The future of consulting

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of consulting lately. This is a bit of an occupational hazard… I’ve been a consultant for almost 20 years, based in San Francisco, and I’ve run my own practice for eight years and counting. A long time ago I remember telling a colleague: “The consulting space is massive: multi-billions of dollars globally. Even if it were to shrink by 50%, there’d still be money on the table for those who know how to find it.” That remark, though not particularly insightful, is still correct and evergreen. There will always be money to…

Beyond average thinking

Before we look at data sets, we can all cultivate better data sense. To that end, I’d encourage us all to look at one common kind of data with suspicion: the average. We all use averages on a daily basis—e.g., when we split a dinner bill or keep tabs on our favorite athletes. They can be useful. But the following examples show how these easy-to-compute shorthands can also lead us astray. Making money online For a pure e-commerce business, Average Order Value (AOV) is a standard measure of financial health. In addition to aggregate revenue, it gives business owners a…

What is marketing?

Marketing is one of those words that seems to have a different definition depending on who you ask. If you explore the huge volume of resources, history, and commentary out there regarding marketing, it quickly becomes obvious that these voices have little to do with each other. It’s hard to believe that they all describe aspects of the same general craft. I work with companies across a wide range of industries and levels of scale, so it helps to have frameworks that are easy to understand and broadly applicable. I’ve written previously that business strategy is essentially about opportunity—seeing clearly…

What is brand?

Brand is a top priority for many businesses, but it often lacks a clear definition, owner, or action plan. People frequently conflate the term “brand” with related concepts like vision, awareness, positioning, and design, and so it never really gets articulated, and therefore never really gels. I’ve been doing brand work for a long time, across a wide range of clients—from massive global conglomerates to edgy startups to small local businesses, and everything in between. Personally I’ve found that the most effective way to think about brand is to replace it with the word “relationships.” Not relationships in some abstract…

It’s (not) complicated

We all understand simple mechanical systems like pulleys. Complex systems, like rain forests, however, work differently. They exhibit unique characteristics, including modularity, homeostasis, self-organization, resilience, emergence, non-linearity, inter-dependence with other complex systems, and collapse. In work and life, we encounter complex systems every day. They include: Human brainsHuman bodiesHuman relationshipsOrganizational culturesFinancial marketsDigital media ecosystemsCompetitive business environmentsGlobal climate One sure-fire way to make big mistakes is to expect complex systems to behave like simple ones. You’ll notice people doing this all the time. E.g., “My investments are down right now, but you know, the pendulum always swings back.” These simple system metaphors can warp our understanding of what’s really going on. Complex…

Unstorytelling

Our default way of experiencing the world is through stories. Whether they come from the latest Good Wife episode, the companies we purchase from, or the theater of our minds, stories are safe-to-consume simulations about how things were, are, will be, or could be. I love stories, and they can do many good things: They entertain us.They help us contemplate what we would do in unfamiliar situations.They help us act.They make abstract concepts relatable and human.The create order out of apparent disorder.They bind communities together.They make us smarter by either challenging or reinforcing our existing ideas.They sharpen our pattern recognition skills.They help us restore self-control.…

There is suffering

The first noble truth in Buddhism is that there is suffering. At first, that seems obvious. Every life has its sorrows, some many more than others. Everyone dies. Atrocities are happening all over the world. Accepting that “bad stuff happens to good people” can be a balm. This isn’t the only kind of suffering, though, that the Buddha was talking about. The process of becoming an adult invariably leaves psychic wounds… deep-seated fears that left unexamined can distort a life. These fears feel like they’re about the future, but they are really about the past. In Heidegger’s words: “The dreadful…

Navigating through chaos

We all get overwhelmed sometimes. Our stories, resources, and energy can be insufficient to accommodate a new reality. We become disorganized, inefficient. Like any complex system, we enter a chaos state. This is an ever-present possibility for even the most enlightened or skilled individual. In a chaos state, we often find ourselves clinging to old ideas, to losses, to hopes for the future. We try to run the old program, even though the operating system has changed. Sometimes reality will shift back to something more pleasant and familiar. But it doesn’t always. As St. John of the Cross said: “Swiftly, with nothing spared, I am being…

Climb the ladder

There’s a classic tool from learning psychology that I sometimes use with clients. It’s called the ladder of learning. This model says that whenever we learn a new skill, we always go through four steps: Unconscious incompetence: You are blissfully unaware that you are bad at something. You feel strongly in synch with your environment and confident in your abilities. This feels wonderful, but by the same token, you aren’t learning anything.Conscious incompetence: New information begins to intrude on your awareness, or you are beset with new challenges that demand attention. Your habitual methods for dealing with problems stop working. This is an extremely stressful situation, and it requires…

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