Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

In order to make the most out of my days, I reduced my caffeine intake and am now on this FRS kick. For those of you that don't know what FRS is, just go to a sportsite web page and look for Lance Armstrong on the right looking ripped as usual. It's supposed to be this all natural energy booster that will help you through work outs and playing sports. Since I play a lot of soccer on Sundays, I take it because I'm one of the oldest guys on the field and after one run, I get exhausted. I'm at the point where I would like to make two runs and still be standing. Just as athletes may have been on the HGH, I highly recommend that consultants try FRS. Right or wrong, I figure the firm would work me 24/7 if they could. So why not take some type of performance enhancing supplement? It makes me wonder what life would be like if all consultants went after every billable hour during weeks and weekends. I think it would be like having a bunch of Terminators running the world. I...

I think that in a down economy, the true culture of an organization reveals itself. I've come to the conclusion that an organization has two choices when the going gets rough. 1.) Everyone takes an every man for him/herself mentality and it becomes survival of the fittest (and luckiest); or 2.) The organization buckles down as one and prepares itself for the upswing. As a consultant, I could say that some organizations do a hybrid of both. But for the sake of discussion, let's deal in absolutes. A wise partner said to me - before the recession hit - that when the economy picks up, we're going to have a severe shortage of people and everyone will be working double and triple time. This turned out to be true. The same wise partner then told me that we are going to start ramping up quickly to meet anticipated demand, and because our "average" performers were let go and would not want to come back to us and our higher performers are disgruntled and will leave - we...

Recruiting top talent is a big deal for us. I'll be honest. We hire a lot of smart people. I swear there are a few that have some type of microprocessor in their head or a photographic memory. They have the ability to remember details, process information and think of things that are unimaginable. It's amazing. Being on the front end of the recruiting process, I think that there are the slam dunks (the ones that you know will excel, get what they want out of the management consulting profession, and then leave to move on to bigger and better thing) and then there are the ones that work hard, figure out the game, have a little bit of luck, and move to the type of the pyramid. Here's the thing that puzzles me. We place a huge emphasis on making our top performers happy knowing that there is a high probability that they will not stick around. I remember asking the question of how long our formers stay after they come back from grad school. The only answer that I really got w...

Once you get to be my level in management consulting, you have to learn how to be the bad guy. My personality is far from being the bad guy, but I quickly need to learn how to become an as*hole. So how do you develop this personality of as*holedness. It's actually quite easy because there are numerous examples to model yourself after. In one of my previous blogs, I talked about how there were a lack of role models. The exception to that is if you are looking for leaders that don't give a sh*t what they say and will steamroll anyone in the process - there are plenty of them to model yourself after. My opinion is that before you can do that, you have to gain the trust of your client. The flip side of that is sometimes you start a project already in progress and it's so messed up, you have to take the risk and make that jump before you even know the client. Taking that risk is calculated because you don't want to get kicked off a project. But my hope is that clients bel...

Yesterday was a day of awakening for me. As I was doing my favorite thing, shopping for clothes, I went into Banana Republic looking for some new clothes that I planned to wear to work. Thankfully, I am not working on a federal project which meant that I didn't have to buy a bland suit that makes me feel stuffy as soon as I put it on.  As I was trying on clothes, I tried on a pair of pants that had a waist size that I thought would never fit me. Let's put it this way, it was 6" bigger in the waist than what my waist size was in college. Lo and behold, those m-f'ers fit! It was at that point that severe depression kicked in. Do you ever keep clothes around with the intent of losing weight so that you can fit in them once again? Well, I do. (And as my wife will attest, they've been hanging in my closet since we were dating 3 years ago). Now I find out that not only will I not fit in them, but I'm going the complete other way and I have to buy more pants that wi...

Going to a conference a while back, I remember attending a breakout session on professional and written communication. Because of my poor retention skills, I only remembered about 5% of it. I remembered that you shouldn't use the word "Hopefully" to start a sentence. The reason escapes me. But I now start sentences with "I hope." I also remember hearing that everytime you use the word, "But," you are negating everything you said before you said "But." That said, I encountered a coworker that would use the "But" everytime I said something. I could have made a recommendation. Immediately I would get a response, "But...." It could have just been a statement. Hell, it could have just been a joke. I would still get a response starting with, "but." In my mind, I thought she was discounting everything I said - and literally, she said it after every sentence that came out of my mouth. I know that we tell our consultant...

The one thing that I've noticed over the past few years is that everyone has an agenda. Maybe I've just been blind to it since I see the good in everyone. Or maybe it's been amplified due to the current economic environment and the shift in culture that our organization has gone through. I talked before about loyalty to the company you work for. We all know that Generation X and younger no longer really believe in company loyalty. I think that everyone in my B-school class is on their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th + job. There are obviously some exceptions. My mom once told me to never trust anyone. For those of you that have Asian moms, they are extremely demanding and usually 100% right. It's very frustrating. I have a problem of being completely transparent with everyone that I meet. The issue with that is that individuals with agendas can use that against you. For example, I know that as soon as I give any indication that I am thinking about pursuing  outside opportunities, t...

Sometimes when you get so focused on metrics, you lose sight of the end goal. Let's say that my end goal is to be a partner of the firm. This to me means that I need to have a brand that is in demand within the marketplace and that the firm understands. (It really doesn't help to have a skill set that no one in the firm understands -- even if it's worth a few bucks here and there.) Not only does this brand have to be demand, it has to be worth a certain amount - let's say at least a few million dollars year over year. As a Sr. Consultant chasing utilization, I will tell you that this is the last thing that I thought about. Part of it is because I think so many of us get into this profession thinking that we'll burn a few cycles for a few years, get the experience, and then live somewhat of a normal life. For others of us, this is all we know and this is that we do. Before you know it, a decade has passed. The other factor in all of this is that at certain periods ...