Your Feedback needed on our consulting firm's website

Hey there, I'd like some feedback from you.

I've set up the website and blog of the performance support consulting firm where I work. Go take a look.

Currently there is the blog , the kind of work we have done , client testimonials , the intervention model we follow, some sample interventions , and our team .

My question is: what is your feedback about the site?

What could we add that would make a potential buyer pick up the phone and contact us?

Brickbats welcome :-)

Leave the feedback in the comments to this post.

For the people interested, I built the site on Wordpress using WP domain upgrade . So there are a lot of limitations to what we could do there, for example I can't run scripts or do pop-ups. Any feedback, or ideas about what to put in and what to edit would be most welcome!

Management Consulting Firms and Recruitment

According to the Consulting Magazine

Bob Damon, president, North America, of executive recruitment firm Korn/Ferry International says it’s still more likely we’ll see more cuts at many firms before hiring picks up. “Generally what happens with service firms is in a downturn, they don’t right-size themselves quickly enough. And so in a downturn, they’re trailing indicators,” he says. And while some firms’ staffing strategies make headlines, it’s hard to know what’s happening at private companies, aside from anecdotal experience.

Phillips says firms are hiring—it’s just that now they want a different type of consultant. At the beginning of last year, he says, “We suddenly heard from a lot of our consulting clients, ‘Let’s just hire the person we really need.’ So most of our consulting clients began to delay and focus on hiring only those people they really needed, and part of the trend here, especially with globalization, is that the client is asking for a different sort of delivery person.” That person, he says, is a trusted adviser with real content knowledge who can serve in a very specific role. “And those are the searches we’re seeing. We’re being asked for laser-specific people, like retail banking, but someone who worked for the banks during this chaotic period.”

Damon adds that firms also are more interested in candidates who have hybrid experience. “[Consulting firms] would typically like to go into a company where someone from Bain left after four or five years to work for a company, maybe started [at that company] in a strategy role, maybe then moved over to an operating role and has been in that kind of situation for a number of years and they would go after that person to come back into consulting.”

The signals from Indian consulting firms are mixed too. In the consulting space, focus on productivity and increasing 'bang from the buck' is up. So if you are a consultant who can enumerate on profitability impact of your advice then firms are going to take a second look at you.

Yeah like all good things there's going to be a shakeout in the consulting market too. And that's a good thing, for consulting firms - as well as their clients. As this other article advises consulting firms "Clean out your dead wood"

Dealing with the economic crisis

This is a guest post by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of universities weblog . She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com


If you want to write a guest post on this blog mail me at gg at gautamghosh.net

Tips for Dealing with the Economic Crisis

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you are well aware that the entire world is waist-deep in an economic crisis the likes of which have not been seen in nearly two decades.  Experts are saying that it will take quite some time for things to turn around and major companies are feeling the crunch and taking necessary measures to ensure they don’t sink under the pressure.

In the field of HR, we are in a unique position that ultimately makes us look like the bad guys when we are simply doing our jobs, but there are some good pieces of advice that can help employees and potential employees deal with these tough times.

Get Ready to Work Harder Than Ever Before

If you want to be an indispensable employee, get ready to roll up your sleeves and take on multiple tasks and do it without being asked.  Take some initiative and throw your hat in the ring.  Once you establish yourself as a doer, you’ll be recognized for your willingness to help out and that sets you above the rest.

Continue Learning

It can be very easy to become complacent and stagnate in the process when you aren’t working on bettering yourself.  There is an entire young workforce out there that is well-versed in a multitude of subjects and applications that are willing to do the same amount of work for less money.  The problem?  They still lack the requisite experience and current employees have an advantage if they are willing to put in the time and effort to learn new skills and applications.

Consider a Portfolio Career

People who have a wide variety of skills at their disposal are finding that a portfolio career suits them better and are able to stay on at their current job in some capacity while exploring other areas of interest.  Portfolio careers are rapidly becoming the norm in a society where technological integration has made trudging to the office for the 9-5 a thing of the past. 

Eyes on the Prize

Determined and self-motivated people don’t have time to sit around waiting for the pink slip.  If they get one, they know that they will be fine because they have the knowledge base and skill set to be successful.  People who still do their job well and effectively under pressure are too busy getting things done to think about losing their jobs and upper management knows who these people are.  Help be part of the solution rather than waiting for the axe to fall.

Organizational Learning and Business Impact

On Linkedin someone asked a question:

From your own professional perspective, what are the approaches that may be suggested to make sure that organizational Learning may be successfully applied in an average company, by ensuring at the same time, a seamless alignment with the business strategy?

This is what I replied:

First of course, we have to make sure that the learning addresses a gap or opportunity area that has a direct business impact. For that critically analysing needs and impact of proposed learning is imperative

By making sure that structures, processes and measurement systems support by making 'implementation of knowledge' important, and by rewarding both success and failure - and punishing inaction - as far as experimenting with new knowledge goes.

It is not just people who undergo training/learning but their managers/supervisors who have to be held accountable for nominating them for learning initiatives and to have measurable change in behavior after learning.

Identity issues in recession

The Wall Street Journal reports

The deepening recession is exacting punishment for a psychological vice that masquerades as virtue for many working people: the unmitigated identification of self with occupation, accomplishment and professional status. This tendency can induce outright panic as more and more people fear loss of employment.
But the science behind cognitive behavioral therapy, a psychotherapeutic approach that aims to change self-destructive thinking and behavior, suggests that that work can bring long-lasting rewards.

Maybe we all should start looking at the other identities that we have apart from our work identities. Identity as family members, larger members of the community, hobby groups, friends.

The paradox of innovation

Life is a paradox. When a slowdown occurs people and organizations view in a linear fashion their own self interest. Quit spending. Hunker down.

Even though they cognitively (perhaps) know that the other kind of behavior, that probably leads to failure as much as success is what is needed. That's because while we yearn for yes and no, binary thinking, life's questions are probabilistic.

As Bob Sutton says :

U.C. Davis Professor Dean Keith Simonton, who has spent much of his career doing long-term quantitative studies of creative genius,  has concluded that a high failure rate is a hallmark of creative geniuses -- he concludes that the most creative people -- scientists,  composers, artists, authors, and on and on -- have the greatest number of failures because they do the most stuff.  And he can find little evidence that creative geniuses have a higher success rate than their more ordinary counterparts; they just take more swings at the ball. Check out his book Origins for Genius , perhaps the most complete review of research on the subject.

Hmm that sounds a lot like motivating someone for deliberate practice .

As I have posted earlier there are more paradoxes at work when it comes to innovation:

In fact in the first half of the innovation process is all about the things that large organizations are allergic to. It's about messy, chaotic, instinctive and insightful idea generation. It calls for suspending judgement. It even calls for suspending action orientation. That is not a role for management people. This is the part of the innovation process that is best done in startups, without too much analysis, or in pods away from the mother ship (skunkworks for example).

The management part of organizations comes into play in the convergence of ideas. This is when 'traditional' management and decision making skills come into play. Trade-offs need to be made, analysis needs to be done on feasibility, ideas need to be tangibilised into execution.

It will not be an exaggeration to say that philosophically, these two parts of the innovation process are directly in a state of tension with each other. The people who do one part well, resent the activities done by the other part. There is a feeling that ideas are superior and execution is inferior. However, as Bossidy and Ram Charan state in their book Execution, it's the implementation that makes the difference.

A little bit like yin-yang I suppose.

Critical Skills for Human Resource professionals

There are some skills that are never taught in HR courses, but once you join the workforce you realise how important all of them really are:

1. Business Acumen - It's understanding exactly how your organization makes money and what you as a HR professional can do to impact it positively. Business acumen has be the lodestone by which you measure and evaluate any HR initiative. (Even though some believe that the real business of business is to build leaders )
2. Communication Skills - It is painful when HR people don't get this one right. Written and spoken skills are both critical to being a successful and effective HR professional. It sends out wrong messages about your capability when you cannot communicate an intervention/initiative's objectives and salient points in less than 50 words. Try it. 
3. Inter-personal skills - Empathy. Respect. Listening. Openness. These are approaches that you are expected to have. But sadly, I have come across many HR leaders and professionals who are egotistical, snooty, pig-headed and totally disrespectful of others. They are also the ones who are servile to higher ups and contribute to the stories that stress "HR is a spineless dictator". Don't be one of them.
4. Negotiation Skills - When you have chosen to be part of a function that is evaluated by what others do, negotiating goes from a life-skill to a critical to succeed professional skill. 
5. Learning to Learn 
6. Consulting Skills 
7. Marketing Skills 
8. Sensemaking 

Any others you can think of?

Related posts:

What exactly should a HR generalist do ?

HR generalist or specialist ?

Advice about HR 

Don't forget learning

I posted on this blog a very pertinent and timely article by Josh Bersin in which he talks about the current fad (driven by the economy, no doubt) but warns that not focusing on learning concurrently would be disastrous for organizations.

You'll do well to read it.

HR's problem - A big reason

Bob Sutton nails it in his blog post:

HR people often get more abuse than they deserve because they are so often put in a position where no one notices them when they do something right, but they get blamed out of proportion when things go wrong.  A classic fate of people who have responsibility, but not enough authority.  So they often are very timid about taking action because they get punished for doing even the most obviously right things.  Not all companies create this difficult situation for HR heads, but too many do.

Bang on.

Advice for the laid off and advice for those in the job

There's a lot of advice these days on careers and how to manage either being laid off, or if you're laid off, how to get a job back.

Here are two very different people with excellent advice on both issues.

Melanie Holmes, VP at Manpower advises the ones with a job to do the following :

• Pitch in wherever you see a need — whether it’s your job or not.  One of my favorite sayings about work is, “If you’re too big for a small job, then you’re too small for a big job.”  Don’t worry about your job description — do what needs to be done.
  
• And don’t be shy about what you’re doing.  Make sure the decision makers are aware of the contribution you’re making.
  

And tech geek uber-blogger Robert Scoble has some advice for the laid off folks, particularly how to manage their online presence to network and job hunt. Here are some of my favorite points from there:

• Your blog is your resume. You need one and it needs to have 100 posts on it about what you want to be known for.
  
• Invite influentials out to lunch. Getting a job is now your profession. If you were a salesperson, how would you get sales? You would take people out to lunch who can either buy what you’re selling, or influence others who can buy. That means take other bloggers (but only if they cover what you want to do) out to lunch. That means taking lots of industry executives out to lunch.
  
• Go to industry events. If you want to be a plumber, go to where contractors go. Etc. Etc. Make sure you have clear business cards. Include your photo. Include your Twitter and LinkedIn addresses. Your cell phone. Your blog address.
  
• Demonstrate you have kids and hobbies, but they should be 1% of your public persona, not 99%.
  
• When you meet someone who can hire and who you want to work for. Follow them on Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Their blog. Stalk them without being “creepy.” Learn everything you can about them. Build a friendfeed room with all their stuff. That way when they say on Twitter “I have a job opening” you can be the first one to Tweet back.
  
• Do some work on SEO. Make it possible for people to find you. THINK about how people would search for someone with your expertise and skills.
  
• Remove all friends from your facebook and twitter accounts that will embarrass you. We do look. If we see photos of people getting drunk with you that is a bad sign. Get rid of them. They will NOT help you get a job.
  

Related posts:
Guard your job during a downturn
Six tips for networking

Graduating in 2009?

Got this email from a MBA student

I request you to kindly suggest me some ways to get myself placed during this crunch time.
Looking forward to your reply.

And this is what I replied:

These are tough times. The key to a good future is to organize what your priorities are.

Maybe you won’t get placed through your college. You should access the key players in industries that are doing well and approach them directly. Ask your professors for their contacts with industry.

Always keep in mind that you are greater than your visiting card (that statement was from Abhijit Bhaduri's book Married But Available). Don’t disrespect yourself because you cannot get a dream job. Economic conditions will change in the future, and the more you have faith in your own self the better you will leverage the upturn when it comes

Yes, it's a tough year to be graduating in. Rashmi Bansal has some useful posts and hopefully will have some great ideas on what a fresh graduate/MBA can do to get employment.

Wish all folks in the class of 2009 all the best.

And oops, just realised that my class completes a decade after graduation! Man, I am getting really old! :D

Google Latitude - a boon for the small office

Google recently upgraded their version of Google Maps with something called Latitude.

Latitude makes it easy for you to know where your friends are on a map. Instead of GPRS it uses mobile tower to track where the phone (and its user is)

As fast company says:

Users have to manually turn on Latitude before it will broadcast their location, so no one will wake up one day with their location marked unless they mean to. Also, Google's servers don't track movements--they merely provide the last waypoint where a user was marked. This means that you can't track anyone's daily pattern of movement, making Latitude nearly useless for prospective assassins. (Breath easy, Barack.) You can also determine the specificity of your beacon, showing an exact city block or just the city itself. Only friends on your contact list can see your location.
Your list of Latitude friends works much like your Gchat friend list. You have to request to be allowed to chat with someone, and they must accept you before you can talk to them. On Latitude, there's a little more middle ground, for the sake of social grace; you can accept someone else's location and share back, accept their location and hide yours, deny their location or block them. You can also change privacy levels for each individual friend after you accept them by going to their Latitude profile, or for all friends by entering the "privacy" menu in your account. Once you're up and running, you can display your location along with a Twitter-like message: "Getting lunch, come join me!" or "At the dentist, come join me!" Or something like that.

Of course, it promises to be a great utility for small and medium enterprises who have a handful of employees - to keep track where each of them are - and understand which area would be better for meeting.

I turned on Latitude on my Nokia N63, and it works like a dream. Of course, the best part is that you don't need a jazzy mobile phone. You can also update that on a PC too, merely by going to http://m.google.com/latitude and entering your google account id, and then invite all your GTalk friends to join you.

Oh yeah, and if prospective clients also accept your invitation, you can just hop across and meet them.

As a blogger I also wonder if it has any integration planned with Google FriendConnect in any way. Imagine the possibilities then. We could have geographically aware communities around blogs/sites too.

Hmm, intriguing as well as scary in some way. Thank goodness it's opt-in.

The newest Carnival of HR is up

Wally Bock hosts the latest Carnival of HR on his blog.

And yes, there are two posts (one by Wally and one by me) that focus on deliberate practice. And of course, tonnes of other good stuff by HR bloggers from across the world.

Hop over there and check it out :-)

Deliberate Practice makes an Expert

Just finished reading this paper (pdf) on research done by Dr. K Anders Ericsson and others on how something they have labelled “deliberate practice” is what separates eminent performers from good performers.

What is deliberate practice?

It’s the focused time and effort that people take that is used to address and develop areas of weakness. It is usually assisted by a teacher/trainer and the benefits are apparent when a performer starts early and slowly increases his/her times over a period of years.

The researchers found that to get to a level of eminence it takes almost a decade of practice – this holds true for people from across disciplines from sports like chess to tennis to musical genius. And being consistent in your practice is the key to development.

The researchers notice that deliberate practice is not glamorous. It is usually done alone or with a trainer/coach. It requires lots of hard work and their is no reward linked directly to practice – just the promise of reward that when one performs on the world stage one might be the best.

Deliberate practice also means getting access to the training/ learning resources and the best teachers. It also means having the unstinting support of your family to help you develop your domain expertise.

According to this article:

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.

What do you think can this research tell us about how to achieve success in organizations? In a sense one is ‘performing’ through the 10-12 hours of work that people put in – so how does one get the 5 hours of time for deliberate practice to sharpen their skills? And yet have the necessary time to recuperate from its mental and physical strain? The researchers note that deliberate practice must be only carried out until can do it physically. Overdoing it would erode motivational levels and lead to burn out.

More on deliberate practice from the authors of Freakonomics:

the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.