Former McKinsey consultant Victor Cheng provides us with an interesting insight. The skills that get you hired as a consultant are not the same skills that get you promoted, and the skills that get you promoted are not the same skills that take you to the top.
You get hired for your analytical skills, you get promoted based on management skills and client skills, and you go all the way to the top based on sales skills.
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I just read Seth Godin’s post on Dunbar’s Number.
Dunbar’s Number is thought to be around 150, and represents the number of people that we humans can place in a group before stable social relationships begin to break down. The thinking is that we simply lose track of new people when the group gets bigger than this.
Last week I created a Facebook group for people who are interested in business and investment strategy. Members are able to create discussions, share ideas, and post interesting links, photos and videos. I am hoping this new group will be a good learning experience for everyone involved.
The group is called “Dunbar’s Strategy Group“, and when it grows to a size of 150 it will be closed to new members.
If this sounds like a group you would like to be a part of, please consider joining.
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Daniel Pink puts forward the idea that there is currently a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.
Pink presents the Candle Problem, an experiment invented in 1945 by Karl Duncker. The experiment works as follows: I bring you into a room and give you a candle, a box of tacks, and some matches. Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax doesn’t drip onto the table. This is a seemingly simple problem, but the problem is difficult to solve because of the difficulty of overcoming something known as “functional fixedness”. The items are presented in such a way that there is a “mental block against using [them] in a new way that is required to solve a problem” (Duncker 1945). Watch the video to see a good explanation of the Candle Problem.
Now here is the interesting thing. At Princeton University, an experiment was conducted using the Candle Problem to look at the power of incentives. Two groups of people were taken and the first group were offered individual monetary rewards if they solved the Candle Problem quickly. The control group were not offered an incentive. The result was amazing, the incentivised group performed significantly worse than the control group … external incentives reduced performance.
Pink makes a number of insightful points on motivation, in summary:
The solution to achieving high performance in business in the 21st century will be based on intrinsic motivation, on the desire to do things because they matter, because they are interesting, and because they are important. Pink argues that this new operating system for business is to be based around 3 elements:
As Pink argues, if we can repair the mismatch between what science knows and what business does, and bring our notions of motivation into the 21st century, we can strengthen our businesses, solve a lot of those Candle Problems … and maybe even change the world.
I wrote Dan an email to thank him for this great speech. He informs me that the book version
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A week ago today, an aspiring management consultant started blogging about the consulting application process – he has already written 27 posts!
Wait a second, I hear your say, there are dozens of consulting blogs, why does this blog rate a mention?
Well, KR is not your ordinary consulting blogger. Apart from being an eloquent writer, KR is a PharmD,PhD,MBA graduate who is currently working as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, and playing the Harvard trump card to get interviews at all the big consulting firms. KR is giving us an up-close-and-personal look at the consulting application process.
The name of the blog is Consider Consulting, and I’ve added a link to my blogroll for our future reference.
This blog is well worth following over the next few weeks/months. I am looking forward to reading all of KR’s insights on the consulting application process, straight from the horses mouth!
Good luck in the interviews, KR!
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There is talk about town and in the media of an economic upturn in the final quarter of 2009 – “banks are lending, consumers are buying, and companies are hiring.” While it is not possible to predict the movement of the economy with any level of certainty, and recent history has reminded us of this fact, it is important for business people and government policy makers to have some idea of what lies ahead.
The practice of reading omens in order to foretell the future has been employed since ancient times. In ancient Rome, priests known as “Augurs” would determine the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds, while other persons known as “Haruspices” practiced a form of divination which involved inspecting the entrails of sacrificed animals.
Things have progressed a little since then. Today economists devine the future by examining “economic indicators”.
In order to assess the likely strength of the economy in the future, economists look at “economic indicators”.
An economic indicator is any economic statistic (e.g. the unemployment rate, GDP, or the inflation rate), which indicates the current strength of the economy and/or the future strength of the economy.
Economic indicators are generally classified by reference to two attributes:
If an economic indicator is “correlated” with the economy, then we would expect a change in the value of the economic indicator to correspond with a movement in the economy. The correlation of an economic indicator may be described as procyclical, countercyclical, or acyclical:
Contemporaneousness refers to the timing of the change in the economic indicator relative to the movement in the economy. The contemporaneousness of an economic indicator may be described as leading, lagged, or coincident:
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