Skip to main content

40 awesome tips (1)

Consulting vs Smart-ass-ing

40 awesome tips of how consulting just doesn't work

Recently I was confronted with a page on Facebook, that made me realize, why being a consultant and being a know-it-all must be different things. The page '40 Awesome Tips For A Happy And Healthy Life' is a great example for very poor consulting because it misses the point and by its imperative has an air of bigheadedness. As Facebook is FTW and the page was in English, these following lines will be in English in subsequence. So let's grab a glass of fine wine and have ourselves a field day with 40 tips, of how consulting should work and how it shouldn't.

1st suggestion of 40 Tips is to take a jog every day for 10-30 minutes. Fist of all: you don't jog. You run. Not everyone likes to run. Some people are not even able to run, let alone every day. Think about handicapped people, obese people, people who have lives, work or other restrictions that prevent them from having a run every day and so on. Second, just running every day is senseless from a methodological point of view. If you train to stay in shape, 3 workouts a week of 30-45mins will be just fine. If you're aiming at improving your performance you'll have to stack. In that case it's even contraproductive to train monotonously without a specific concept. This advice should be: 'work out regularly' or 'stay in good physical shape' or maybe just 'move your body'. How often, how long, what kind of work-out is left to your customer. Some will prefer the gym, some will go for a ride on a bike, some will have a swim, and some may even run or mix. As a consultant, be as specific as necessary, but don't set up unecessary restrictions.


2nd tip is to sit and be quite for 10mins each day. Why sit? Why 10mins? Why not 8 or 9 or 15 or 2x5? And why each day? Obviously we all get it. It's about focus, distance and deceleration. But why the unecessary restrictions? 'relax and focus regularly' or 'calm down as much as you need' would be better advice.





3rd tip is not really a tip. It is more of a claim or even a proposition. Factually it is a tautology, because nobody would seriously oppose an obvious fact like taking response for someone's happiness. However not everybody on earth is granted a merciful fate. For example, if you are born in a 3rd world country, you'll have a different definition of 'happiness' from someone who is born in a developed country. Right now the greatest amount of refugees in history since WWII is fleeing African and Arabic countries in persuit of happiness. Europeans are mostly concerned with how to shut down their borders effectively . In the United States the Donald intends to build a wall on the border to Mexico. So I'm not even sure, whether I can back that proposition a 100%. Yes, of course you are in charge. But no, you are not alone. Sometimes a little help is necessary. It's like when your car breaks down and you face the choice of taking care of it on your own or have someone who is willing to help you and e.g. give you a ride or tow your car to the next gas station.
Tip 4 is just hilarious from a consultant's point of view. Your business is EXACTLY what other people think of you. Yes, what they think of YOU! The results of your work, your diligence and your state of the art expertise are necessary, but they are not key. You, your whole appearence, presence and character is what makes your customer decide wheter you're a good consultant or not. Hence this tip is plain BS. But hey! Who said everyone wants to be a consultant? Oh no, wait. No. In private, when I'm not wearing suit and tie, I also try to be polite, honest, accurate, helping and so on. I guess you should care about what people think of you. Maybe it's not your business. But either way it is something you can influence and you should at least care about.


No 5: Ok. This might work for me. I live with other paradigms, but basically there's some resemblence. Mine are love, passion, loyalty. In German this would be three L-s (Liebe, Leidenschaft, Loyalität), but that's merely a coincidence. Love, because I care foremost about the people I love. Passion, because I care foremost about the things I feel passionate about. Loyalty, because everyone and everyting I am involved with but I don't love or I am not necessarily passionate about deserves the best I can offer. Three E-s are again too narrow for good advice. I would prefer something like 'Have clear principles' or 'Set up your own paradigms' or something like that. So tip no 5 is not that bad of a point after all.

Sadly I just took the last gulp of my glass of wine. So it's 35 more tips to go. A decent amount of wine is going to be necessary. Still plenty of fun to be had. :-)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learn To Unlearn

Be Brilliant Subject matter expertise has its perks. Being an expert on any field requires deep learning as well as deliberate practice over years and years. The more professional experience you gain the more you'll swap a minimum principle mindset ('What do I need to do to achieve XY?') for a maximum principle ('How much can I possibly achieve with my available resources?'). When I started as a consultant I had a very basic and fragmented knowledge in most of the technical aspects in my subject matter. At the time I was already a certified and experienced supply chain management expert with some merits. However, as the branch I had worked in (military and defence) neither used the latest technology nor had a business model that promoted short development or change cycles in leadership or management, I did not feel 100% competitive. Therefore I faced some serious challenges when I started my career in the private sector.  At the time when I joined a consulting compa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Happiness And Anxiety

Just A Feeling Despite all the drawbacks caused by the pandemic I have to admit that ever since the kids were born I have been feeling more happy in general. To set the stakes even higher, I have already been pretty damned happy ever since I met my wife several years earlier. Maybe it is because the kids fill me with hope that all is good and is steadily improving. Also they give a whole new purpose to everything in my life. I have only really had a few significant stretches where I felt so beaten down or lethargic, that I had issues to motivate myself. There were only three significant times I was struggling with my decisions and had serious doubts that I made the right choices.  Freaking Out In The Barracks The first time was in 1998, when I signed a contract as a contract soldier for 12 years. During my first couple of days with the military the magnitude of my decision sank with the utmost brutality. It totally freaked me out. I spent the first night in some spartan barracks in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Plans and Principles

Why is it that plans can, sometimes even need to change over time? At the same time: Should guiding principles be designed to live long term and to be resistant to short term change? To both questions my answer is a firm yes. Here's why: The principle of the benefit of long lasting habits is one that fascinated me early on. The imagination that any person can improve to levels beyond their own imagination by merely sticking to a habit over a long period still strikes me. One of my oldest habits is sports. I started swimming as a member of a club -and later also as one of a competitive team- as a young teenager and have stuck to some kind of sports habit ever since. When I started first I went to training sessions twice a week. At my peak I did six to eight training sessions a week and most of my school holidays were spent either on training camps or competitions. So my first serious habit was established during those early years. After school I was not always able to swim due to re...
Post a Comment
Read more