The Diary of a Reluctant Management Consultant
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
I’ve been working as a management consultant for the last thirteen years. Most people don’t believe me when I tell them that I actually studied Human Resource Management and Marketing at university, but still ended up as an evil management consultant. There are few specific skills that one needs to be a management consultant, apart from maybe being a little analytical, but even this can be faked. You need to be able talk a great game, be clever/nimble/sneaky enough to be consistently 24 hours ahead of the client and be able to work black magic with Excel and PowerPoint.
Thirteen years is a long time… Why, it feels like just yesterday I was walking swiftly through corridors, armed only with a folder and a smirk, scaring poor employees with the threat of retrenchment. Fast forward to 2009 and I still walk really quickly through corridors, but now mostly in fear of being called into a meeting to discuss another meeting. With the economic climate being positively miserable these days, I have no doubt that soon my old colleagues and my oft overlooked “people off payroll” skills will soon be called upon again. There’s only so much cost-cutting you can achieve with squeezing suppliers, squeezing customers and squeezing chubby executives into Economy class seats!
Now that I’ve started working as a speaker, I have a great outlet for sharing my experience, observations and opinions on business, leadership, management, the workplace, our colleagues and why canteen food should be avoided at all costs. And with the advent to blogging, I now have another channel to share my ideas.
Stick around for future entries on my Top Ten Signs that you’re at a Bad Teambuilding Event, on why performance appraisals are like the Cold War and more on why canteen food should be avoided at all costs. As you’ve no doubt gathered, I feel very strongly about the latter.
If you have any comments or suggestions, drop me a line at diary@jeetesh.net
See you next week for the next edition, where I’m bound to use the word ‘stakeholders’ in ludicrously inappropriate ways.
