Archive for the 'Consulting' Category

Hiring Mongrel Dogs

Published at 17 September, 2007 in Consulting. 2 Comments

There is evidence to suggest that some firms are hiring the wrong people - they look for those that are good at interviewing but not necessarily performing.

Once upon a time there was a man named John Holmes - not the bloke with the big shlong, the other one - the dog trainer and author. He wrote a book in England in the 40s or 50s called The Family Dog. His argument against buying the lovable mongrel was this: the Labrador has been bred for lots of years to retrieve things from water, and the Greyhound to run like buggery, and the Border Collie to work sheep - in other words, they have been bred selectively for a specific purpose. The only thing that mongrels have been selected for is, well, being mongrels - it proves that one or both parents were adept at either being neglected or jumping fences. Not a good choice for the family pet.

Do we hire the same way? Do we select for those people who are good at interviewing to the detriment of those abilities that might fulfill the organisation’s promise to deliver? As a young man I was told, I kid you not, that a colleague had been promoted because “we know he can’t do the job, but he put in a corker of an interview”. I laugh about it - now.

PS: I have to add that I’ve owned several dogs through the years that have been of mixed parentage - some have been wonderful animals, some not. It doesn’t mean that I’d hire someone who couldn’t, or wouldn’t work.

Ever applied for a job through Monster.com?

Published at 26 August, 2007 in Consulting, Life and Rant. 0 Comments

I know I have.

I’m worried about the implications of their security breach, and if you have applied for a job through Monster.com, you should be worried too. It’s not every web-based service provider that can claim to have exposed the personal details of 1.6 million people to identity thieves.

Gender in the workplace: Penelope Trunk and I agree (mostly)

Published at 3 August, 2007 in Consulting and Life. 2 Comments

I wrote about a sensitive topic in Gender in the workplace: On Confrontation and Flirtation - that of dating co-workers:

Flirtation is an easier line to draw in the sand: any unwelcome advance is unlawful harrassment. For myself as a consultant, clients are off-limits. This is an easy call to make. For the last year-and-a-half I’ve worked on a client site where there are thousands of employees - anecdotally 80% women - and if that reduces my dating pool, then so be it.

With colleagues, I tend to agree with Tim Bray - within the geek community we spend a lot of time in work and afterwork - accordingly, there are fewer opportunities than previously available to find a partner. Gloria infers that women never want to date anyone else in the office, so everyone should forget about office romances - and while this is usually a good practice, I believe that it is incorrect to say that it never happens. It’s still possible, just not easy or practical. That said, as always, any approach to a potential love interest should be done with decorum, tact, and respect - otherwise it is predatory, and wrong, regardless of where the approach takes place or your gender/orientation. Gloria’s example of the married middle-aged man hitting on the 17 year old woman is a prize example of wrongness - but to extrapolate this to the premise that all women are always offended by more than professional interest in the office is taking it a little too far.

Penelope Trunk wrote this today in her own blog:

Date coworkers.
I can see how 40 years ago, when it was still legal to ask a woman what her husband thought of her career, it would’ve been bad to date coworkers. Back then, women felt powerless in the workplace.

But today, young women feel they have equal power to men. And they aren’t deluding themselves — women and men receive equal pay in business until they have children (after which woman are penalized for having kids more than men are). So men and women approach dating at work as equals.

The bigger issue here is that if you’re working 40 hours a week, you’re more likely to meet the people you want to date when you’re at the office. If you tell yourself that all men at work are off-limits, you put yourself at a huge disadvantage.

And if you want to have children, you need to make getting married a higher priority than your career. This isn’t some radical statement — it’s backed by a lot of research, not the least of which is that you can’t tell your biological clock to wait while you refuse to date all the men you come in contact with.

So the adage to not date men you work with is totally antiquated. It assumes that women aren’t equal to men, can push back childbearing indefinitely, and should put their career ahead of getting married. All of these are bad assumptions.

I’m not sure that I agree entirely, but it is interesting that she puts it so directly. Time will tell if this is a general change in perception - or perhaps it is misplaced nostalgia on her (and my) part for the “My goodness, Miss Simpkins, without your glasses you are beautiful!” good old (bad old) days of 1960s movie office romance cliches in a world where our real relationships may not be all that we could hope for.

PS: My goodness, Penelope - who do you know that only works 40 hours a week? :)

Consulting is something you do for your clients…

Published at 26 July, 2007 in Consulting. 2 Comments

…not to them.

A comment from Jeri Merrell on my Blogging with a heart post made me think about how values-based activity relates to professional life. As I thought about it, I realised that consulting (like blogging) is something that you do for your clients, not to them.

The bottom line is this: no matter how many bonuses you get for bringing in new business, or writing killer IP, or finding new consultants, if you aren’t doing something of real value for your clients, then you are doing it to them not for them.

Guess which model is more sustainable and ultimately more rewarding? :)

Facebook invitation ettiquette

Published at 20 July, 2007 in Social Computing and Consulting. 0 Comments

At last night’s Canberra IA Cocktail Hour discussion turned to Facebook invitations. Some of us get a lot of them, and sometimes we wonder how we know the inviter.

Penelope Trunk has the following advice for inviting people to LinkedIn. I’ve been a LinkedIn user for a while now - I can see the applicability of this to Facebook:

1. Don’t say yes to an invitation from a person you don’t really know.
LinkedIn works best as a way to leverage your professional circle of people you know well or know their work well. I love looking through my friends’ professional networks to get an idea of what introductions I could possibly get from a friend. My friend can say to her friend, “This is Penelope, you should get to know her because of x.� But this only works if my friend actually knows me and the other person well. Otherwise, I may as well make the introduction myself.

In that respect, your network on LinkedIn is really only as strong as your ties to the people in it. You will get more benefits from LinkedIn if you have a network of 30 people you know well than 300 people you don’t really know.

2. Don’t send invitations to people who don’t know you.
I feel like I kinda know Mike Arrington. I know I’d like to have dinner with him (does he ever stop blogging to have dinner?) I read his blog every day, and I know the type of connections he could offer me. But he doesn’t know me. Even if I have emailed him three times and posted ten comments on his blog, he doesn’t know who I am. He probably reads 400 emails and comments a day.

…5. Remind me how I know you.
Sometimes, I do actually know someone, but I communicate with so many different people every day, that I don’t remember. Yesterday I got an invitation that said, “It was great to do the podcast interview with you today� right before the standard LinkedIn invitation text. That was great. I knew exactly who the woman was and I connected. This also brings up another point, which is act immediately. The best invitations come right after you’ve made one, solid connection with a given person. For example, if you go back and forth in email six times, send an invitation that day.

What’s the easiest way to screw up a Facebook invitation? By getting it to run through your GMail or Outlook address book and inviting everyone you’ve ever emailed without thought. Chances are there are a lot of people that were CC recipients of mailing list responses from 12 months back that don’t know you from a bar of soap - you have no reason to invite these people to be Facebook friends, so don’t invite them.

Social Networking: Changing recruitment practices?

Published at 16 July, 2007 in Consulting. 0 Comments

Nick O’Neill writes that social networking is changing the way we recruit. As Nick indicates, there are recruiters active on Facebook - as well as those on Second Life and LinkedIn.

What does this actually mean? Does social networking just provide one more recruitment channel, or are their more fundamental changes?

A potential change is a growing recognition of the knowledge worker and their preference for burstworking. In an employee’s market, potential employers need to be aware of the needs of those they recruit so that they can attract the best.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that the people approached via social networking applications are more likely to be knowledge workers and therefore more likely to expect a non-process-centric work environment.  And this means that they’ll be less satisfied in the average hierarchical organisation.

I suppose this begs the question: is social networking changing working life (and thence recruitment practices) or are the changing expectations of the growing number of knowledge workers allowing social networking to bloom? I suspect that the answer is a bit of both - and the next few years should be really interesting as the accelerating pace of change catches up with older, larger, slower organisations.

Context is everything

Published at 12 July, 2007 in Consulting. 1 Comment

The photo says it all. Context is everything :)

pic01842.jpg

How do you position yourself? How do you provide context?

Consulting: It’s called an engagement because…

Published at 11 July, 2007 in Consulting. 0 Comments

…because you are supposed to be engaged. Fully engaged.

This is one of the things that I learnt from my SMSMT mentor Stephen Hall. Be fully present for the client, keeping in mind your obligations to the company, friends and family. Be an adult, get the job done. Over-deliver when you can, but ensure that you deliver.

No client wants to hear about how drunk you got last night - imagine going to a dentist or a heart specialist and hearing how unwell you are from alcohol abuse. All that most clients want is for you to get the job done - that said, it is easier to ask you back for another engagement if you are someone that they like doing business with. Being liked is part of the job.

Are you a consultant? Is there any of this stuff that doesn’t make perfect sense to you?  If so, tell me about it.

Dilbert on consulting

Published at 10 July, 2007 in Consulting. 0 Comments

Word up to Steve Collins for the following Dilbert cartoon :)

There are some fascinating lessons in this - in how unscrupulous consultants work, and how good ones shouldn’t. If you can guess them, leave me a comment :)

Brevity and the Art of Email

Published at 5 July, 2007 in Consulting. 0 Comments

Anne Zelenka writes that email should be short rather than nice. She argues that elegance in emails should be expressed in brevity rather than pleasantry.

I think that this is not quite correct. Close, but not quite correct.

Effective communication is not about medium, it is about the transfer of information.

If the audience are expecting you to write in one way (polite) and you write in another (abrupt), then the delivery can get in the way of the message. Here’s an example of where a little padding could go a long way - imaginge that you are trying to convince your boss to let you use Twitter at work - and he or she just doesn’t get it. You could react by calling him or her a dinosaur, or you could sell the benefits of social networking and then segue neatly into a demonstration of Twitter (or Pownce if you are one of the really cool kids). Which do you think has the better chance of success? Sure, sometimes confrontation is inevitable, but like Sun Tzu said, it is more efficient to avoid it where possible.

So it is with email - the rule is to write to your audience first, last, and always. If they are OK with the written equivalent of grunting and pointing, and it is appropriate to the message, then go for it - brevity has always been the very soul of clarity. If you are so busy being busy that you get 1,000 emails a day, maybe you’re inviting more attention than your available capacity to handle it, and need secretarial support. It happens :)