• Switch careers into consulting (from all sorts of professional backgrounds)
• Land jobs with the big consulting firms (includes LBS & Judge MBA students)
• Secure their next roles following redundancy (I am particularly proud of this)
• Set up as independent consultants (this is enormous fun!)
• Grow their consulting practices

A common theme in all my work is the discovery that consulting skills give people a major advantage in today’s competitive workplace. This is true even for those with advanced degrees and other professional qualifications (~30% of my students have MBAs). Why is that?

I was recently interviewed by the editor of Professional Manager (the Chartered Management Institute magazine, circulation ~90,000). Click here to download the article.

What I argue in this article is that managers spend a great deal of their time tackling investigative problems and that consulting skills help them become much more effective at this. Why risk ‘winging it’ when there are extremely powerful consulting methods that can help you and your colleagues tackle complex problems and challenges much more effectively at lower risk?

Click here for more information about our work.

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There’s way to much to include here however, the main takeaways for me were:

• You have 8 seconds to interest a visitor in your web site before they exit.
• People don’t read web sites, they scan them – focus on the headlines!
• Form should follow function – work out the site’s functionality first.
• Be scientific – do an A / B test on any important changes to your web site.

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We use EverNote to quickly tag and clip web pages as we browse. Not only is it extremely easy to use, it stores your precious information on the cloud so you can access it anywhere. It even automatically includes these clips in your Google searches. The basic version which is very good is free. Thoroughly recommended!

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Speakers: Nader Tavassoli, Professor of Marketing at LBS & Richard Hytner, Deputy Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide

Every Autumn a strange ritual takes place called the London Business School Alumni Celebration. I really don’t understand why a group of otherwise sane adults decide to hold a massive global jamboree to celebrate LBS, its achievements and those of its ‘illustrious alumni’. How cringing!

On the other hand it’s a great opportunity for the gregarious to attend an excellent lecture, network enthusiastically and overdose on canapés and wine!

This year’s lecture was no exception and the speakers, both self acknowledged as ‘vertically challenged’, gave an excellent talk on how the top companies use their culture to create a sustainable competitive advantage by creating staff and customer ‘Loyalty Beyond Reason’.

Many case studies were presented including how Southwest Airlines and Saatchi & Saatchi were using this thinking to develop their businesses. Key takeaways were that businesses need to:

• Stand for what people care about
• Excel at ‘moments that matter’
• Start on the inside

This is just a small part of a much larger and fascinating topic.

Acknowledgements & Useful Links

My thanks to LBS for organising such an interesting event.

Details of the many excellent programmes run by London Business School can be found by clicking here.

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The Professor of Management Practice was speaking at the launch of phase two of The Future of Work at London Business School. Her prediction came in the wake of results from phase one which showed that developed skills rather than those that were general would be the most transferable in the future.

The findings came at a time when many employees are becoming more transient at work. Future of Work is a 43-country research consortium which represents the US, India, China and Europe. The aim of the project is to understand what state the world of work will be in by 2020.

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VM/VE is one of the best management consulting methodologies ever developed. Originally formulated in the late 1940s by Lawrence Miles at General Electric and refined by many practitioners over the years, VM/VE is a powerful problem solving system designed to maximize the value of products, services, projects and business processes.

VM/VE is an evidence based methodology featuring team working, sense making, optioneering, stakeholder management and benefits realization. Skilled value practitioners are able to apply the framework to solve most organizational problems.

Our courses are registered VM/VE modules:

• The Professional Consultant is a registered Foundation VM Course
• The Lean Operations Consultant is a registered Advanced 1 VM Course
• The Strategy Consultant is a registered Advanced 2 VM Course
• Book Now! (Takes you to our booking enquiry form)

The European Standard BS EN 12973:2000 Value Management was developed to keep EU economies competitive in global markets and the European Training and Certification scheme was developed within which our courses are fully approved. Certified value practitioners (PVMs) are registered to practice throughout Europe.

Unlike many consulting methodologies, VM/VE is designed to be future-proof and it constantly evolves to incorporate new thinking and innovation. You can find practitioners working in most areas of commerce, public sector and even in leading not-for-profit organisations. Contact us for more information.

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Please email laura@amskills.com for further information about these little known training grants which are available to independent consultants and those facing redundancy in the UK.

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Speaker: Ellen Miller, Faculty of Organisational Behaviour

Whoever you are and whatever your aspirations, the chances are that your success is closely linked to your professional networking skills.

I recently attended a number of events on the subject. This one was particularly interesting due to the following check list which I have adapted to make it more useful:

• Do you constantly seek ways to expand the size and diversity of your network?
• Do you prepare for networking events to maximise the opportunity?
• Do you run have enough business cards for each event?
• Are you comfortable with starting conversations?
• Do you introduce yourself in a way that is clear, concise and engaging?
• Do you reintroduce yourself to people rather than wait for them to remember you?
• Do you remember people’s names and facts about them?
• Do you make notes on people’s business cards to remember them?
• Do you proactively introduce members of your network to each other?
• Do you record information about your network and can you easily retrieve it?
• Do you organise your thoughts before making calls to people in your network?
• Do you regularly keep in contact with people in your network?
• Do you return phone calls within 24 hours?
• Do you ask for assistance or guidance from people in your network?
• Do you provide useful information or contacts to the people in your network?
• Do you find opportunities to ask others ‘Who do you know who…?’
• Do re-evaluate your network?
• Do you operate with integrity and professionalism in your interactions?
• Do you help others develop their networks?
• Do you enjoy networking?

The more strongly you can answer the above questions the better you are at networking. If you have any ‘areas for development’ act on them now!

This is just a small part of a much larger and fascinating topic.

Acknowledgements & Useful Links

My thanks to Elen Miller and LBS for organising such an interesting event.

Details of the many excellent Executive Education programmes run by London Business School can be found by clicking here.

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Being a parent is a wonderful experience and we love our children to bits and yet, if we are truthful, we frequently find ourselves tearing our hair out with the difficulty of it all. Speaking personally, the younger generation are a major source of stress, up there with long hours, demanding clients and even the challenge of finding new business.

Just ask yourself the following questions. Wouldn’t your life be infinitely less stressful if your delightful offspring (if you have them) regularly:

• Bounced out of bed cheerfully on time, made their beds and opened the curtains
• Ate a healthy breakfast and showered properly (especially teens)
• Practiced their musical instruments diligently (ours are pretty good here)
• Didn’t leave games stuff at school (ours are dreadful in this regard)
• Did their homework diligently (ours are actually rather good at this)
• Came off the PC, PS3, TV, etc. cheerfully and on time (hmm…)
• Enthusiastically cleared up their rooms
• Were in bed, lights out and asleep on time (i.e. not feasting on illicit sweets or reading under the duvet with a flashlight)

Here are a couple of tips you may find helpful.

The first tip is to install an excellent utility called TimesUpKidz onto your PC from http://www.timesupkidz.com/. This basically allows you to outsource the hassle of getting your kids off the PC (I think Windows 7 has this built-in). Beware, this functionality is not available for the PlayStation 3 which is a mistake we made in buying one of these.

The second tip is to consider adapting this spreadsheet (click here to download) for your nearest and dearest. The idea is to:

1. Choose with them something they would like to save towards and put it on the spreadsheet
2. Print a copy weekly for each child and Blu-Tack it next to the kitchen light switch
3. Each day tick off each item successfully completed
4. At the end of the week give them, say £5, for successfully completing all tasks
5. Any task not completed gets a 50p deduction

This normally works brilliantly with younger children. Once they are in their teens it may be too late. But it’s at least worth a try…

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Sharon Jandoo who shared her original ideas with me and helped develop the spreadsheet.

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Pink but Perfect!

Many of us watch in amazement as our pension pots stagger from one financial crisis to the next barely keeping pace with inflation. We entrust our life savings to professional fund managers to little effect. Could we do better ourselves? John Kay thinks we can and this book is a great introduction to this.

John is a well regarded economics professor (ex-LBS where I attended his excellent lectures) and his position is based on sound economic principles. His starting point is that although there are a few very good investors (e.g. Warren Buffet and George Soros), most of us (including eminent economics and finance professors) are pretty rubbish. The randomness of the market may make us feel we are skilled in the short term but over the longer term we get fairly average returns.

Given our general lack of skill, Professor Kay shows us how to use economic principles to stack the odds in our favour. Some of these economic principles are as mathematically complex as rocket science and this book thankfully avoids this.

The main practical financial lessons from this book are straightforward and offer quick wins:

1. Optimize your personal borrowing efficiency by bundling all loans if you have them into a low cost offset mortgage.
2. Shop around for the best deals using monoliners and avoid financial services conglomerates. For example www.moneysavingexpert.com can save you a fortune if you have never seriously done this before  (I’ve just saved 60% on the cost of home and car insurance, and got better cover in 2.5 hours work which for years I had mistakenly assumed I was way too busy to do)
3. Optimize your personal tax efficiency using the various tax breaks and allowances available (e.g. partner’s tax allowances, ISAs, CGT, pension contributions, etc.)
4. Use a low cost execution-only online stockbroker to make your investments which should be in diverse low management cost index tracking assets such as ETFs (few fund managers can outperform them)
5. Benchmark your asset allocation according to the sort of pattern followed by a typical local authority pension scheme as a starter for ten. Hmm, not sure about this one…
6. Drip feed your investments regularly into the market rather than in lumps to avoid buying at a temporary market peak and benefit from ‘pound / dollar cost averaging’

John argues that if we follow this approach, economics and the law of averages will work in our favour over the long term and we will be able to retire at a reasonable age.

The great benefit of this approach is that it’s simple, uses little of one’s time and thus allows one to get on with more interesting things in life than finance. Although there is a lot more interesting stuff in the book, it seemed much less useful for the average private investor.

Did I enjoy the book? Yes. It’s well written and I would thoroughly recommend it.

Did I find it illuminating? Certainly but mainly to confirm ideas I had already worked out for myself in recent years.

Was I satisfied with it? Not entirely. Why? Well, for three reasons.

Firstly I would have liked clearer references to some of the underlying theory. For example, how does ‘dollar cost averaging’ work? It would be handy to have more of the theory referenced on-line (I’m being lazy).

Secondly I felt John was teasing us with the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). OK, so the  EMH is illuminating but not true. So what? What are the conditions for it to be true? Under what conditions does it break down? How does my 22 year old nephew use its flaws to earn as much as I do after 9 months working for Optiva? Sounds like it’s time to shovel some expensive grub into him in exchange for a few answers…

Thirdly, as an engineer, I just can’t believe that these systems are totally random. Yes there may be a large short-term random component but if you look back at the different asset classes, their price movements over the long term are clearly driven by economic fundamentals such as cash flow, supply, demand, competition and economic growth.

In conclusion, this book achieves what it sets out to do but invites us to go further. Overall a great achievement and a good read.

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