Gautam Ghosh – Website

Consulting Seminar: Types of Consultants,

This page succintly classifies the types of consultants that there are and therefore the various types of consulting approaches.
“Generalist vs. Specialist — A generalist educational consultant, for example, might work with the superintendent in a school district to help develop strategies for cutting costs or redirecting money to individual schools. A specialist, however, will focus work on a specific area of expertise. A specialist might consult with a school district to make a CD-ROM to help special education teachers learn new laws and regulations pertaining to students.

Diagnostic vs. implementation — A diagnostic consultant will try to find the sources of problems. She may offer solutions, but her relationship with the client will end with a clear description of the problem and possibly some suggested solutions. An implementation consultant focuses on helping organizations change. This person calls attention to the problems and helps the organization focus on the processes that need to be revised, deleted or implemented to bring about change. “

Gareth Morgan on Metaphors in Management: The Pros and Cons

Much of management thinking in the late 1990s is being dominated by two broad types of metaphor. The first urges us to embrace images of flux and transformation. One perspective here encourages us to jump into the melee of hyper-competition by beating, outsmarting and upending our competition before they beat us. Another encourages us to move our organizations toward “edge of chaos” situations and see the transformations that emerge.

A second broad type of metaphor is encouraging us to become corporate bankers by levering and developing intellectual capital to meet the demands of a knowledge economy. Great metaphors with great insights. But, hopelessly flawed unless you see that they are just metaphors. The challenge is to take the creative insights and lever them for all their worth. But avoid the weaknesses and limitations, or they will come back to haunt you.

Learning is Social
An interesting story from Xerox
What Thomas heard from the trenches, in fact, did little to elevate her estimation of the training department’s role in the learning process at Xerox. She was astonished to learn just how removed from the sphere of real work was the prolonged methodology for developing training classes, a process that unfolded along these lines: First came a flyover visit to determine training requirements. Those requirements were handed off to designers back in Leesburg, who designed a curriculum. Months later, training-delivery specialists parachuted onto the scene armed with a detailed script.
But these scripts were next to useless, according to the workers. They complained to Thomas that they heard way too much about tasks they never or seldom performed, and way too little about some of the most crucial aspects of the job. Moreover, there was never an opportunity to practice what they were taught until three or four weeks of classroom training ground to a blessed halt. By the time workers were actually back on the job, they’d forgotten most of what they’d been told. To learn billing and credit procedures, for instance, trainees endured 11 weeks of nonstop classroom lectures before taking their first customer call.
Worst of all, none of the talking heads had ever set foot in a customer service setting. “They tell us how work gets done based on what someone else has told them,” the workers told Thomas. “When we finally get back to the job, co-workers have to explain to us how things really get done.”

Over the initial objections of the training department (some trainers assigned to the ICS project later became staunch advocates of the new approach), IRLS recommendations were put into place. Not only did the ICS workers prove themselves adept at teaching their jobs to each other, by their own accounts they were exhilarated by the challenge of doing something new and different. “It was the best sort of team-building I’d ever seen,” says Rick Hawkins, who came to the ICS project from account administration. “It forced us to rely on each other daily.” In learning new skills for the ICS pilot, Hawkins estimates he spent no more than eight hours away from the job, listening to co-workers in an informal classroom setting; the rest he picked up while on the work floor.

Articles on HR at Ma Foi

Some good articles, specially Sushant and Raghu at this site.

Trends in Consulting in India

As the Rs 400-crore Indian consulting market (industry estimates) starts booming (it is showing a growth of 50% per annum), the two sides have begun competing fiercely. On one side are big IT companies like IBM, Cambridge Technology Partners, Citicorp Information Technology Industries Ltd and TCS. On the other are management consultants like McKinsey & Co, PwC, Andersen Consulting, Ernst & Young and KPMG, who are making IT an integral part of their business. Management consultants are also beginning to reorient themselves. With clients asking them to implement what they preach, consultancies are building formidable IT expertise. PwC is transforming itself almost into an IT company. Some 700 people of its 1,000-strong staff are engaged in IT-related activities. About 500 alone are ERP consultants. Business is growing rapidly too. Total revenues increased by about 45% in the last three years, but in IT-related areas the revenues increased by almost 80%. In fact, by the year 2001, PwC expects two-thirds of its revenues to come from e-business consulting. Others are following suit. For Ernst & Young, 60% of work comes from IT-related areas. Cisco has taken 19% in KPMG after the latter was involved in its e-business consulting. As for Andersen Consulting, 80 of the 200-strong workforce in India work on technology-related areas. And it is now increasingly focusing on e-commerce and convergence technologies like m-commerce related projects as its major thrust and growth area.

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions – outline

Kuhn was the chap who said that Scientific thought passes through paradigm shifts which are brought about by people who are either young in age or new to the field or both.

Basically, the established paradigms that exist in the minds of the scientists do not enable them to look at data that differ from their paradigms!!

Metaphors of Organisation –
by James Lawley
“All theories of organisation and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that persuade us to see, understand, and imagine situations in partial ways. Metaphors create insight. But they also distort. They have strengths. But they also have limitations. In creating ways of seeing, they create ways of not seeing. Hence there can be no single theory or metaphor that gives an all-purpose point of view. There can be no ‘correct theory’ for structuring everything we do.”
Read this page !!

Is Independent HR Consulting Right for You?

For folks who are thinking of Independent HR consulting, this article gives them a great feel of the issues. Basically the summary of the article is

Independent consulting has made its way into HR.

Don’t overlook the need for sales skills if you want to go out on your own.

Finding a niche and creating a business plan will put you in the direction of success.

Top-Consultant.com – News from the Consulting Universe

Ian Davis has today won the leadership vote at McKinsey to become the firm’s new Managing Partner. Davis was standing against Michael Patsalos-Fox in a vote of Senior Partners at the firm. He will now take over the McKinsey helm from the outgoing Rajat Gupta on the 1st July. Gupta stands down having led the firm for the maximum-permitted three consecutive 3 year terms.

Will McKinsey’s India focus go after Rajat Gupta moves out ?

Davis is understood to favour a return-to-values drive, encompassing greater investment in training and development, and a renewed focus on working with top clients on top issues.

Knowledge Management & New Organization Forms: A Framework for Business Model Innovation

This is an online article written by the founder of Brint.com Dr. Yogesh Malhotra

Top Ranked Training Websites on the Net

These are the Top Ranked Training and Development Websites as ranked by users. Don’t know how much they are useful, but you might want to check them out

HR revisited: Role of IT in recruitment

Technology helps many HR executives move beyond the perception that they’re bureaucrats who spend money rather than make it. Forward-thinking HR folks focus on helping to shape the big picture rather than documenting its details. There are a lot of companies making HR as a part of their business strategy.

KPMG’s European KM Survey 2002/2003
Companies believe that an average 6% of revenue as percentage of total turnover or budget annually is being missed from failing to exploit knowledge effectively, are the findings of this annual survey.

KnowledgeBoard: the European Knowledge Management (KM) Community – Home Hits
Top Ten Trends for Online Communities 9
6-Mar-2003 – This article by Jim Cashel of the Online Community Report, examines specific niches within the online community space which are demonstrating strong revenues, credible earnings (now or forecast), and a promising future. This article reviews ten such areas which, given their financial promise, represent the future of online communities

Have updated the title and template of the blog !
Let’s see how I like it !!

Another posting on Brint board

My personal humble opinion is that KM is expanding in scope and also spawning off whole systems of sub disciplines, which link with other branches of thought.

1. Expanding KM: KM at a strategic level is expanding, linking with strategic thought and focussing on how knowledge can enhance business breakthroughs.

2. Focussed KM:
(a) IT: The KM tools market is undergoing a consolidation and the hype that has been defused is seeing tools being shaken to separate the actual KM tools from Document Management tools.

(B) Intangible Assets: Looking at the Knowledge Assets with a financial lens.

(C) Human Processes: As organizations understand the importance of learning and knowledge creation KM will move to top management and HR, and I don’t think they are ready to handle the scenarios.

My posts on the Brint KM Board:

As a CEO of a knowledge corporation said “all my assets walk out of my door” and he doesn’t know whether they will come back the next morning!!

How do we protect these knowledge assets? By trusting and encouraging the employees we have, and knowing that ideas and knowledge will always be permeable and travel no matter how an organization tries to water-tight them

On the Balanced Scorecard:

My opinion is that companies after taking these quadrants of the
Balanced Scorecard get back into the old rut of managing by metrics.

Let’s take the example of the focus of the BSC on Customers. Many
instances can happen as to how companies can interpret this
quadrant. For example, one company can say it will measure “the
number of times we meet our customers” which is at a very basic
activity level kind of measure. While, another can choose to
measure “Customer Satisfaction level” and while it is a
more ‘evolved’ method than the first one, it can still deteriorate
into meaningless number crunching. While a third company can
say “Using the Pareto principle, let’s see which 20% customers
contribute 80% of our business , take their feedback and measure as
to how we have implemented their views into our products/services”

So while all the three firms can claim to implement the BSC only the
third one is actually using it to its full potential.

The really worrisome part is that the BSC is now being touted by IT
firms and the real fear is that of getting snowed under data.

Reliance overall is a great case study for how a company can
master “radical growth” as a Prof of mine puts it.

That reliance has been able to define the concept of “core
competence” from an industry to a process is well chronicled.

What is not so well chronicled is the way reliance has mastered the
art of

(i) Knowing its business web
(ii) Mastering the +ve feedback cycle (also known as the virtous
cycle)

Let’s look at the business web…as said earlier, Reliance views its
competence to be an executor of large, challenging projects, and it
knows how to mastermind partnerships (either with Du Pont, L&T,
MorganStanley) to execute these projects.

When it comes to feedback loops lets take two examples..

Reliance has quick delivery schedules, which leads to a low customer
inventory, which result in savings to customers, which results in
two things : (a) A larger customer base (b) the customer willingness
to pay a premium…both these result in substantial profits over
competitors, which is ploughed as investments into locational and IT
facilities which results in quick delivery schedules…thus driving
this virtuous cycle faster and faster, grnding away all the
competition …

Or the second virtuous cycle it has mastered:

Investments to assimilate talents and IT infrastructure, leads it to
have knowledge of global sources of funding, which gives it access
to low cost capital, which fuels growth and expansion and drives
profits and surplus which is invested in more talents and
infrastructure

These virtuous cycles trigger “the law of increasing returns”
something not too many economists would agree with
But it is not enough to know and master these virtous cycles…and
therefore it needs to bet on the correct technology standard…and
that is what we are witnessing now…the war between GSM and CDMA
standards…and it is the side that bets on the winning technology
that comes out the winner…and the irony is that the technology
does not have to be the better technology or even more matured
technology…:-), hence an organization that can foresee the
technology and standard waves and can ride that is always the
winner..

In fact, it is quite amazing to notice the commonalities between
Microsoft’s strategy orientation and Reliance’s…both always keep
their eggs in different baskets…experiment in the market (not as a
test:-), listen to the feedback and constantly keep improving based
on that..speed and size of launch is valued by both of them
(Reliance Infocomm’s 28th Dec launch reminds one of Windows 95 !!)

Warm regards,
Gautam

Between strategy crafting and execution

Over the last one week a colleague and I were involved in diagnosing
how strategy execution dilutes as it flows from the top to the
frontline salespeople and then down to the level of dealers.

It was interesting to note that the deviation in strategy execution
happens right from the group that crafts the strategy. This is due
to assumptions not clarified on small seemingly inconsequential
details like (how a certain initiative has to be carried out, what
is the context, and what is the overall purpose?)

This translates into more deviations and dilution as the strategy
flows downstream, which emphasis being placed more on the means than
the ends, and then the firm starts to track numbers that take focus
away from the overall purpose.

Finally, when the rubber hits the road at the level of the retailer
and dealer he/she is aligned to a totally different purpose by the
sales people than what the planning group wanted him to be.

And the reviews that are supposed to be clarifying these questions
only add up more to the confusion with people not knowing why they
are requesting a certain request or doing a certain activity.

It was an amazing learning as to how organizations are falling short
in performance and a pointer to things like how MUCH more they can
achieve.