Mark Law, Lead Tutor
Expert consulting practitioner with extensive experience in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. Certified Management Consultant & Registered Mentor for the CMC. Career Mentor to London Business School MBA students and Alumni.
Click here for LinkedIn profile.
Professional Certifications
Mark Law
Click for the Big Picture
Over the past decade the proverbial ‘job for life’ has virtually disappeared. Even in ‘secure’ professions, such as medicine, tenured positions are vanishing as short term contracts become the norm.
The big challenge facing each of us has evolved from career choice to career resilience. How can I remain attractive to potential clients and employers? In short, ‘how can I future-proof my career?’
Here are some insights to help you strengthen your position in the workplace, i.e. turn your career from a verb into a noun. I hope you find them useful.
Click for the Big Picture
In recent years management consulting has rapidly grown into a major business. With the advent of the Certified Management Consultant (CMC) qualification it is now evolving into a profession.
Here are a series of insights about some of the issues affecting the profession. I hope you find them interesting and useful.
Late Night?
Isn’t time you got out a bit more? No, I’m not referring to your appetite for nightlife – mine has been relatively quite since I left the mayhem of the oil industry a few years ago!
What I’m talking about here is going to evening events organised by professional institutions. All it takes is a couple of hours, a few cheerful handshakes with like minded people, the swapping of business cards, a lecture on an interesting topic and a few canapés and drinks afterwards. A pleasant way to spend an evening, catch up on some CPD, meet old friends and of course network.
Alas, not all of us can attend events that easily. We may live in a quiet part of the world, we may have pressing family commitments or our partner may simply just not trust us!
I normally get to two or three of these events a month, often organised at London Business School (currently the world’s No1 Business School, according to the FT). These feature world-class speakers on a wide variety of interesting topics. Lectures tend to be themed by academic discipline or organised by the various thriving LBS Alumni Clubs.
My purpose here is to let you have a commentary on some of the more interesting talks I attend. I hope you find them useful.
Bovver Book...
Why are some of the greatest books also the toughest reads? My theory is that they are written by boffins, professors and eccentrics. People passionate about their subject who either don’t understand the poor reader or just lack a good editor.
Life is too short to plough through this stuff unless your job depends on it (mine does). Wouldn’t it be nice if someone did it for you? But who is selfless or possibly crazy enough to take on such a task?
Well, here is a collection of great books I have recently read focusing purely on their payload. You get the gist without the grind!
Enjoy!
The fluent use of technology has become a key life skill. It allows us to make new contacts, land new assignments and rapidly add value at work. It keeps our professional skills sharp, our knowledge of the world current and even indulge in a little industry research. Technology skills are the hallmark of the modern business professional.
Yet there is a dark side to technology. If we are not careful it becomes an obsession, a black hole into which we pour time, money and even our sanity. Technology teases us with its promise but drives us crazy with its complexity, poor design and unreliability.
So how can we quickly get down the learning curve? How do we sort the good from the bad? Where should we start? Here are a series of insights to help you make the most of technology.
Click for the Big Picture
Stress is both a hero and villain in our lives. Good stress keeps us sharp, excited, vibrant. It adds colour and texture to life and makes the world an exciting place:
The great new idea. Pitching it to a potential client. The success of winning an engagement. The ‘crikey I’ve now got to deliver it’. The ‘thanks for a job well done’. The next engagement call from a happy client.
Each of these adrenaline rushes is fun, exciting and keeps us on our toes. Good stress is what makes life exciting, an adventure, a journey into the unknown.
Bad stress burns you out and eventually kills you. It’s the unreasonable boss, the over demanding partner/family, the overload of tasks, the 18 hour days, the all nighters, the ‘you get fired if you mess up’ demands of some organisations.
Here are a series of insights to help you understand the role of stress in your life. I aim to show you how to use good stress to your advantage and how to avoid, or at least handle, the bad stuff.
OK, so you’ve met the requirements of your boss or client. You’ve done a diligent piece of work, you’ve interacted well with them and they seem pleased with the results. But is this enough to stop the axe falling during the next downturn (if you are employed) or cause the phone to ring with the next engagement (if you are a consultant)? Continue reading
There’s nothing like a bit of fun at work or over a drink afterwards!
This is the nearest I can do online to buying you a drink, enjoying a chat and of course swapping some jokes.
Wine Bar at the Institute of Directors
For a real life drink on me, why not book onto one of our courses?
A physician, a civil engineer, and a consultant were arguing about which was the world’s oldest profession. The physician remarked, “Well, in the Bible, it says that God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam. This clearly required surgery, and so I can rightly claim that mine is the oldest profession in the world.”
The civil engineer interrupted, and said, “But even earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most spectacular application of civil engineering. Therefore, fair doctor, you are wrong: mine is the oldest profession in the world.”
The consultant leaned back in his chair, smiled, and then said confidently, “Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?”
Venue: London Business School. Format: 3 x 20 minute presentations + Q&A
Speakers: Paul Farley (British Airways), Mark Spears (KPMG) and Chris Bones (Dean of Henly Business School)
This action packed event covered way too much in an hour to do it full justice here. However, each of the speakers described major change in their ‘home’ organisation and drew some learning from it. Change programmes were described at KPMG (the big accounting firm), at British Airways (currently facing major commercial challenges) and at Henly Business School (following a recent merger).
Although change is a highly complex subject the key takeaway from this event for me was the concept of breaking change down into its three main elements: planning change, winning support for change and implementing change. Some useful points under each of these headings were: Continue reading
Many thanks for subscribing to our newsletter!
This occasional publication, typically circulated bi-monthly, provides an update on our numerous activities as well as access to various useful articles and resources.
Please contact us for further information or if you have any comments.
.
Advanced Management Skills respects your privacy and does not rent, sell, or share your information with any other organisation or third party.
.
Profiting from Evidence-based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer & Robert Sutton
This book is a timely reminder that management should be based on sound scientific principles yet in the real world it is anything but. Evidence Based Management (the authors’ updating of ‘scientific management’) is a loud wake-up call to senior executives and their consultants to apply scientific thinking whenever they launch a new business initiative. Continue reading
Consultants have to be adaptable and operate in whatever political environment they find themselves in. Here is what a major international firm of consultants currently advises its clients as best practice in different political systems around the world:
SOCIALISM: You have two cows. State takes one and gives it to someone else.
COMMUNISM: You have two cows. State takes both of them and gives you milk.
FASCISM: You have two cows. State takes both of them and sells you milk.
CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
EUROPEAN FEDERALISM: You have two cows which you cannot afford to keep because of milk imported from a member state with cheaper labour. So you apply for financial aid from the European Union to subsidise your cows and are granted enough to carry on working them. You then sell your milk at the original high price to some government-owned distributor which then dumps your milk onto the market at the price that drove you to subsidies to make Europe competitive.
Whenever a client or employer is thinking about engaging you they are placing a bet. You may have got your first job out of college purely on the basis of your hard-won degree and an ability to blag but thereafter you are a walking wager. Each of us carries a large invisible sign saying “Place your bets here – this guy has the potential to make or lose you a fortune!”.
So how do we make ourselves attractive in a competitive world? Continue reading
Surprisingly, Google isn’t the best research tool on the web. There are hundreds of search engines out there, many of which are much better for the job at hand. Continue reading
This wonderful book provides a fascinating take on improvement – a key topic for clients and consultants alike. Here are the key insights.
The book starts with the simple but profound question: “What does it take to be good at something in which failure is easy?” (despite having serious consequences such as killing people).
The book explores this question through a series of life or death medical scenarios. During these, doctors struggle with what appear to be intractable problems in which the lives of millions are at stake. Here are some of the scenarios and lessons learnt. Continue reading
Here are five sure signs you’ve worked too long as a consultant:
- You can’t stop using words that don’t exist.
- You feel a constant urge to give advice on subjects you know absolutely nothing about.
- You use so much jargon in bed that your other half thinks you are speaking a foreign language.
- You firmly believe that an article in Wikipedia is all it takes to make you an expert.
- You think Darwin would have made a better job of selling evolution if he had put his ideas into a 2 by 2 matrix.
Of course, none of the above applies to me…
First impressions (FI) can give powerful insights into the complex situations clients and consultants face every day. FI can fast-track our thinking on key issues affecting a consulting engagement. FI can also fool us into making major / expensive mistakes.
On the positive side this book is a readable anthology of research and anecdotes about FI. It gets one thinking about the nature of FI and the ‘adaptive unconscious’ - the part of our mental processes that learns how to react quickly to certain situations. Some of these mental processes are built-in (i.e. we duck to avoid a snowball). Others are learned through thousands of hours of study and practice (i.e. jazz musicianship). Continue reading
How good are you at thinking on your feet?
- You meet a Chief Executive at a networking event. How do you do business with them?
- You are facilitating a workshop and some smart-ass asks you a difficult question. How do you handle it?
- You are leading a team of experts. How do you steer them?
- You are dealing with a difficult person. How do you quickly win them over?
- You are about to be mugged. What should you do next?
Institute of Directors
We run face-to-face courses at the Institute of Directors, London, UK and in-house or online.