Please email info@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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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 a series of insights to help you strengthen your position in the workplace. I hope you find them useful.

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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.

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 associations. All it take 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 of spending an evening, catching up on some CPD, meeting old friends and of course networking.

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 have attended. I hope you find them useful.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 Course in VM/VE
• The Lean Operations Consultant is a registered Advanced 1 Course in VM/VE
• The Strategy Consultant is a registered Advanced 2 Course in VM/VE
• Booking Form (Microsoft Word Format)

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.