For many of our clients, what they value most, is the opportunity to talk things through with someone who both understands their business and has the experience and knowledge to help. That is our forte.
We take things one step at a time, work within your resources and capabilities, but push forward to find that elusive success.
Chance is highly underrated by the management gurus, I wonder why?
My favourite columnist in The Economist, Schumpeter, had a little rant last week about “The three habits of highly irritating management gurus”. What caught my cynical eye was towards the end of the piece when he points out how frequently corporations cited in the gurus’ books as model, end up in trouble a few years later. He cites a piece of research[i] by Andrew Henderson of the University of Texas in which Henderson looked at the firms cited in “success studies” like “In Search of Excellence” and “Good to Great”.
“We evaluated 287 allegedly high-performing companies in 13 major success studies. We found that only about one in four of those firms was likely to be remarkable; the rest were indistinguishable from mediocre firms catching lucky breaks.”
“Many of the ‘great’ companies cited are, in fact, nothing special; consequently, the researchers are simply imposing patterns on random data. That’s not science – it’s astrology”
Why MBA schools need to embrace what they fail to do as well as what they do so well.
This evening I’m going to attend the 10 year anniversary alumni dinner of my MBA year at Cranfield University. This is a bit of a first for me as I have rarely returned to my seats of learning, largely due to me leading student revolutions at most of them.
Recently in The Economist (“The pedagogy of the privileged”) “Schumpeter” argues that business schools have done little to reform themselves in the light of the credit crunch. The writer concludes:
“Business schools need to make more room for people who are willing to bite the hands that feed them: to prick business bubbles, expose management fads and generally rough up the most feted managers. Kings once employed jesters to bring them down to earth. It’s time for business schools to do likewise.”
A jester for a business school? I’d like to apply for the fun-poking, mickey-taking, fad-busting, bubble-pricking role. Amongst the many bubbles I’d like to burst:
Some of us have been here before. Dire economic figures, redundancies, turmoil and opportunity. Yes, that’s right; opportunity.
We were sitting on a couple of packing cases in a Chicago convention hall chatting about what we’d like to do next. Gareth had started a software company a few years before and had created a 3D animation package which ran on hardware made by the company I was working for. It had been involved in an unrelated patent battle which was finally going to put it in its grave and me into redundancy. The conversation ambled along as we killed time waiting for the shipping boxes to come out of storage so we could pack up and head off to the bar.
Slowly our conversation drifted from the fun stuff we liked to do, to a sketch of a new product we could build.
Could it be that silver is a bigger prize than gold?
A look at some of the advice on offer in these “challenging times”
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