Onward to the next thing

A while back, I mentioned that I had an idea – a BIG idea – that I would share at some point. Well, that’s now 2 big ideas, however I’ve decided that they’re too exciting not to push them forward.

I do make the promise to share the next big idea that comes along (they’re as regular as clockwork) but right now, I want to push one through. So, I’m looking for…

• A marketing genius with experience of proliferating social phenomena
• An iPhone (and other device) app development expert who can help spec out an app
• A social researcher who can help me structure the back-end data to a saleable product

Equal shares all around for anyone who contributes significantly to the product, by common agreement of the team.

Oh, and BTW, this really is a ground-breaking idea but be warned, as soon as anyone on the team leaks it, or steals it, I’ll publish it as open source!

Vince (BadConsultant)

What has that bad, badconsultant been up to?

Hi everyone, BadConsultant has been busy launching a number of online forums, some of which I’ve mentioned here, but some I haven’t – the latest one (my most interesting experiment) went live this last weekend.

I thought I’d summarise what’s been going on so that everything’s in one place:

1) Jobinions – Tell it like it is (launched January, 2009)

Jobinions is essentially a consumer review site dedicated to working at, and interviewing for, companies. My aim in building out the Jobinions community and reference resource is to provide an open resource to help talented people make good career decisions. There isn’t any angle, or vested interest (I’m not selling job postings, or user data, for example), it’s just my own little way of changing the world of work.

2) The Strengths Springboard (launched June, 2009)

The Springboard is my companion ‘product’ for the individual conversion to strengths-based working. I’m a huge fan (and, yes, believer) in a personal commitment to doing what you do best at work, however have come to recognize over the past few years that the majority of organizations actually don’t want that to happen. The manifesto document (The Strengths Springboard – Is your organization ready?) took me a few months to research and write and ultimately describes 5 organization beliefs of strengths-based organizations and how they can get coded into behaviors, processes and systems. Alongside the manifesto, there are discussion forums and, over time, I’ll be adding diagnostic tools, etc. to help members assess their own organizations.

3) Too Busy Hiring (launched June, 2009)

Too Busy Hiring is a somewhat light-hearted entry into Strategic Workforce Planning, through the lens of the tireless recruitment/ staffing/ talent acquisition professional – a quick 10-question assessment leads to a read-out of symptoms and potential solutions. Oh, and of course, you get a score to compare with the overall database – have some fun there and drop me a line if you want to discuss further.

4) We Are Story (launched July, 2009)

This is my grand experiment, away from the business world. I write a lot and have published a couple of novels – later this year, I’ll be publishing my latest book online (for free!) – and if you’ve done any serious amount of writing, you’ll know it can get pretty lonely – and a little weird being locked up in your own head. Earlier this year, I was flying to Phoenix and read the whole of Seth Godin’s ‘Tribes’ while sitting in Providence airport waiting for my flight out. Halfway through the book, I came up with the idea which eventually became We Are Story – the idea was pretty much fully formed immediately and it’s pretty much as I imagined it. Simply put, We Are Story is a single story told in pods of max. 5000 characters (around 500 words) by whoever feels like writing it. I’ve started the story rolling and am now getting people to join. All writing can be rated and commented, so it’ll become a social forum over time. I’m really excited by We Are Story – it’s truly and experiment.

So, if you wonder why BadConsultant hasn’t been as vociferous recently, you’ve now got the reason – why don’t you come along to learn, teach and, perhaps, do a little story-telling too?

Vince (BadConsultant)

Update to our literature search – Part II

A little over a year ago, we carried out our our proprietary literature search to inform Difficult Truths, Too Big to Swallow – Part I. We updated the search in November. Here’s the latest installment. As of this evening (November, April in parens), percent gain since original search:

* Change Management: 65,689 (57,604; 47,416) +38%

* Business Strategy: 72,959 (64,603; 56,102) +30%

* Organization Culture: 32,944 (28,965; 23,956) +38%

* Talent Management: 10,426 (8,970; 7,206) +45%

* People Management: 48,019 (41,848; 33,011) +45%

* Leadership: 350,084 (302,959; 256,503) +36%

What do these stats tell us? Nothing much, just that there are many more people writing books about business than actually being successful in business… All this really good advice and still the nature of commerce and capitalism has taken a nose-dive.

And now, we want to introduce the grand-daddy (or -mummy to be truly diverse) of literature search stats. As of this evening, number of books found on searching for the word ‘management’…

Wait for it…

960,499

Wait a second, let’s give that the emphasis it deserves…

960,499!!!

[nearly a million books on management and most organizations still scramble to get the basics right - sheesh!]

Cause for hope? Look at talent management and people management, finally making the catch-up run on the home stretch. Maybe organizations are finally beginning to get what it’s all about.

Maybe.

L’huego,

BC

Who won the war for talent… Er… If it’s all right to ask that question…

A little earlier this year, BadConsultant launched Jobinions. A free service/discussion forum where people could share opinions on companies as either an employee or as an interviewee.

[and, for full disclosure, I don't make any money from Jobinions - yes, it is possible that some people aren't commoditizing everything]

The spirit of Jobinions is quite simple – tell it like it is. From the Jobinions front page:

... life’s too short to work for crap companies. They can damage your health, wealth and happiness and strip you of your potential to do your very best work. We want you to know what it’s like working for any company. And the best people to tell it like it is are the people working there already and others who have interviewed with the company.

We created Jobinions because there was nowhere to tell it like it is.

Jobinions is founded on the belief that the working world can be better and that we can help each other make great career decisions.

Jobinions is pretty easy to use – a quick sign up process, answer a few core questions on the company and you’re in, simple as that. There’s no personal information shared on the site and, I guarantee, the identity of community members will remain confidential (provided they don’t get into libel/slander).

Quite a few people signed up and created accounts. When I recently advertised Jobinions on Google Adwords, even more people signed up.

BUT…

Only 5 people have left a Jobinion, so far (not counting my initial example). There’s good stuff in those Jobinions – particularly about one major accounting firm.

I am a firm believer that the war for talent has been won by the talent – and Jobinions was built on the basis that it’s OK to have an opinion about your employer – that each of us owns our career and can be proactive in getting to do more of what we do best every day.

Yet, from the many users, only 5 Jobinions in 5 months. Why the reticence?

I did a little bit of digging, searching and reading and came across Laurie Reuttiman’s

[who is a goddess - follow what she says - laugh at her blog - marvel at how remarkably cute she is in all her pictures and... er... make sure you spay and neuter your cats, right Laurie?]

entry about Jobinions which had generated some of the users. And there was a comment that just plain made me go ‘huh?’

To quote:

Even though the post is entitled “Humor,” I’d recommend that folks NOT use Jobinions – your current or potential employer might not see the humor that you do.

Or, for God’s sake, don’t use your real name, email address or URL.

The recession makes grumpy, humorless jerks out of more people than you realize.

Huh?

[see, I told you]

HUH?!!!

“I’d recommend that folks not use Jobinions…”

because your qualification for saying so is that you’re paranoid about employers not seeing the joke?

Really?

Getting past that sort of confrontational, win-lose, serf-master employment relationship is exactly WHY I created Jobinions – it’s time to transcend the BS of the 20th century ‘modern’ organization

[read the manifesto at http://www.strengthsspringboard.com]

and put the people who create the value on the footing they deserve.

Yet even with that intent, I have the simple fact that people (many people) have signed up and created profiles – yet only 5 Jobinions have been posted. Is paranoia rampant? I don’t believe so. Reluctance to use discussion boards? Er… I won’t dignify myself with an answer to that one. Mistrust of ye olde BadConsultant? Maybe.

But at the base of it all (as I discuss at the Strengths Springboard), is that I believe the majority of people haven’t woken up to the fact that the ‘modern’ organization is near dead in the water, out of tricks, unprepared for a world where the East is faster and cheaper, the West is demanding and fickle, and value is created from ideas not reproducible, scalable manufacturing processes.

And why haven’t they woken up?

Because it’s been easier and safer to collude with the mythology. Though it may look, feel, sound, smell and taste like it, it’s not fear, not really – it’s laziness.

GM, AIG, Chrysler…

The mythology is crumbling before your eyes.

So come on over to Jobinions and tell it like it is – it’s time to build a different future – one where it’s cool to work at something you love doing and be respected, rewarded and celebrated for doing just that.

And so you’re back… from outer space…

… just turned up to find you here… with that sad look upon your face

[careful, when the badconsultant boogies, no-one's safe]

Well, haven’t I been off in the clouds for a while?

If you read my New Year’s Eve post, you’ll remember that I predicted 2009 would bring some interesting work and indeed it’s turning out that way. Jigsaw pieces are clicking into place, mechanisms are turning, sense is emerging from nonsense, s*** is indeed hitting fans.

Getting some things built and ready has taken quite a bit of time, but you’ll be glad to hear that most of the heavy lifting has now been done and I’ll be back to writing

[and helping you take the red pill]

more regularly very soon.

In the next couple of days, I’ll be launching the Strengths Springboard (the manifesto is available now if you want to sign up).

Around the same time, I’ll be doing something a little odd. Sharing a ‘Big Idea’ (i.e. one which could potentially make a lot of money for whoever brings it to life) openly on the web. There’s a high likelihood that I may get nothing back for doing so. I’ll even consult about it. Happily. It’ll be the first of many such experiments in letting ideas loose in the world. Stay tuned here or at Twitter to hear more about that.

Letting ideas loose in the world.

It is time to confound the reality we’ve all taken for granted for too long. It is time to take the red pill.

And in the meantime

[Cue disco ball]

won’t you join me in a little boogie?

First I was afraid… I was petrified…

Mañana

BC

Aaaahhh… Victimhood…

… You make us so comfortable when you stick around.

A little while ago, we wrote a piece called “Free Agent Nation?” covering what we perceive as the impending exodus of talent from corporations.

Before we extemporize, quantify, clarify and obfuscate, we formally want to tip the hat to Daniel Pink who wrote about the subject in Fast Company and more recently in his book – we haven’t read the book yet, but will be doing so in the near future. Despite our uncanny ability to resell work we’ve previously done, and repackage others’ intellectual property with a facade of our own creation, we absolutely, totally do not steal from our bretheren – we didn’t coin the term Free Agent Nation

[though we did add the question mark]

and want to recommend you read the original article now – it was somewhere in our subconscious as we brought a lot of ideas together over the past few weeks.

OK. That’s over – phew!

Pretty transparent, right? Our owning up to an unwitting terminology ‘borrow’. Not for us the game of “that’s not fair, we didn’t know about it” – no, here at BadConsultant towers, we tell it like it is

[especially at http://www.jobinions.com - have you left a jobinion yet?]

regardless of whether it places us in positions of jeopardy.

Would that the rest of the world would do that.

Instead, we are fed a litany of excuses, blame rants, whining, whingeing, bellyaching, caviling, criticizing, deprecation, disparagement, fault-finding, griping, grouching, grousing, grumbling, kvetching, moaning, nagging, niggling, nit-picking, overcriticizing, quibbling, scathing… Well, you get the picture, right?

Through our multi-variant, cross-referential, do-loop, mega-meta-analysis of conventional wisdom-sapping framework complexes, we’ve identified that for the majority of your workforce, victimhood is a comfortable bed-fellow. For them, it’s all your fault; your fault that…

• they didn’t hit their targets
• their ideas aren’t strong enough to move forward
• there’s in-fighting within the team
• they aren’t able to develop the skills the business needs tomorrow

They’ll whine and complain

[and all those other words we cribbed from an online thesau... er... erm... our knowledge management database]

about all of it. Only they won’t do it to your face. They’ll do it in a bar, in a cubicle, in the park… Anywhere but where they need to do it: In the moment, at work, with you and the team.

To them it’s all your fault.

And guess what? They’re totally and utterly correct. It is. Because, when it comes to bringing people to a highly engaged state, it’s highly, highly unlikely that your own leadership is telling you it’s what’s expected – so the only reason you’ll do it is because you naturally believe it’s the right thing to do and have the capability to do it. There aren’t that many of you – and it’s highly unlikely you hear the whining nearly as much as others do.

For the rest of you managers, though, you are in complicity with the victims you manage – human beings perpetuate the status quo

[here we go-oh... Rockin' all over the world! Cue Americans going "huh?!!!"]

no matter how painful. Put simply, you are comfortable managing victims.

We’re going to let that sink in.

You are comfortable managing victims.

Why? Well, if you do it like you did it yesterday, no-one can hold you accountable for today’s poor results; today’s failure was perfectly acceptable yesterday. So, why change anything?

Anyone…

Anyone…

We’ll be back soon to answer the question.

έως ότου συναντιόμαστε πάλι

BC

What does it mean to be a badconsultant?

Well, here we are at the Human Capital Institute Summit 2009

[networking - woo-and-indeed-hoo!]

soaking up some of the latest thinking in the management sphere and testing the boundaries of our own reality. Does that sound like an odd thing to happen at a conference?

[unlike hot-tubs]

Well, we’re rapidly coming to the conclusion that the world is changing around, underneath and within us AND (some of which we covered in Economic Catastrophe and Bipolar Disorder) that is like, er, a rilly, rilly good thing!

["It's the end of the world as we know it... And BadConsultant feels fine!"]

We’ve had a number of questions as to why BadConsultant? Here’s our two main answers:

1. We don’t make money from this unless we add value – you can take it for free or you can do the decent thing and respect our contribution
2. We’re more than happy to lift the lid on the madness and, to quote a friend of ours, “open the kimono” – most people in modern corporations (and the moreso as you get more senior) are perpetuating an illusion of order and control that is slowly but surely destroying their energy, vitality and chance of achieving happiness – it is also, quite literally, killing any chance of a sustainable, growing business. And BadConsultant just flat refuses to perpetuate the myth. Even though our consulting bretheren would rapidly bill for more hours to achieve just that.

So, here we are, bringing s*** and fan together.

And we are determined to create and model a new form of consultancy. It’s basic tenets:

• It’s no longer about having the answers. It’s knowing which question to ask. Especially when it’s about the unthinkable.
• Every action we, and our clients, take should tear down, or destroy some building brick of the monolithic corporate structure – it is a model that worked for some of the 20th century – but it’s already far beyond out of date
• You only get to draw on our talent if you have a mission and purpose that changes the world for the better

How do you like them apples?

BadConsultant is available for any sort of gig that meets the above criteria. And we’re wondering what you’re scared of that stops you getting in touch with us.

It is time to change your world, and the world, for the better.

BC

Come on, let’s have some fun with…

Economic SUPERNOVA!

Technorati Tags: Business, Innovation

What if… Part I

What if your customers made your selection decisions?

Technorati Tags: Business, Innovation, Leadership, Management, Tactics

Thanks to the good folk at…

http://www.wordle.net