Don’t hire a consultant who doesn’t look good in a suit (courtesy of consulta panel)
Are consultants a boon or a bane? Do they really help or hurt your organisation?
This is the question I’ve been asking myself lately. Tasked with improving things in the organisation, my mind reflected upon the pros and cons of hiring management consultants.
Why do some companies succeed in turbulent times while others fail?
Is there a “secret sauce” to enduring corporate performance?
We’ve seen it happen time and time again.
A company starts off with great fanfare, led by a charismatic and visionary leader. She or he brings it to new heights. Growth is healthy and flourishing – year after year.
There is crystal clarity in what the company does. It attracts a loyal tribe of customers and fans.
Courtesy of Time Travel
We’re besieged by “short-termism” in an age of 24/7 hyper-connectivity. With the empowerment of social technologies, everybody can be a pundit, proffering an interminable stream of quick fixes.
When faced with a problem, you can virtually hear the “guns” firing away…
Harvard Business Review or HBR has always been one of the mainstays of my reading list. I love how its editors seive out business and leadership articles which are meaty enough to provide a good intellectual workout without unnecessary academese.
Its latest compilation “HBR’s 10 Must Reads” is a selection of carefully selected journal articles centred on the most pressing issues of management.
Written by Ken Blanchard of “The One Minute Manager” fame, together with his co-authors John Britt, Pat Zigarmi and Judd Hoekstra, “Who Killed Change?” is a whodunnit with a business twist. The slim volume is easily read in one sitting and imbues one with useful pointers when implementing change management.
The plot goes like this. Somebody in the ACME organisation has killed Change. In this case, Change of course represents Change Management – a very necessary ingredient for enduring organisational effectiveness when things no longer become business as usual.
In the world of business, we’re often focused on our customer value proposition. What makes our products or services stand out in the marketplace? How do we draw the right customers at the right price?
The unfortunate thing, however, is that we often neglect to pay attention to the most important stakeholders in our organisation.
Namely, our employees.
Courtesy of Jim Collins
Are charismatic superstar CEOs the answer to enduring success? What about dramatic mergers and acquisitions – aren’t those the panacea to ailing companies?
What about those awe-inspiring cutting edge technologies like virtual reality, artificial intelligence and blockchain? Surely those ought to at least have an impact on greatness, right?
Courtesy of Bright Hub
There are two ways to look at one’s business: “inside-out” or “outside-in”. Let me go through each in turn.
The first approach starts with what one first possesses before looking at anything else. It raises questions such as what one’s organisation has in terms of capital, equipment, core competencies, human resources, customer relationships and distribution networks and how these could be leveraged upon.
Courtesy of Blaze Institute
Why do some teams produce outstanding results while others lag behind given similar resources?
The secret, according to “The New Science of Building Great Teams” in Harvard Business Review, is that successful teams have higher energy, are more engaged, and spend more time exploring outside the group. These patterns of communication and interaction are strongly correlated with performance metrics such as the average handling time in a bank’s call centre.
