Diary of The Reluctant Management Consultant

If you're sick and you come to work, we may choose to ostracise you!

For us poor souls in the Southern Hemisphere, autumn is in effect and winter is just around the corner. While office workers in London will soon be frolicking in parks during their lunch hour, we’ll be wheeling out our winter woollies, heaters and red wine to keep us cosy for the next few months. With the colder weather comes the flu, colds, sinusitis, chest infections and any other excuse you can find for not attending a performance of the Phantom of the Opera (if anyone asks, I was very, very ill – I hate musicals). Which brings me to a real bugbear of mine: sick people in the office!

The rule is really simple, if you’re sick, please stay at home. There’s really no point being a martyr about it! You know the kind of colleague that I’m talking about – the one that comes to meetings with a box of tissues, a pot of herbal tea and a variety of medication that may or may not have been prescribed by a qualified medical doctor. Echinacea doesn’t count. They’re hacking away in their cubicle, coughing as if they’ve been smoking two packs of cigarettes every day since they were sixteen, clearing phlegm in volumes that could fill the koi pond in reception.

What’s worse is that they’ll tell you all about it. When you arrive at the office as pale as your local teenage Goth, bags under your eyes the size of the average woman’s handbag and with as much drive and energy as a bank teller, the rest of us may surmise that something’s wrong with you. We don’t need a blow-by-blow account of your illness. We don’t need a breakdown of the time you spent on the toilet last night, the ‘discharge’ the doctor removed or that you sneezed so hard a little part of your brain shot out. We don’t need to know! Keep that stuff between you and a medical professional… and perhaps your attorney if it’s really serious. Chances are in the brief conversation about your ailment, you’ve probably infected everyone on the team. So instead of one infirm co-worker, we’ll soon have ten. So, please, just stay at home!

The martyr who will come to work at all costs is contrasted with the hypochondriac who’ll stay at home for the flimsiest reason. Just after adding some pepper to their lunch, they sneeze and immediately conclude that they must be coming down with something. Stub a toe on the coffee table at home and the next day they’re at work with a cast over the injured digit. Two rashers of bacon at breakfast and they think they’ve got swine flu. The hypochondriacs are also the ones who seem to take a remarkable number of sick days on a Friday or a Monday. Funny how a long weekend can magically fall in your lap, if you can convince your boss that you have a contagious rash. WLBs – work-shy, lazy bastards!

And these are just the physical ailments! What about the nutters who insist on taking sick leave because they’re depressed, stressed or have a social anxiety disorder? Well, then maybe auditing isn’t for you? I jest, depression, stress and social anxiety disorders are serious issues. But I do object to my fellow first year Applied Maths student who asked to defer an exam due to stress – it’s exams, we’re all stressed! I get stressed when I’m asked to attend a performance of the Phantom of the Opera and you don’t see me making excuses for not attending. Okay, you got me there!

If sick colleagues or WLBs get on your nerves too, leave a comment or send me a mail at diary@jeetesh.net. Remember, if you’d like some Reluctant Management Consultant gear, check it out at JK-Mart.

When Jeetesh avoiding musicals, he’s available as a keynote, conference and after dinner speaker.

Skydiving, a complete waste of time when compared to learning new Excel shortcuts

Recently, a few people in the office were talking about their bucket lists. I thought about mine for a minute or two and shared my bucket list with my colleagues: iron, enamel and plastic. Judging from their quizzical looks, I quickly realised that my list of favourite types of bucket wasn’t what they had in mind. You see, their bucket lists consist of things that they want to do before they die! They contained all sorts of new, exciting and adventurous things. Things like going skydiving, learning how to scuba dive or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. I have no plans to jump out of a plane, intentionally drown myself or get to the top of Africa’s tallest mountain when it looks perfectly picturesque on the cover of a travel magazine I read in my dentist’s waiting room. Management consultants have different dreams of things to do before we die. Here’s just a small selection:

• Meet Jack Welch
• Lay-off a 100,000 people
• On a cold, rainy day, curl up under a blanket and read the Peters and Waterman’s classic “In Search of Excellence” one more time
• Rack up a million air miles
• Use the “Control + `” shortcut in Excel
• Find out who in the company wants to go skydiving, paragliding, bungee jumping or any another high risk activity and then cancel their insurance
• Ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange
• Storm out the office saying “You can’t fire me, I quit!”
• Have an article published in the Harvard Business Review
• Fly to a client, without getting stopped at security, getting upgraded to First Class, falling asleep and not being woken up by a crying baby

If you have some things on your bucket list to share, leave a comment or send me a mail at diary@jeetesh.net. Remember, if you’d like some Reluctant Management Consultant gear, check it out at JK-Mart.

When Jeetesh sharing his hopes and dreams, he’s available as a keynote, conference and after dinner speaker.

If this is the seat of your corporate empire then your empire is very, very small

Seniority in an organisation takes many forms. And several of these forms are very obvious and prominent. Simply having an office as opposed to a dingy, grey cubicle is a sure sign that you’re someone important. A fancy sounding title is a clue that you are a man or woman of influence. Chief ‘Something or the Other’ Officer is a good start, Chief Executive is impressive and Chairman exudes even more gravitas. You’re probably at the other end of the scale if your job requires any sort of ‘assisting’ or ‘supervising’. Salaries are a good indicator of where you stack up in the organisation. Even the number of minions you have in your little corporate fiefdom will hint at your relative status. But there are some more subtle, discreet and perhaps even subversive signs of success. Here are some Reluctant Management Consultant clues:

• The closer you park to the front door. If you’re parking in another building and have to take a shuttle to the office itself, you’re probably not very high on the corporate ladder.
• The size of your white board. If you don’t even have a white board and must brainstorm on recycled copier paper, you probably didn’t get a bonus last year.
• The quality of your coffee. The difference is dishwater-like instant ‘coffee’, with the option to add powdered milk, out a vending machine that you have pay for versus a delicious cappuccino made by a professional barista who wears a waistcoat, gels his hair and says “Ciao” a lot.
• The more comfortable your chair. If you’re sitting on a metal chair bolted to the floor, your title probably doesn’t even have “Assistant” or “Supervisor” in it.
• The amount of stationery you have. A wide variety of post-its (not just the regulation size and default yellow colour) and a stapler can sometimes be the clearest sign that you’re a high flyer.
• If you travel internationally, you have a bigger per diem or corporate credit card limit. That’s because your standards are higher.
• When having client lunches, you don’t have to pay any more – one of your underlings pay and you just sign the expense claim.
• Your phone has more buttons on it. Not that you have any use for the additional buttons, the point is you have more buttons.
• Access to sunlight. If your cubicle has as much natural light as Mordor in winter before Sauron introduced daylight savings time, you’re a little way down the food chain and you may want to start taking a Vitamin D supplement.
• Your floor is access controlled. Keeps the riff raff out. If you floor isn’t access controlled, you are the riff raff.

If this sounds familiar, leave a comment or send me a mail at diary@jeetesh.net. Hate teambuilding? Well, we have some Reluctant Management Consultant merchandise that just might suit you. Have a look at JK-Mart.

When Jeetesh isn’t drawing smiley faces on his enormous white board, he’s available as a keynote, conference and after dinner speaker.

Amateur...

Last Wednesday was Human Rights Day in South Africa and I chose to spend the Public Holiday celebrating my human right to be lazy. I don’t know if this is an official human right or not, but it must surely be in France, where I believe it’s illegal to work a standard, forty hour work week. The most strenuous activity of my day was washing my car, and by ‘washing my car’ I mean taking my car to the car wash to be washed by someone else (celebrating his right to gainful employment), while I sat in the shade and read a book. When I got back home, I watched some TV. And when I say ‘some TV’ I mean a first year liberal arts student’s worth of TV. And what better way to indulge in slothfulness than to lie on the couch, armed with my trusty remote control. And when I say ‘remote control’ I mean all six of them!

That’s right, I have six remote controls to manage the various components of my home entertainment system – one for the TV, the amplifier, the satellite TV provider, the Apple TV, the DVD player and the CD player. I keep them all on my coffee table and seeing that I seldom have coffee on the coffee table, I’m tempted to rename it the remote control table. I have more buttons to press than NASA had in 60′s. Although to be fair, NASA probably didn’t need thirty two different bass and treble settings for watching the news. I don’t too, but I have the power.

And speaking of the power, I’m sure you know that’s a common nickname for a remote control. After wrestling the remote control out of the hands of a loved one, it’s important for you to stand on the couch and exclaim “I have the Power!” That might just be me… The flipper, the clicker, the zapper are all acceptable synonyms for your remote. One buddy calls it ‘My Precious’. He has a Vitamin D deficiency.

I guess I really like having six remote controls because my father was always against having one and even worse, using it. You see, he always saw the remote control as the height of laziness. We thought he was a Luddite, but turns out he was probably right. In our old house, you could change the channel on the TV by leaning forward just a little and poking it with the TV guide. Instead, I’d lean back and use the flipper to the flip the channel. These days, my now retired father is fully conversant with the remote and even surfs the channels looking for something interesting to watch that doesn’t involve action, comedy, drama, cars, Mythbusters, cooking programs, decorating programs, World War II documentaries and anything on Animal Planet. If he didn’t use the remote control, he’d be standing for forty minutes before he found something he’d like to watch.

Being a good management consultant, I should probably rationalise the numbers of remotes I have. Sorry, remote controls, but there may be some lay-offs in the next few weeks. Some of you might want to consider early retirement.  I could lay-off all of my remotes and get one larger, centralised ‘universal’ remote, but then as any good management consultant will tell you, you lose out on division of labour and specialisation. I might be overthinking this… I should take a break and relax a bit, and what better way to do that than to go watch a little more TV!

If you have more remote controls than children, share you experience, leave a comment or send me a mail at diary@jeetesh.net. Remember, if you’d like some Reluctant Management Consultant gear, check it out at JK-Mart.

When Jeetesh isn’t doing time and motion studies in his lounge, he’s available as a keynote, conference and after dinner speaker.

My hard drive is toast...

It is with much sadness and regret, and an unhealthy dose of anger, frustration and cursing like Adele at an awards ceremony, that I inform you that my hard drive has died. The hard drive that I grew to call my own, since it came with the laptop I bought in 2009, is deceased. To paraphrase the Monty Python ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch, my hard drive has passed on, has ceased to be, has expired and gone to meet its maker (Seagate, I think), it’s bereft of life and rests in peace. More like ‘pieces’ because I fully plan on driving past Seagate and flinging it out my car and into their offices. As I’m sure you can tell, I’m a little upset.

The circumstances of my hard drive’s passing are a mystery. I was checking my mail in Outlook, procrastinating on Facebook and downloading the latest update for my iPad (all 700MB of it!), when in an instant everything froze. I immediately suspected Window Vista. Can you blame me? The two had been hanging around a bit too much for my liking. One day they’re ‘just friends’ and before you know it, they’re crashing together. I knew I should have put a stop to their chummy relationship years ago! I rushed my drive to my brother-in-law, who on investigation, declared it dead on arrival.

At the moment, I’m making my way through the Five Stages of Grief. First came Denial. My hard drive can’t have shed this mortal coil? Maybe it’s just resting? Overheated and overextended from all the Excel number-crunching I did the night before. Then inevitably came Anger. All my hard work over three years evaporated in an instant! Do you know how long it’s going to take me to re-assemble my collection of Demotivational Posters? Bargaining follows slowly thereafter… perhaps I can take it to a friend who’s a forensic accountant, but then that would mean spending an afternoon with a friend who’s a forensic accountant. Right now, I think I’m in the Depression phase. Why do I even bother carrying on? Maybe I should buy an ultrabook with a solid state drive? Would that even help?! I hope Acceptance follows soon – I’ve been listening to too much James Blunt!

Still, we shared some good times. That trip to San Francisco was a real memorable one, networking with American hard drives for the first time. That truly epic, two thousand line project plan I built that my hard drive slaved to save while I played Minesweeper. Even that scare we had when I mistakenly pointed iTunes at the wrong folder. It gave us an almighty fright but I’d like to think it brought us a little closer, united in times of adversity and the thought that we’d have to re-import all of my music. Good times!

My hard drive is survived by my NAS box (four 3TB drives), three external 1TB drives, a 350GB portable drive and two 8GB flashdisks. It will be sorely missed, especially considering I didn’t have a reliable, up to date back-up on any of these devices. Fail!

If you’ve experienced a tragic hardware failure in recent times, share you experience by leaving a comment of sending me a mail at diary@jeetesh.net. Remember, if you’re like some Reluctant Management Consultant gear, check it out at JK-Mart.

When Jeetesh isn’t reading more about automated back-ups, he’s available as a keynote, conference and after dinner speaker.

The view from your cubicle

Consultants, even reluctant ones, are seldom given luxury accommodation when it comes to working at the client’s premises. Usually you get given whatever open space there is. This might be a boardroom that they reserve for you and your team for the duration of the engagement. Or it might even be the space next to printers, leaving some people to conclude that the firm’s hired permanent, very well dressed, printer technicians! At a food manufacturer I was given a school desk right next to the machine that sealed the bulk boxes – if I leaned too far to the left, I’d be shrink-wrapped and delivered to a large retailer in Argentina. Most of the time, we’re grateful to just get a nice, regular, homely, grey cubicle. But every now and then, you hit the jackpot and get… an office! Working in an office can take some getting used, but once you do, you realise there are some things that you can do in an office that you just can’t do in a cubicle. Here’s my Top Ten list:

If you’re slaving away in a shoebox, a cubicle or an office in the executive wing, post a comment or send me a mail at diary@jeetesh.net.If you’d like to get your grubby mitts on some Reluctant Management Consultant merchandise, check it out here: JK-Mart.

When Jeetesh isn’t frightening the cleaners, he’s available as a keynote, conference and after-dinner speaker.

Collecting depressing newspaper headline about the economy isn't a good idea for a hobby...

The last few weeks have been jam-packed with economic news – the South African Minister of Finance announced the Budget for the forthcoming year, the European Union seemed to have reached some sort of consensus (for this week anyway) on what to do with Greece and Gary Busey filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The news is littered with stories about the economy, personal finance and celebrity buzz over the Academy Awards. One must have priorities! But economics, stock markets, investing, tax and owing more on your house than it’s worth can be difficult to understand. So as yet another public service, here’s a brief guide on what’s what and what isn’t.

Apologies for a lack of post last Friday dear readers. A technical glitch resulted in me not being able to post a post. Being a good management consultant, I’m now conducting a root cause analysis.

Any other suggestions of confusing economic terms are most welcome. Share a comment below or drop me a mail at diary@jeetesh.net

When Jeetesh isn’t getting a haircut, he’s available as a keynote, conference and after dinner speaker.

They should just write "Heaven" instead

Being a Big Time International Consultant (BTIC) can be a very taxing and tiring job (if it isn’t, you’re doing it wrong). There’s all that thinking you need to do, all the PowerPoint slides you need to make and the billing isn’t going to do itself. While the word ‘International’ might sound very exotic and glamorous, I can assure you that in most cases it isn’t. ‘International’ can mean landing at the world’s smallest gravel airport before driving 200 miles in a Hyundai Getz to get to a coal mine on the hottest day of the year, wearing a suit and tie, of course. ‘International’ can mean going to Zimbabwe. And ‘International’ can mean 21 hours of flying time to San Francisco with a movie selection confined to “The Hugh Grant Premium Selection” and “Did You Hear About The Morgans?” is the premier. But there is an island in a sea of TSA pat downs, lost luggage and jet lag – the airline lounge!

With clients being more cost conscious these days, flying Business Class isn’t a guarantee anymore. Now, you have to consider the very real possibility of sitting in cattle class, alongside babies and their sleep-deprived parents. ┬áAnd even worse, the wine comes in tiny, hobbity bottles! That’s no way to travel. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel and sometimes even champagne at the end of runway because if you’ve collected enough miles or have the right brand of credit card, the sanctuary of the airline lounge is ready to welcome you with open arms. Sometimes those open arms will even offer you a head, neck and shoulder massage!

It’s like a little oasis in there. First, there’s a reassuring check at reception to make sure that you’ve earned your place in airport Shangri-La. If you can’t fly Business Class, at least you can earn enough miles to be afforded an open invitation to the lounge. Compared to the airport, everything in lounge looks brighter, more colourful, cleaner and neater. The staff is polite, friendly and very helpful. If you ask nicely, they’ll even update your Facebook status. When compared to the planks they call seats in Economy, the chairs and couches are as comfortable as sitting on the comfortable chairs and couches you have at home. There’s place for a little shut-eye or even an invigorating shower. The taps are quite liberal with the amount of water they dispense, rather than limiting you to a predetermined spurt as you get in the regular airport restrooms. There’s space to catch up on some work if you’re that way inclined, computers, plug points for chargers, TV’s, newspapers and magazines. ┬áAnd unlike your dentist, the latter are current.

Apart from the peace, quiet and comfort, you get the chance to eat something that actually resembles proper food as opposed to recycled cardboard in a gravy of salt, garnished with a small, solid red thing masquerading as a tomato. A full bar service promises that your beer, whisky and wine will come in real, man-sized portions. With the threat of lounge terrorism on the decline, food is served with cutlery of the metallic kind, meaning you can actually cut, fork and stir with confidence.

International travel might not be exotic and glamorous, but at least in the bosom of the airline lounge, you can relax and pretend!

If you’re in the middle of a ten hour layover in Lagos, then you’ve certainly got the time to share a comment below or drop me a mail at diary@jeetesh.net

When Jeetesh isn’t eating the mini-donuts in the lounge, he’s available as a keynote, conference and after dinner speaker.