, by late 2017 or early 2018, be trusted to drive a car on any road, in any country and in any weather condition, day or night.
Suggesting, as he often does, that the giant leap from automated motorway driving to full autonomous will be straightforward, Musk told Fortune: “I think we have all the pieces, and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments – and then we’re done.”
Two years is also the expected time horizon until the launch of the third generation Tesla car, Model 3, which will be Tesla’s cheapest car yet. It is expected to cost around 30,000 euro and have an electric range of 300 kilometres.
This will be the ‘mass market’ car that Elon Musk has been working towards since the creation of the Tesla company in 2003. As Tesla´s mission statement says, the company aims to “accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass-market electric cars to market as soon as possible.” The expensive first two generations of the car has been necessary to develop the technology and infra structure required for mass market production.
Other car companies, and Google and Apple, have 2020 targeted as the year when fully autonomous cars become a reality. Headed by one of the worlds greatest living innovators, I have no doubt Tesla will beat them.
The post From the Chariots of Ben Hur to Automatic-Driving Cars appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
Images and video are important digital assets to leverage for destination developers, in marketing their products and destinations. Pictures speak a thousand words and video evokes emotion that photos can not. For destination development, tourism marketing videos can sometimes be pieces of art.
Videos from Croatia are often very good and we think the video Dubrovnik in Holiday Lights here below is a seasonal gem, showing this beautiful world-heritage city in holiday season lights. Dubrovnik currently has 14 degrees and sunny clear sky, but this does not prevent snowflakes and Christmas motives in light installations. Click on this link and enjoy!
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Video Transcript Hi. It’s Michael Zipursky from Consultingsuccess.com. Welcome back to the Consulting Corner, where consultants learn how to consistently attract their ideal clients and significantly increase their fees. I received a question from a consultant who asked how they can compete with larger competitors and with larger consulting firms in their market. This is […]
3 Ways to Compete with Larger Consulting Firms is a post from: Consulting Success
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, is awesome. Too many reasons to mention, but a good thumbnail will be this 9 minute interview with McKinsey here. Yes, is not your typical person – her CV looks like the gold standard – Harvard, Harvard Business, McKinsey, chief of staff to the Treasury secretary, Google, then COO of Facebook. Not shabby. More importantly, she talks about women’s equality – which involves men & women, society’s biases and individual self-confidence.
Gender Equality. This is not a topic I write about much because I don’t know much about it AND I am a bit of a libertarian who frankly thinks that most people in America’s work places have little reason to complain. Yes, I know that is not politically correct:
Yes, I will probably get hate-mail from that, but here is where I turn it around. . .
Gender inequality definitely exists in the US workplace. I read an email that was written to a successful woman manager who I know. It was about her bossy behavior, and honestly, this is EXACTLY the kind of biased bull#$^t that Sheryl Sandberg fights .
1. Social bias against strong women. Both men and women discourage women to lead, take charge, be aggressive, and win. Too often, it is a double standard where women who are action-oriented are called BOSSY or BITCHY.
As men get more successful, they are liked more. As women get more successful, they are liked less. That is a really powerful negative incentive for women to lead.
2. Women get paid less for the same work. Results show that women only get 77% of what men get for the same work. Sounds like explicit and/or implicit discrimination.
3. Few women in leadership roles. Sandberg notes that only 14% of top corporate jobs are held by women. Also, when women reached 20% of the US congress, the news media claimed that “women were taking over”. Clearly, 20% if not taking over.
4. Work women do is under-valued. This is a deep point. . . which I interpret to mean that we (men and women) need to re-set our mind to what is valuable in life. It cannot be a dichotomy where work life (what you get paid by the market to do) is more valuable than raising children, or any other life choice. . .
One of the most important things women can do working together is to make it clear that every bit of work a woman does—whether it’s in the home, in the school, in the community, or in the workplace—is valued as much as work that men do. Across the board, we are not there.
5. Women are encouraged to “give up”. Sandberg comments that corporate life is often compared to a marathon. A marathon where men are encouraged to keep up the pace and keep pushing for the finish line. In contrast, women are often told that the SHOULD be taking care of the kids, or compare themselves to stay-at-home mothers.
No one can have it all. That language is the worst thing that’s happened to the women’s movement. You know, no one even bothers to apply it to men. It’s really pressure on women. I think what happens to women is we compare ourselves at home to the women who are work-at-home mothers and we fall short. Compared to them, I fall short every day.
6. We should be creative about “work-life balance. Be willing to mold the work environment to get everything you want to get out of life. Find supporting mentors and people to do projects with. Don’t try to assault the mountain by yourself. Team.
And I’m not saying I don’t make sacrifices. You know, there has never been a 24-hour period in five years when I have not responded to e-mail at Facebook. I am not saying it’s easy. I work long hours. I am saying that I was able to mold those hours around the needs of my family, and that matters. And I really encourage other people at Facebook to mold hours around themselves.
Yes, there are systemic, implied, subtle, and unfair biases we put against women succeeding in the workplace. Perhaps it is not as simple as a libertarian view where everyone is given a chance to succeed, and it is a question of grabbing it. Perhaps it does require pro-active mentoring, behavior-modification, and smart people to adjust the landscape for a more equitable place.
We should just start with management consulting. We should expect more from ourselves and our peers. We are a privileged class of people – educated, traveled, self-confident, well-paid, and intellectually curious. Let’s push the meritocracy to the limit.
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China continues to generate controversy with its rapidly growing investments in Africa, and the country has emerged as Africa’s largest trading partner for primarily energy and minerals. At the same time, there is a growing volume of Chinese direct investment in Africa. The ever-impressive Brookings institute published an interesting blog article on the topic earlier this autumn.
For an accessible infographic, the Visual Capitalist has published an excellent visualisation of Chinese investment in Africa, which we would like to share. Click on the graph below to reach the full resolution original.
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The post Chinese Investments in Africa appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
I read Fast Company. It is a iconoclastic magazine which is easy to read, fun, and honestly, pretty cheap at $1 per month per magazine here at discount mags. It is their 20th anniversary, this editorial talks about the big trends they predict over the next 20 years. Lots of merit here, and thought-provoking. My comments in orange color.
1. Speed with Triumph. Completely agree with this. In the digital age, information is not a differentiator, instead, it is the common ingredients – available to all competitors to mix, match, and iterate to create value. There is enormous “value” in the teams of people who can capture the imagination of early adopters and continuously iterate to a solution. Clay Christensen talks about the innovator’s dilemma here, and offering less for less. Listen to this 24 min podcast from Harvard Business Review of Xiomi – Chinese cell phone maker – and you will will convinced that speed is the key here.
2. Mark Zuckerberg will Lead. He had 19 million users in 2007. He passed up $1 billion for facebook, and now he has 1.5 billion users and a net worth of $30 billion and growing. Largely credited with running a smart business – learning Mandarin – and only getting more business savvy. Bad ass.
3. Malala will Build. Don’t know much about this Nobel prize winner. Will learn more.
4. Elon Musk with Inspire. Serial entrepreneur. Disruption in multiple industries. Just look at a few videos of his WILD best on CNBC here, and you will be convinced that is both a visionary, maverick, and juggernaut. If you don’t love Tesla cars (103 out of 100 on consumer reports cars), you may be a dullard.
5. Technology Will Improve the Human Condition. Duh, not a deep point here.
6. Digital Tools will Unlock Opportunity. Absolutely true. Think of all the MOOCs here, and how they will democratize education and flatten the global learning barriers, where the most talented, motivated, and poor children will be able to learn from the best. It will disrupt higher-education, and only the best education franchises will last.
7. Democracy will be Digital. Agreed, not a controversial point.
8. Diversity will Deepen. I would hope so.
9. Mission will Triumph over Money. This is fascinating. While I agree that this has become more important to new generations of educated, privileged, and worldly travelers . . .oddly, I don’t know why.
As a bit of a neo-classical (University of Chicago-type thinker), not sure why the free-market monetarist way of thinking does not influence everyone . . .I begrudgingly admit that the new generation is different. They want meaning, not just money. Perhaps money has diminishing returns in the developed world. Privileged Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and Koreans. . just want something more than Gucci.
10. DNA will be unstoppable. Believe this entirely. Our consulting team talked about 23 and me tonight. A good friend sent his sample in and will get test results back shortly.
11. Medical Training will be ReWritten. This is an interesting thesis, that physicians and clinicians will not longer need to “remember” treatments, but instead leverage IBM Watson like diagnostic capabilities to interpret data. As with many of the more time-tested professions, I personally think that medicine will be one of the slowest to change.
12. Human Empathy will be Central. Agreed. Our (humans) ability to contextualize, empathize, and related to each other, is one of the enduring differences between us and the machines. As McKinsey notes, that 13% of our jobs can be further automated when computers learn to understand human language at a median proficiency here.
13. Entrepreneurship will not be for Everyone. Agreed. Look at most consultants – we have tons of good ideas and advise clients everyday on risks that we – ourselves – are unwilling to take. MBAs make us risk averse.
14. Bubbles will Burst. Clearly.
15. Simple will be more Difficult. Competely agree. Bain makes this point repeatedly that the world continues to be more cross-functional, multi-variable, and complex. Simple is hard to create. As Pascal commented many years ago, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have time.”
16. Cybersecurity will be more Costly. It already is expensive – not only in the direct costs of protection, but also with the opportunity cost of wasted time worrying about identity theft, and numerous credit card frauds and miscellaneous charges. It is the clearly the easiest way for bad people to mess with the system.
17. China and India will Dominate. This is already true.
18. Food will be Healthier. Whole Foods here.
19. Cash will Disappear. I rarely, ever carry cash.
20. We will all be Family. I am Gen-X and probably disagree on this one. We are not all family. Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter all give us the semblance of intimacy, but its is false proximity. You think you know me, but you really don’t. In Korean the word for friend is call CHIN-GOO – which means. . . FRIEND-LONG, meaning that friendships are formed over a long time and through deep, intense experience. I still believe that. . now, and even 20 years later.
Read Fast Company. It is a great magazine – fun, full of innovation and thought-provoking things that will honestly make you a more interesting conversationalist at Christmas parties. Don’t be boring. Read about things other than the stock market. What are the trends you believe we will see in the next 20 years?
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This week, the World Bank has published a new report titled “Competitive Cities for Jobs and Growth – What, Who and How”. The report analyses what makes a city competitive and how more cities can grow their economies, a topic which is at the core of our work at Bearing.
According to the report, a competitive city is a city that successfully facilitates its firms and industries to create jobs, raise productivity, and increase the incomes of citizens over time, and If every average city had managed to do as well as a competitive-city, the world would have added 19 million new jobs in 2012 alone. Of the 750 global cities analysed in the report, three-quarters have grown faster than their national economies since the early 2000s.
Worldwide, improving the competitiveness of cities is a pathway to eliminating extreme poverty and to promoting shared prosperity. The primary source of job creation has been the growth of private sector firms, which have typically accounted for around 75 percent of job creation. Thus city leaders need to be familiar with the factors that help to attract, to retain, and to expand the private sector.
Cities are the future. They’re where people live and work and hubs for growth and innovation. But they are also poles of poverty and, much too often, centres of unemployment. With successful Place Management, more cities can create more jobs.
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As consultants we are in a relationship business. Strong client relationships lead to successful project outcomes. They also lead to on-going work and more referral business. Here are eight tips to help strengthen your consulting client relationships. Like this infographic? Share it on social media. Embed this infographic: Copy the code in the box below […]
8 Tips to Stronger Relationships with Consulting Clients is a post from: Consulting Success
Self-feedback. I ask this of my team all the time. My favorite question to ask on team calls – to discuss analyses, client presentations, work product, or most of anything – is an open ended question. “What do you think? “”How do you like it? ”
My thesis: If you don’t like your work, I likely won’t, and the client definitely won’t.
It’s not a trick question. As a manager, the more I can trust the team the better. I love democracy mode of work – everyone is a corporate citizen with a clear understanding of the end destination, and eager to do great work. Fundamentally, I want people who take pride in their work, have a sense of what “good looks like”, and are self-aware.
Open up the conversation. In the same way that we run the client interviews by asking open ended questions upfront. This is a way to open the doors and windows and let in some fresh air and allow breathing room for creativity, self-expression, and the most important things. Yes, millenniums want to be heard. Yes, everyone wants to be heard
Get the best ideas out first. What your team wants to say is important, and the first thing they say is probably most useful. You may find it to be the same point you were going to discuss anyways, but a lot of times it’s something that you overlook. Don’t be afraid to change up the agenda. Don’t be afraid to disagree. Idea fight club.
Get the pulse of your team. Understand their emotions and state of mind. Most of the work we do as consultants is very contextual. It’s not a question of black and white. It’s not a question of profit and loss. It’s a question of cross functional nuances, office politics, pride, fear, greed, all the human emotions. Same goes for our teams.
What is their frame of mind?
Without getting too psycho-babble about it, these cues come from word choice, energy level, volume, and tone of voice. Get to know your team.
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
(Dwight D. Eisenhower)
Don’t carry the burden of meetings by yourself. By soliciting interaction and ownership from your team, you are rowing the boat together. It’s very easy for people to throw stones when they are not responsible in anyway. It’s less easy to throw stones, when you were given a voice to say something and chose not to take it. BOOM.
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PowerPoint. Over the last 20 years, there are very few days when I have not worked in PowerPoint. Sad, but true. Even when I am not creating one, I am often reading investor relations presentations or analyst reports. Pay attention to strong presentations. Collect them. See how authors structure data.
Yesterday, I worked with my team on a 40 page PowerPoint. The first 10 pages was the executive summary – building an argument for the executive to take action and explaining WHAT, WHY. The remaining 30 pages were the details – HOW, WHEN, HOW MUCH, and WHO. It is not a final deliverable yet, but getting there.
It was an assessment so the content was diverse – different functional areas, different time frames, different stakeholders. All good. Consultants like diversity, we get bored. Here are a few templates (just structuring of the page). Here are a few scrubbed pages show how use the visual layout to tell the story. Consulting =storytelling.
Showing a process. Similar to the DMAIC format of SIPOC, we used this at the beginning of the current project to emphasize the key activities needed in the middle. This can be a drum-beat of a visual; use it to tell the team, and the client, where you are and where you are headed. Like road-signs, tell the passenger where they are headed.
Showing a stage/gate. When we were projecting phase 1 and phase 2 of different workstreams, I usually use something simple, a bit reductionist like it. Yes, you can use Visio – many on my team do – but I find that clients don’t prefer it. It’s hard for them to edit, its less visual, and honestly for their purposes, too detailed. Yes, it shows rigor, but at the expense of visibility, clarity, and power,
Draw out relationships. Need to be a little careful here because thoughtful organizational design is a separate project with specific methodology to do it right. That said, a lot can be done to delineate the responsibilities between different roles. Too often, there is confusion in decision-rights and who has the authority to make what decisions. Simplify.
Sequence of activities. There are multiple ways to show sequencing of activities, but this one below has the benefit of showing specific activities #1-8 and when they occur. One word of caution on this time of page is that it can look like an appendix page. . . with too many facts and tidbits of data, and not enough of a message. Don’t be afraid to put a kicker box at the bottom to reiterate your point.
Comparing current and future. A lot of consulting is showing the client the gap between what they want to be (future) and where they are now (current). Maturity models are particularly useful for this purpose, but you can also use a simple table like the one below to show the transition. Remember, people are very good at recognizing patterns.
The majority of our pages have texts, data analysis, and graphs which support arguments. That said, don’t hesitate using tables, frameworks, templates, and visuals to get your point across. Your clients will appreciate it. You can put the boring, text-heavy information in the appendix.
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When I travel, having the comfort of being offline, I bring myself up-to-date by reading the newspapers and magazines available in most airplanes. Over a flight from Stockholm to Zurich this afternoon, I have been reading Financial Times, The Economist and a couple of Swedish newspapers about the COP21 negotiations in Paris this week. Reading the newspapers, I cannot help but think that the journalists are missing a major point. They are missing the irreversible gravity of the current situation. Consequently I spent the second half of my flight to write this blog article.
We humans have an almost predestined capacity for failing to do what we know in our hearts we need to do. As Ibsen’s literary character Peer Gynt said: “To think it, wish it, even want it – but do it! No, that I cannot understand.” To understand what really is at stake, lets think things through, starting by the origin of our solar systems known history.
The Earth is estimated to be 4.543 billion years old, formed out of the gas clouds surrounding the nascent Sun. Quite quickly as the surface cooled down, as if by miracle, early forms of life was formed. Remains of biotic life have been found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia.
Then through four billion years of evolution, Earth developed into the “blue and green planet” we inhabit today. The contemporary Earth is a paradise for our human bodies and biology, not surprising as we have ascended through evolution.
Now dear reader, imagine we go on a journey in space. Imagine we land on a strange planet with a surface of water, as the human explorers do in the movie “Interstellar”.
Our landing site is one of the many volcanic islands dotting an ocean covering the surface of the planet. Maybe it is dry-land, maybe shallow-water as in the movie. The light in the sky is dim, with 20 percent less starlight than we are used to, and there is a single, very large moon in the sky. The planet spins fast so the day is short, less than 15 hours. In the dark, we can see comets in the sky, along with numerous meteorites falling towards the planet.
In the dim light, you step onto the barren landscape. You are sealed in a space suit, because the dense outside atmosphere would suffocate you quickly, as it is composed mostly of nitrogen and carbon dioxide (CO2), but almost devoid of breathable oxygen. As you step out, you notice that the day is very hot, more than 49° C.
Then in the far distance you notice a huge, menacing tidal wave coming towards you… You start to run in the shallow water, but will you make it back to the spaceship on time?
Welcome to the Earth of four billion years ago. This was a time when continents were forming, the sun was dimmer than today, the moon was closer, and the earth was spinning faster.
On the early Earth, there was almost no free oxygen in the atmosphere, and an immense volume of the greenhouse gas CO2 kept the planet much warmer than it is today.
This is the environment in which life originated on our planet. Since then, both plant life and animal life developed in an ever faster spinning evolution. By now in our Julian calendar year 2015, more than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct.
This uninhabitable, barren Earth of four billion years ago looked like the Earth will look very soon again in our future, by our own doing, unless we can slow down global warming, emission of CO2 and pollution.
Unlike the movie Interstellar, this is not science fiction. This is what we are irrevocably doing to our children, and all other life on earth.
It is up to us, the immature, often aggressively selfish humans of today, if we are going to leave a living planet to our children, or if the next few generation will be the last humans living on Earth. We have a choice and it is probably not yet too late.
We have all read the alarms in media in the recent 20 years, the general consensus of the scientific community is that the earth’s surface is warming. The first time I heard this was in an excellent Discovery Channel documentary in the early 1990s titled “Can Polar Bears Thread Water”. As so often story telling brings understanding and is easy to remember, and sadly for the polar bears, I learned that they cannot.
It may seem improbable that a shift of a few degrees in temperature could have a large effect, but even a seemingly small shift in the average temperature of a system as vast as the entire surface of the planet, sustained over a number of years, can cause a dramatic change in the way the oceans, land, and atmosphere transfer heat.
This transfer of heat is one of the primary dynamics of the earth’s climatic system, and it drives such phenomena as precipitation, ocean currents, and storms. The transfer of heat begins when sunlight, a form of electromagnetic energy, reaches molecules that make up the atmosphere. Particles in the upper atmosphere reflect a small amount of this energy off into space. Most of the sunlight, however, becomes heat energy, warming the earth and the atmosphere.
When the global temperature is stable, the atmosphere eventually transfers all this energy back into space. If it did not, the total amount of heat on the earth’s surface would constantly be increasing.
Because of the many layers of water vapour and other molecules present in the atmosphere, the heat is transferred out through the upper atmosphere slowly. Even when global temperature is stable, the lag in heat transfer raises the total amount of heat present on the Earth’s surface at any given time.
Recently while working on a a project in Uppsala in Sweden, I learned that the Swedish, Uppsala University based scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896 was first described this natural process, called the greenhouse effect. In fact, Arrhenius estimated that the natural greenhouse effect of the atmosphere was responsible for the average global temperature being favourable to life. Without it the planet would be about 33° C colder and probably devoid of all living things.
Therefore, the issue is not whether there is a greenhouse effect, but rather to what extent human activities are adding to the natural level of warming, whether it is already possible to see the change caused by increases in gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect, and what the potential implications are for human society and life on Earth.
Contaminants pouring from industrial smokestacks contribute to the Earth´s atmospheric pollution. Some of these contaminants, such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, are greenhouse gases. Once in the atmosphere, these gases act to retain the heat emitted by Earth, causing the the greenhouse effect.
Much damage is already done and cannot be undone. Various greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for different amounts of time before breaking down. I remember from chemistry classes that methane has a life span of about a decade, N2O stays in the air for more than 100 years, and CO2 remains for up to 200 years. Herein lies the problem.
Of all the greenhouse gases, CO2 is the most important factor in global warming because of its relatively long life span and its prevalence both as a by-product of the fossil fuel combustion that powers modern industrial systems and as part of a natural cycle that can be pushed out of balance.
As early as a century ago, the Uppsala scientist Arrhenius was concerned that the burning of coal, oil, and gas was intensifying the greenhouse effect by increasing the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere. Coal, oil, and gas are all fossil fuels, geologically stored remnants of past organic processes. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most common gas produced in fossil fuel combustion.
Despite use of nuclear energy, geothermal power, wind power and solar energy, the single greatest energy source for human activities remains fossil fuel, especially in the emerging and frontier economies, such as China, Brazil, India and high-growth African countries. It follows that as industrialisation progresses in these large and often densely populated developing areas of the world, it will become increasingly difficult just to keep global carbon dioxide emissions at current levels, let alone to decrease total yearly emissions. In fact, by the rapid re-distribution of both population and economic growth and ascending living standards in the developing economies, the challenge of CO2 emission is exploding.
The total amount of heat in the climate system is a critical factor in how the system operates and hence the widespread concern about the possibility of increasing the heat load of the planet. Such an increase could alter complicated climatic patterns in unforeseen ways, and many scientists and meteorologists think we already notice this through a higher degree of improbable weather events, such as hurricanes, storms, tsunamis, droughts and other nasties.
Not only will global warming bring warmer temperatures, chaotic weather, higher sea levels, droughts and barren landscapes (reflect on the farm in the previously referenced movie “Interstellar”). Its clear by logic that perhaps the greatest of all negative consequences of global warming will be the effect on biological diversity (the variety of plants, animals, and microorganisms with which we human beings share the planet).
A myriad of consequences could result from global warming due to changes in the onset of events such as snow melt, timings of flowering, or the arrival of food sources for migratory animals. For instance, an early snow melt might mean insufficient water for the voyage to the sea of spawning salmon in the Nordic fjords. If growing seasons change, a plant may flower before many of its pollinators arrive. Similarly, climate changes could cause migrating coast-based birds to arrive in the bays before crabs and crawfish which they feed on move onto beaches in late spring to lay their eggs.
Any system, especially complex systems such as biological ecosystems, are very fragile and if we have learned anything by the history of life on Earth (as David Attenbourgh have told is in many excellent television series), it is that 99% of all species that ever have existed have already died out. Fragile systems cannot possibly take the chock of rapid change which we are putting the earth through now.
What can we do about it? Well, you and me, dear reader, not much individually, but by voting for politicians and supporting awareness, we can altogether do a lot. Role models like Bill Gates, Bono and others can do even more in leading the rest of us to accept the necessary changes and sometimes sacrifice which we have to do, and we must encourage them to keep on leading from the front. We must, to allow our children and their children to experience the paradise that is Earth as we do, and not leave them a barren landscape, similar to as it was before life, four billion years ago.
The world’s Governments have already committed to curbing burning of fossil fuels, but that does not mean the problem is solved. Commitments come cheap. The difficulty comes when you try to get 195 countries to agree on how to implement the decision and practically deal with the issue of reducing CO2 emissions.
Every year since 1992 the Conference of the Parties (COP) has taken place with negotiators trying to put together a practical plan of action. This year apparently there may be a deal, but there is no point to cheer until we know how credible implementation will take place. Yet then, we cannot get rid of the existing CO2 in the atmosphere for at least 200 years, so we may slow the climate change process, but we cannot stop it.
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“Now this is not the end; it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
– Winston Churchill, November 1942
Al-Alamein is a town in northern Egypt, located on the Mediterranean Sea 106 kilometres west of Alexandria and 240 kilometres northwest of Cairo. For most of us who remember our modern history classes in school, this place was the site for one of the decisive battles of the Second World War in October 1942.
After a long series of defeat and retreats, the British Eight Army, led by General Bernard Montgomery, defeated the combined German Afrika Korps and Italian Army, led by General Erwin Rommel. The victory led to the retreat and ultimate defeat of the Afrika Korps and the German/Italian surrender in North Africa in May 1943.
Already in Greek-Roman times, El-Alamein was known as “Leukaspis”, which means the white shell. It was named so because of its beautiful white sandy beaches, where Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was worshipped. In those times it was a thriving commercial port for olive, wine and wheat exports, with a population of 15,000 residents at its peak.
Al-Alamein of today has a population of about 8,000 people and is a popular seaside resort. With hotels, such as the Porto Marina shown below, the town is a popular tourist destination. Al-Alamein was once described by Winston Churchill as having the best climate in the world and it is one of the favourite sea, sun and sand upscale destinations for domestic Egyptian tourists.
Foreigners are following the trend and invade the upscale resorts that are growing like mushrooms on this stretch of coast, and frequent charter flights operate from main European cities to the new El-Alamein International Airport.
Today Al-Alamein New City (ANC) is one of Egypt’s new national projects, with the intention to utilise a leading-edge approach for planning of economically self-sustaining cities in the country, in order to reduce the pressure of population growth in Cairo. The ANC represents a new challenge at the political, and sustainable development levels and it is considered to be a pilot project aiming at fostering the development of unexploited regions designed to attract investors, employment, and population.
United Nations Habitat has been asked by the Egyptian Government to provide technical support in addressing the development of the ANC, to promote sustainable urban form and function for new city developments in order to provide healthy and viable communities. As a first step, Bearing Consulting in Africa has been selected by United Nations to assist with a strategic and macro-economic assessment, to recommend potential competitive industry sectors and critical conditions for their success, as foundation for a coherent development strategy. We initiate this new project in December 2015 and will work on the assignment until June next year.
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The first time I saw a 3D-printer in action was at the science park in Lodz, Poland. The printer was a testbed for the science park, acquired to attract an eco-system of startup´s who would innovate using the technology.
Earlier this year, it was reported in the news that a construction firm in Shanghai has developed a house which can be mass produced using a giant 3D printer.
A few weeks ago I attended a seminar in Stockholm which related to the sharing economy, that is, peer-to-peer-based sharing of access to goods and services, often coordinated through community-based online services, and I was told examples of how 3D-printing allows for new business ideas.
This morning I read on the web that the Dutch company MX3D are about to 3D print a steel bridge. See below a brief video about the project. This new technology is really coming of age.
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Video Transcript Hi. It’s Michael Zipursky from ConsultingSuccess.com. Welcome back to the Consulting Corner, where consultants learn how to consistently attract their ideal clients and significantly increase their fees. Today I’d like to share a few reasons why you should avoid outsourcing your marketing when you’re just getting your consulting business going. Far too often, […]
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The potential of Big Data is slowly emerging on us, as analytical methods become increasingly more powerful in making the huge amounts of data we collect in todays society meaningful for understanding reality and to make predictions.
We have already covered the development in several blog posts, including Big Data is Better Data, The Challenge with Big Data and Christensen, Asimov and the Impact of Disruptive Innovation.
By now it seems Big Data, combined with the internet of things and the possibility we have to build complex connected system, like Ericsson´s networked society concept, together push us into a new disruptive age, a fourth industrial revolution.
It is not long ago we realised we have been through the third industrial revolution. In fact, I wrote a blog post about this just about two and a half years ago.
The first industrial revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to 1840. The second industrial revolution, starting around 1870, transformed western societies into an urban-centred, industrial-based culture, which was an entirely new social reality based on science and technology. The third industrial revolution, starting in the 1960s, brought us computers, electronics and the internet.
It can be argued that big data is a continuation on the third industrial revolution, however I start to think that what is happening now is something different. This new phase is truly breaking down the barriers between man and machine.
Data is increasingly building up on who we are, who we know, where we are, where we have been and where we plan to go. Mining and analysing this data lets us understand and predict how people behave at the individual, group and global level, as I wrote about in Christensen, Asimov and the Impact of Disruptive Innovation.
The difference between the age of Business Intelligence and the new age of Big Data is profound.
When I was in business school in the 1980s, one of the initial year courses was statistical analysis, where we studied how small data and samples can be used to predict developments. Our course book was Chou “Statistical Analysis For Business and Economics”, and it was a very interesting read. I learned that through sampling, simulations and not the least Bayesian inference, we had powerful tools for dynamic analysis of a sequence of data, with application in a wide range of activities, including science, engineering, philosophy, medicine, sport, and law. Through sampling and statistical analysis, we could develop Business Intelligence.
Common to all the analysis methods in the statistics course at Stockholm School of Economics, was that the data population is assumed to be larger than the observed data set. In other words, the observed data is assumed to be sampled from a larger population and conclusions about the observed data could through probability theory be assumed as valid for the full data population, given that we had at least 30 data points, which enabled an assumption of normal distribution.
In Comparison, Big Data is about data sets so large and complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. For big data, we can make extremely accurate predictive analytics. The accuracy leads to more confident decision making and understanding of the world, and better decisions can mean greater operational efficiency, cost reduction and reduced risk.
This will have a profound influence on society, at a level that can help us bridge a number of current challenges like climate change, overpopulation and unemployment on a macro level, to advanced developments in life sciences, chemistry and advanced materials on a micro level.
As the impact looks to be so profound, I think the age of Big Data can well be seen as a new, fourth, industrial revolution, building upon the foundation of the third, just as the second industrial revolution built on the advancements of the first.
Some years ago, Gartner Group wrote "Big Data represents the Information assets characterized by such a High Volume, Velocity and Variety to require specific Technology and Analytical Methods for its transformation into Value", and they defined Big Data in the following way:
Whereas Business Intelligence uses descriptive statistics with data with high information density to measure things, detect trends etc., Big Data uses inductive statistics and concepts from nonlinear system identification to infer laws (regressions, nonlinear relationships, and causal effects) from large sets of data with low information density to reveal relationships, dependencies and perform predictions of outcomes, patterns and behaviours.
At its core, Big Data uses have unprecedented complexity, speed and global reach, and as digital communications become commonplace, data will rule in a world where nearly everyone and everything is connected in real time.
Big Data requires exceptional technologies to efficiently process large quantities of data in real-time or within tolerable elapsed times. Such technologies were created by the third industrial revolution and now enables the new networked society, transcending man and machine. The impact will be unprecedented in the history of human society.
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The Boston Consulting Group released its 10th annual listing of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies this morning. The list is based on a survey of 1,500 C-suite executives, who were asked to rank companies across industries and within their own industry. It also gives weight to total returns to shareholders over five years.
The top three on the list, Apple, Google and Tesla, come as no surprise. But it gets interesting after that. Samsung made a respectable number five.
Automakers other than Tesla earned three more spots in the top ten: Toyota (6), BMW (7) and Daimler (10.) The study´s co-author Andrew Taylor says the strong showing reflects how much autos have changed in the last decade, both in their power trains and as “delivery systems for other innovative technologies.”
Overall, three quarters of the companies in the top 50 were non-tech, including firms as diverse as Japan’s Fast Retailing (15), Disney (18) and Marriott (19) MAR -0.79%.
There are no Chinese companies in the top ten. Tencent is first at 12, and then there’s a big jump to Huawei (45) and Lenovo (50). Taylor said that is an increase from a decade ago, when there were no Chinese companies on the list, and he thinks their presence will grow. “The rate of innovation of Chinese companies is increasing, and the perception of their innovation is increasing,” he said, “but with a lag.”
The BCG survey found the importance of speed in business innovation is on the rise, with executives citing overly long development times as the biggest obstacle to innovation. It also noted the changing role of technology across industries. “Technology used to live in its own silo—the IT department,” the report says. “Today, digital, mobile, big data and other technologies are used to support and enable innovation across the organization, from new product development to manufacturing to go-to-market strategies, in multiple industries.”
Overall, innovation continues to rise in importance. In the survey 79% of respondents ranked innovation as either the top-most priority or a top-three priority at their company, the highest percentage since BCG began asking the question in 2005, when 66% said innovation was their top or among their three top priorities. At the same time, science and technology continue to be seen as increasingly important underpinnings of innovation, enabling four attributes that many executives identify as critical: an emphasis on speed, well-run (and very often lean) R&D processes, the use of technological platforms, and the systematic exploration of adjacent markets.
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Growth in global trade volumes has slowed in recent years, thanks to a slow economic recovery from the financial crisis, increased use of internet based services which is not tracked in statistics, and the changing structure of the Chinese economy. Maybe also new production techniques with cheaper local production in the advanced economies can be one reason. However there has been a number of new multilateral trade agreements since the Doha round of world trade talks fell apart in 2008.
I recently participated in a seminar where we discussed the growth of regional trade, and according to the Economist, much of the focus in trade liberalisation has shifted to regional trade agreements (RTAs). The number of RTAs has risen from around 70 in 1990 to more than 270 in 2015.
In alignment with this, PWC today published a set of interesting blog articles and reports, where they conclude that news of de-globalization are premature. As PCW argues, economic integration at the regional level, within Asia, Europe and Africa, continues to make progress.
Adam Smith wrote already in The Wealth of Nations on how the commerce of towns contributed to the improvement of the country. Today with the growth of urbanised areas and decline of countryside and small towns, this is more true than ever.
PCW also argue that skilled people are on the move across Asia Pacific in big numbers, from engineers to shipping channel pilots to nurses. In a report, prepared for business advisors to Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), PwC takes a look at cross-border talented worker mobility. The report concludes with three principles for developing “supra talent” in Asia Pacific considering some ideas to improve conditions for international workers and businesses, as well as talent receiving and sending APEC economies. We recommend reviewing these blog articles and reports. It provides for a refreshing read.
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