I stretched both my legs out. Took a deep breath and ran past the houses before reaching the main road. The street was empty. I could hear a whirring sound in the distance, probably from the highway in the distance. But the birds were chirping all around me. All the recommendations, best practices, books, and […]
The “MOST” Powerful Success Principle “Ever” is a post from: Consulting Success
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Determined to Grow Your Consulting Business? is a post from: Consulting Success
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When Consultants Should Hire Contractors or Outsource? is a post from: Consulting Success
The title of the BCG report sounds serious, but its a bit of a gem – easy to read and understand. Download here (1Mb pdf). Boils down to three points:
1. Hit the ground running. New CEOs are often brought in at critical junctures in a company’s life. At these inflection points, there is heightened expectation that something BIG will happen – more than incremental improvement, and definitely more than just prudent management. New CEOs are under the gun to make change happen.
BCG argues that there is a “short window of opportunity” to get things going, and there is a greater danger of CEOs doing too little, too late:
“Stakeholders expect changes to occur when a new CEO is hired. In fact, a principal risk for new CEOs is that they may resist taking action too quickly—or hesitate to make changes that go deep enough.”
CEOs need to establish their ambition for change 100 days BEFORE starting the job. It’s not enough to be strategic and thoughtful after you get there. No, you have to develop your point of view months before you get your employee badge. The subsequent steps of rallying the troops, getting some quick-wins, and holding people accountable are both useful, and a bit unsurprising.
2. Fund the Journey. Another way to think about transformation (or any topic) is the short-medium-long term. For me, the most dramatic point is the first one. You need to fund the journey by taking short-term, “no-regret moves” to simplify the organization, reduce costs, and increase ROA. This frees up money and attention for the heavy lift of transformation. Layoffs, cost reduction, or sale of non-performing assets are often long overdue. “Yeah, we knew that would happen eventually” is a common refrain.
BCG cost takeout list. They show 12 ways to take out cost, free up resources, and fund the journey. Note that many of these are complementary or have overlap; organizational simplification can be tied to outsourcing, or personnel costs.
3. Ten types of transformation. Transformation is an over-used word. You hear it from clients and in the popular business press to vaguely describe anything long-term and difficult to do. It’s over-used. BCG describes it this way:
“We define a transformation as a profound change in a company’s strategy, business model, organization, culture, people, or processes. A transformation is not an incremental change but a fundamental reboot that enables a business to achieve a sustainable, quantum improvement in performance, altering the trajectory of its future.”
Here are the 10 buckets which BCG groups the different types of transformation:
BCG summarizes the point like this on page 6 of the report here (1Mb pdf):
“The message for incoming leaders is clear: You need to take action immediately. By laying the groundwork in advance, you can be prepared to lead from the front with a clear vision, solid objectives, and the tools and processes to succeed.”
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Consultants should use surveys more often. They are cost-effective, seemingly impartial, easy to use, and provide data in the “touchy and feel-y” areas where data might be hard to find, collect, or quantify. Bain, PWC, BCG, Deloitte all use surveys; see the links at the bottom of the post. Even on this website, readers reply to surveys to give me a sense of who they are, what they read and what they like here.
Marketers have known this for ages. A well-crafted survey can be a cost effective and ingenious way to gather customer insights. Instead of guessing what consumers want, ask them. Instead of asking them one at a time, send out a survey. With the advent of free tools like survey monkey, and even real-time tools on Skype for business, surveys are ubiquitous and rightly so – they are super useful tools.
As an example of a survey from this website, 121 readers told me anonymously how much of their income they saved. 55% of you (67 people) saved 20% or less, while the there were 12% of you (15 people) saved more than 50% of your income. Bravo.
Surveys create data. I have written before that data is a consultant’s friend because it is apolitical and helps you to test your theories. Surveys can create data where there was none before. A few examples from my past:
So what makes a good survey? There are dozens of books, and courses on this topic. Even survey monkey has some tips here. It’s a science and art, but here is my back-of-the-envelope thoughts at 1130pm on a Tuesday night:
Remember the objective: What is CTQ?
Organize the survey logically.
Write simply.
Think like a marketer. Get a good response rate.
Be realistic.
Get started. The more surveys you put into the field, the more experienced and fun it will be. Qualitrics is an industrial pro-tool, but why not sign up with Surveymonkey for free? They limit you to 10 questions, but honestly, it’s a great and easy experience.
Readers – what other good survey advice do you have?
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The Truth to Achieving “Instant” Results in Your Consulting Business is a post from: Consulting Success
It takes more than 10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that people have to practice for 10,000+ hours before becoming experts. At the time, this dispelled the idea that it is just raw talent or genius at work. No, he concluded, it takes lots and lots of practice to be excellent at something.
When listening to the most recent Freakonomics podcast here entitled How to Become Great at Just About Anything, I learned a few things:
Practice needs to be deliberate. Researchers have shown here that it takes continual feedback and deliberate effort to improve. More does not mean better. It takes structure, organization, feedback, testing, stress, and growth. It is like a muscle. Low-intensity, sloppy practice does not matter. It takes deliberate practice, usually with coaching.
Hence, continued improvements (changes) in achievement are not automatic consequences of more experience and in those domains where performance consistently increases aspiring experts seek out particular kinds of experience, that is deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993)
This make sense right? We have seen all kinds of people in our professional life who reach competence many years ago, and since then, they are just coasting. You need to push to get to the next S-curve of progress. It is not natural, but deliberate.
Experts “bucket” their learning. I am a big believer in structured thinking as one of the key consulting skills which make us useful. It helps us to get smart quickly on problems, and use hypothesis-based thinking. Experts organize and “bucket” information here and use their long-term memory to vastly expand their mental reach
Instead they [experts] select the relevant information and encode it in special representations in working memory that allow planning, evaluation and reasoning about alternative courses of action (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996).
Hence, the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982)
Experts’ knowledge is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant.
Basically, experts have trained their brains and bodies to do more – through more effective categorization of information and faster retrieval. It’s like having a better operating system, hard disk AND central processing unit (CPU).
Is this encouraging? Yes, the title of the podcast is How to Become Great at Just About Anything, with an enormous emphasis on the idea that you can really craft the way you learn and become close-to-an-expert through effort. No excuses anymore. As an example, Bob Fisher – soil conservation technician – holds 14 world records for free throw shooting here. 2,371 free throws in 1 hour. 52 free throws in 1 minute.
What will you become an expert in? Are you willing to put in the dedication, time, discipline, coaching, and sacrifice? Speaking with my wife, this is something I need to think about. . . what am I willing to dedicate 1-2 hours EVERY DAY to get better at? Scary questions to ask yourself.
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