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| Change |
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Wherever you live in the world, you probably know that the US presidential election is underway and the votes will soon be counted. Regardless of who wins the election, change is coming.
Given that almost every consulting project involves some type of change, consultants know a thing or two about the subject. And, as the US election illustrates on a grand scale, there are challenges to initiating any complex change. On the day after the election, a substantial number of people will be both weary of the process and unhappy with the outcome.
In a client setting, the "change-weary" are often a small, but vocal, minority of people who can quickly bring a promising project to its knees. It's the consultant's job, along with the client team, to find ways to bring these people on board. Ignoring them is a recipe for long-term failure.
Whoever wins the US election will face this problem in ways most of us can only imagine. I'm guessing that, in the next few months, we'll learn a lot about how to manage--or mismanage--large-scale change simply by watching how newly elected officials handle their roles. Stay tuned.
Enjoy this month's issue.
And send me an email if you have comments.
Mike
McLaughlin
Editor
Management Consulting News is a publication of MindShare
Consulting.
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| MCNews 12 Index of Professional Services |
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US Economic News |
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McNews 12 Index |
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Most investors are likely jumping for joy because October is finally over. The US market suffered its worst month in twenty-one years, as stocks continued to get slammed.
Even though the market showed some signs of life at the end of the month, the economic news remains bleak. Evidence of a recession grew this month, with new figures showing Americans are spending less and are gloomy about the economy. The University of Michigan survey of consumer confidence fell to 57.6 in October, the biggest one-month drop in the survey's history, which dates to 1978.
The timing of these trends couldn't be worse. As consumers tighten their belts, US retailers are bracing for one of the worst holiday spending seasons on record.
The MCNews 12 Index companies were ravaged along with the overall market, giving up more than 17 percent last month, and are now facing a YTD return of -22.5 percent. With the exception of Accenture, which had less than a 1 percent decline in October, the companies in the MCNews 12 Index suffered double-digit declines in their share prices.
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MCNews 12 Index |
YTD
Change |
S+P 500 YTD Change |
| October 2008 |
692 |
-22.5% |
-27.6% |
| Sept 2008 |
833 |
-6.7% |
-16.6% |
| August 2008 |
1,014 |
13.5% |
-4.62% |
The MCNews 12 Index reflects general investor sentiment about the state of the global professional services industry.
The twelve publicly-traded companies included in the MCNews 12 Index account for roughly $80 billion in combined annual revenue, and serve clients around the world.
Learn more about the MCNews 12 Index 
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| Interview:
Dan Roam |
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 "The heart of business is the art of problem solving."
Everyone's heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but there's still hesitance to use pictures in business communication and problem solving.
Dan Roam, founder of Digital Roam Inc., thinks everyone is capable of productive visual thinking--even those who can't draw and consider themselves to be analytical, "left brain" types. Roam's consulting firm, and his book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, help us experience the power of visual thinking.
We asked Roam to show us how and when to use the techniques of visual thinking. Our interview with him wasn't done with pictures, though it probably should have been.
Read
our interview with Dan Roam
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| Email, Call, or Go See? by Ford Harding |
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 To what extent should you use emails in place of phone calls and face-to-face meetings when developing and maintaining relationships with clients and other important network contacts?
This question is asked by someone in every group of aspiring rainmakers I work with. Sometimes the speaker asks hopefully, wishing to avoid phone calls. Others are trying to sort out mixed messages from clients. Or they may be wrestling with the perennial juggling of client work with business development, and may see emails as a partial solution.
So, which are more effective, emails, phone calls, or in-person meetings?
Read the article
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| On Being Spectacularly Unsuccessful |
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 There's no shortage of stories about executives who make it to the top with no apparent leadership skills. In his book, Why Smart Executives Fail, Sydney Finkelstein, a professor of management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, warns that turning a blind eye to leadership shortcomings can have disastrous consequences.
Based on interviews with 200 business people, Finkelstein lays out seven characteristics of what he calls "spectacularly unsuccessful people." These tendencies offer clues to help you figure out whether colleagues or clients are headed to a spectacularly awful fate. Pay attention if they:
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See themselves and their companies as dominating their environments.
Identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal and corporate interests. Seem to have all the answers, often dazzling people with their speedy decisiveness. Make sure everyone is 100 percent behind them, ruthlessly eliminating anyone who might undermine them. -
Are consummate company spokespeople, devoting most of their efforts to managing the company's image.
Underestimate major obstacles. Rely just on the strategies and tactics that made them and their companies successful in the first place.
You could probably accuse many leaders of having one or more of these fatal characteristics. But watch out for those who have them all, especially if you have one as a client.
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I'm a Consultant and I'm Here to Help |
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It's always useful for clients to let their people know why they have hired you, especially when you need cooperation to get the job done. But, some introductions work better than others.
Have a look at this excerpt from a memo to the company from Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo!, about his decision to hire a consulting firm.
"As we look ahead and to position us for success in 2009, we're continuing the work already underway to get fit as an organization: actively looking for ways to make process and structural changes to our business that will allow us to work more efficiently, with more scale. We've enlisted the help of Bain & Company to work with the leadership team on identifying ways to leverage our strengths, and to improve and accelerate our performance."
When people read euphemisms like "get fit," "structural changes," and "work more efficiently, with more scale," they think layoffs. Most consultants know that working in a tough environment is part of the job. But sometimes it's better for the client to say nothing at all than to send an evasive, jargon-laden message that raises more questions than it answers.
What's worse is that this type of introduction sets the consultant up as the bad guy when executives make the hard decision to downsize the company.
Not long after the above memo went out, Yang announced, "We anticipate we will reduce headcount by at least 10 percent" by the end of the year.
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| A Cure for Jet Lag? |
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 Jet lag is a familiar malady to most anyone who flies across time zones. And it's been studied by scientists for years. The first study on the effects of jet lag, which the FAA conducted in 1965, found that all test subjects felt fatigue and experienced significant impairment of "psychological performance."
Over the past few decades, researchers have completed dozens of studies, using humans and lab animals as test subjects, without much luck in finding a cure. One such study found that jet lag in hamsters was reduced when they ingested small doses of a well-known erectile* medication. For humans, that treatment has obvious drawbacks.
The latest study, published in the May 2008 issue of the journal Science, reported that fasting for sixteen hours before a long-distance flight might enable travelers to better resist jet lag. The theory is that fasting can reset the brain's internal "clock," helping it adjust faster to a new time zone.
You have to wonder if the pain of this "cure" might be worse than jet lag, especially for the people who are trapped on a plane with the one fasting.
*The V word was omitted due to spam filter objections.
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| Coming
Attractions |
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 "Very often when we make a decision about someone or something, we don't use all of the relevant, available information."
Next month, we'll talk with Robert Cialdini, author of the classic book Influence: Science and Practice, about his latest thinking on how consultants should--and shouldn't--use the techniques of persuasion to influence clients and others they work with.
Look for the next issue of Management Consulting News on December 2, 2008.
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