Advanced Management Skills

How To Future Proof Your Career

Mark Law — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:55:13 +0000

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.

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The Consulting Profession

Mark Law — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:54:23 +0000

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.

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Consulting Skills – The Missing Link in Management Education

Mark Law — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:18:31 +0000

One of the things I enjoy most about my job is helping people take the next steps in their careers. Examples of this include helping people:

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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Event Summaries

Mark Law — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 08:47:22 +0000

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.

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Book Summaries & Reviews

Mark Law — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 07:54:19 +0000

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!

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Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Mark Law — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 07:33:31 +0000

As a professional engineer I have long been fascinated by ergonomics, the art and science of optimising the human / machine interface. This superb book is all about how to optimise web site ergonomics and get the best possible results in terms of building your brand and attracting business.

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.

This of course doesn’t mean that our web site’s perfect. I’ve recently been working with a good friend and corporate identity guru to improve it. First thing he says is to get rid of that ‘horrible mug shot’ on our home page! Maybe he’s right but of course we need to evidence this so I think I’ll conduct a poll.

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Technology Tips

Mark Law — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 06:34:43 +0000

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.

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How to Easily Save Web Content

Mark Law — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:41:21 +0000

Do you ever get the feeling that web surfing is a bit like driving a car on vacation? We pass through all sorts of interesting places yet if we need to capture their essence we need to go to the hassle of pulling over, climbing out, preparing the camera and then take the photograph. On the web we have to go to the effort of bookmarking a page (useless when the web site changes) or perhaps copying and pasting the web page into an MS Word file and figuring out where to save it on our hard drive. What a hassle!

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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Building Brands From The Inside Out

Mark Law — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 08:27:24 +0000

Venue: Lincoln’s Inn. Format: 1 hour interactive presentation + Q&A

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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Employers ‘Look for Specialist Skills’

Mark Law — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:00:23 +0000

London Business School’s Professor Lynda Gratton has said employers will look for specialist skills in the coming years. Professor Gratton said that employers will be looking for “deep” skills over more general ones over the next decade. She suggested that people looking for work in 2020 will be required to have a far different set of skills than today.

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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