Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

When you are someone that typically fits in anywhere, it's hard to accept the fact when you don't fit in somewhere. A lot of thoughts - not all positive - tend to run through your mind: It it me? What's wrong with me? Am I incompetent? How did I get through the past decade of my professional life?  Was I really someone at my old firm? I'm not so sure anymore. It's entirely my fault. I'm just not communicating effectively.  Oh my god. This is my life. How do I explain this to my kid and parents? Once you get past the point of having an anxiety attack and AFTER you let everything go, you'll begin to realize that it's not really you, it's the environment that you are in. Unfortunately, you may begin to reject the environment before it ultimately rejects you.  Here's the thing. You know - within 48 hours of starting a job - whether you fit or not. AS SOON AS YOU KNOW that you don't fit - you have 2 choices; try to make it work,...

A while back I wrote about the vision of  up and to the right. Ignore the fact that it could mean revenue over time -- to quote a former colleague of mine. (I can't take credit for that one). In a local consulting model, I think the following conditions exist.  Resources need / have to be generalists. A jack of all trades and master of none if you will.  Resources that have specific expertise need to have expertise that is industry agnostic. What I mean is that there are less opportunities to define an acquisition strategy for a telecommunications company than there are to write something in HTML 5.  The work will naturally leans towards being more execution oriented vs. adviser oriented -- unless you spend an inordinate time at the client getting to know its business from the inside. So now it gets interesting. What happens when the doer becomes a source of knowledge? What happens when the donkey gets a seat at the table? In other words, what happens wh...

I was watching a Minute with Maxwell where he talks about getting Unstuck . He says to get unstuck, you have to go back to where you are stuck. In other words, too many people try to run away. The irony is that the more you run, the more stuck you end up becoming.  One of the ways to get unstuck is to recognize the environment that you are in. For example, in Wreck-It Ralph when Felix and Calhoun were stuck in the Nesquik sand, instead of trying to jump out - which only accelerated their descent - they recognized that the Laffy Taffy could save them and worked the system, no matter how painful it was. From experience, there is nothing to be gained from fighting the system. In the words of one of my favorite people / characters, The Rock,  Don't do what I didn't do. Recognize the environment. Work within that structure. Don't try and fight it. Find experiences that improve your reputation or brand. If any of that feels wrong, then it's probably time to make that ...

Back in the dark ages my parents made a decision to put me in a school that was labeled as "Traditional." It was a school that provided a structured teaching curriculum and did a little more than just teach to the middle.  A lot of the smarter kids I knew when to an "Open" school. This was a school where students could pick their own classes, study at their pace, and independently drove what and how they learned. I realize now after 4 decades that I've grown up in pretty structured environments. So what happens when you get put in an unstructured environment?  Confusion? Loss of direction? Confusion? Yes, yes, and yes.  When making the transition from a big firm to a local company, you try to figure out how things can be so different when you are supposed to be doing the same type of work.  You may think it's growing pains of the company.  You may think it's leadership and management.  You may think it's your fault.  But the reality is that...

In order to stay sharp, I've had to read a lot of books. I remember at one point I joined lumosity.com , but then I couldn't afford it anymore. Sad, but true.  One could argue that I'm really not that sharp because a colleague of mine gave me a rather simple math problem, and I started out all wrong. There was also a time that a Partner at a restructuring firm gave me a mini-case over lunch and I failed that too. You know the times when you're like, "Duh! I knew that?!" Well, that's me when it comes to cases or problems after someone gives me an answer. Why I can't figure it out the first time escapes me.  Out of all the books that I've read, and CDs or podcasts that I've listened to, every one of them says to "find your purpose." Clayton Christensen's book, How Will You Measure Your Life , even goes so far as to define what the characteristics of a purpose are. So what happens if you don't know what your purpose is?  Wh...

As soon as you get off the road as a management consultant in a professional services firm, I think you need to enter group therapy. The shock of what you left to what you are entering can be challenging to overcome- to say the least.  As you slowly begin to realize where you are, there has to be some mechanism to absorb the shock. The easy way to do this is to find other individuals just like you. These are people that: Did not get a role in industry at a senior executive level (or respectable title) where the role commands recognition Went to a "no travel" type of firm where the environment is not giving you what you need in terms of intellectual stimulation Are simply struggling with the question of "what do you do?," when you're off the up or out treadmill and enter organizations that just don't operate that way. Fred Kofman says this: Shared experiences forge shared perspectives. Corporations, families nations - all groups - develop habitu...

Inspiration for this came from one of my co-workers. This is good for a couple of reasons. The first is that I'm not alone in what I'm thinking. (Scary). The second is that someone actually reads my blog. Nido Qubein, the President of High Point University, said something to the effect that if you create an environment of excellence, people will live up to the standards of that environment. (That's not an exact quote. I'm terrible at retrieving information when I need it) . But you get the gist. At a big firm, you almost begin to believe that you are worth the rate that you bill clients. So when you move to a smaller organization and your bill rate is cut by 3/4, it's almost impossible not to take that personally.  There's a cost associated with the resources and intellectual property, not to mention intellectual horsepower, that big firms can give you. In addition, anyone that's taken any type of behavioral economics course understands that people asso...