Tag Archives: top management consulting

TNF #085: Get more sleep

Welcome Professionals…

…deprivation of sleep is a common epidemic among top management consultants. We touched on that topic in issue TNF #004. Under the title “Get the most out of your sleep”, I argued that we must ensure the highest quality of our sleep, since we have little control over the quantity of sleep we get. Now guess what: Quality and quantity matter!

Our brain needs sleep, otherwise it cannot get rid of toxic by-products of our neural activity. For a comprehensive summary of negative side effects from sleep deprivation and some general advise to sleep more and better, I suggest the following article by Dr. Travis Bradberry: “Why sleep is key to success”.

In my blog post TNF #004 I already outlined some consultant-specific tips on raising the quality of our sleep. In this issue, I want to emphasize on quantity. For most of us, we need to sleep between 7 to 9 hours to be fully rested. There are actually only very few individuals who need less. I am not one of those and you most likely neither.

When we deprive our brain of our individually required level of rest, we will fall short on performance. If we want to work at the peak of our potential, we must ensure to get enough good sleep.

Here are some consultant-specific tips:

Reduce daily commute, live near by the office and choose a hotel very close to the client location
Consider traveling on Sunday night instead of Monday morning
Learn to meditate in order to fall asleep quicker after work (not having to drink alcohol to cool down or use other substances)
Streamline daily routines (body care, dressing, packing) to the minimum time
Do your physical work out with bodyweight exercise to skip the gym (learn how in TNF #012)
Among team mates and superiors, promote a high performance culture that relies on healthy lifestyle such as getting enough sleep

The last point is clearly the most difficult, but also the most important.

Have a good rest!

Malte

Thursday Night Flight is brought to you by Malte Müller Professionals. Sharing best practices for top management consultants on topics like communication, client handling, problem solving, appearance, and fitness. Check out www.mm-professionals.com for more material and free resources!

TNF #084: Small pain

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Welcome Professionals…

…I was at the dentist today. One of my inlays was broken and I decided to have it replaced as protection from potential further tooth decay. This preventive maintenance is costly, time consuming, and not really pleasant. As I was laying on the dentist chair, I thought about the analogies to our consulting profession.

What we would all agree to as a wise decision in dental care also applies to business. Accepting the smaller pain today in order to avoid the bigger pain in the future. Thinking through the various decisions within my 15+ years as a top management consultant, I can come up with many examples for the smaller pain:

admitting a mistake
asking an embarrassing question
changing staffing after a few days on the project
giving pushback on targets set by client/superior
scheduling a weekend shift before an important presentation

All these highly unpopular and sometimes painful actions have the potential to avoid a bigger and even more painful failure in the future. However, I sometimes had the idea that I might get away without any pain. I might get lucky, I thought. Well, very unlikely to get lucky on caries for the next 50 years with a broken inlay. Why not apply this wisdom to everyday business?

Welcome small pain!

Malte

TNF #083: Core values revisited

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Welcome Professionals…

…I am writing to you from Oslo, Norway, where I am meeting our international partner firms that we have in more than 30 countries. It is exciting to share best practices and learn from each other.

For this conference I had to prepare a presentation on our company. When presenting to fellows who follow the same business model, I wanted to go beyond the typical slides that we normally show to our clients.

I started out with a summary on our brand awareness in Switzerland, the track record and reach of our marketing work, our specific approach to executive search, and some war stories in client development. When I discussed this with the founder and Senior Partner of our firm, we found the overarching theme that connected all these bits and pieces: our core values.

What we are trying to convey at the conference is: Why are we operating in this way and not another? What is it that clients value about our work? Why do we have a brand image like this and how did we create it? It all links back to our core values.

I realized how important it is to go through such an exercise from time to time. It helps to question the ongoing business and to focus on your strengths. It sharpens the key marketing messages around the USP. And by discussing this with other experts, it helps to challenge your own view about it.

So, enjoy your journey while revisiting the core

Malte

TNF #081: Unsubscribe – getting email right

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Welcome Professionals…

…With the long Easter weekend ahead of us, let me share a reading recommendation for you. Everyone of us writes and receives emails every day, usually a ton of emails. Statistics say that up to 28% of our active working time is dealing with email. To put an end to this waste of time and getting more done, I recommend you read “Unsubsribe”.

Author Jocelyn K. Glei has drawn together some great best practices around email. I am sure you have heard some of them already, but in this condensed form her book is worth reading. It is a quick read and full of tips and tricks. It even has some email scipts for everyday and advanced situations.

Quite insightful was the author’s statement why email checking is actually addictive. So check it out:

Send me an email when you finished reading the book…

Malte

TNF #079: Fun to work with

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Welcome Professionals…

…We have come across the importance of humour a couple of times in the series of Thursday Night Flight. When people share feedback about their co-workers or close supplier relationships, they sometimes use the term “this person is fun to work with”.

The importance of this feedback is very much underrated. We should all strive to be “fun to work with”! That does not mean that we are funny all the time. It rather refers to the general attitude when we show up. It refers to the emotional state of our clients when we work with them.

Of course, first and foremost we need to deliver outstanding results. But this is not enough. For an outstanding premium service we must also pay attention to the customer experience that we already discussed in TNF #039. Being “fun to work with” is creating a customer experience that relieves some of the heavy work load and makes the interaction more pleasant. In the best case, the interaction leaves the client in a better state than he/she was before.

Characteristics of “fun to work with” are:

approaching challenges with an optimistic mindset
acknowledging the client as a personality with specific needs and emotions
taking the positive perspective, rather seeing opportunities than risk, rather searching for solutions than describing problems
listening to personal stories of the client and reacting in an empathetic way
sharing personal stories in balance with the point above
occasionally making a jokingly remark or sharing an anecdote if appropriate

This list is not exhaustive, but it shows clearly that “fun to work with” goes much beyond being funny. Work can be hard. It is the way we approach it that makes a big difference to us and to our clients.

Wishing you lots of fun serving your clients

Malte

TNF #077: Name dropping

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Welcome Professionals…

…Do you have trouble remembering names? I did. Since a while though, I am using a simple life hack that I picked up.

It starts with understanding the name correctly. When I get introduced to someone, I immediately repeat the name. Just repeating it may be a bit awkward. But using it in the next sentence or the next question comes quite naturally. You can actually do this troughout the whole conversation. People love hearing their name. This is the first step to remembering it.

The next powerful tool is to build a metaphoric association. Something that associates the person with the name. Let’s take “Natascha” my neighbour as an example. She always carries two large handbags. The word for “bag” in German is “Tasche”, so whenever I see “Natascha” with her handbags, they immediately remind me of her name.

Wishing you lots of fun with your name metaphors,

Malte

TNF #076: Ancient notebook

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Welcome Professionals…

…Do you still keep a notebook? I am not talking about a laptop, I mean those hardcover books of white paper, sometimes bound in leather, sometimes with carved-in initials of the owner. Do you use these?

Despite the fact that we are oversupplied with computing power, I regularly see business people taking notes in a notebook made of paper. Everything is filed in there in chronological order. Meeting after meeting – regardless of the subject or project. It is a mystery to me how someone can find anything within these books. One would have to remember date and time of a certain subject and even then, one would have to go back through many pages, sometimes even moving to another notebook!

What is worse – it also implies carrying around a lot of useless weight. Either old pages with mostly completed tasks and outdated notes or just white sheets of paper. Sorry – other than for journaling or nostalgic handwriting enthusiasts I do not see the use of such notebooks in business life.

I keep a pad of paper on my desk in order to take initial handwritten notes during phone calls or meetings. I usually carry around about 5 key pages of work in process with me. Everything else is either transcribed into tasks in my calendar or information with follow-up dates in my CRM system.

For a while I tested the use of electronic notebook apps like evernote and others. But I actually do not get any added value out of those. Calendar and CRM work fine for me.

Which tools do you use to stay organized? Let us know with a comment to this post.

Malte

TNF #075: Brain recreation

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Welcome Professionals…

…I went to an event yesterday night on mobility solutions for the future. Speakers came from well-known companies like Uber and Hyperloop One, and also from startups like Cargo Sous Terrain and Imagine Cargo. It was a fascinating journey into ideas of the future.

At the beginning of the week I had actually thought about skipping the event and instead to stay in the office to get some work done. I am glad I decided to attend. In hindsight, it feels like I rather gained some productivity and not like losing a couple of work hours.

I think this is attributed to two effects. First, looking forward to the event in the evening, I felt like I had to earn my right to leave the office at 5 pm, so my whole Wednesday evolved more productive than most days. Second, diving into the future was a recreation exercise for the mind. The speakers shared their dreams about delivering cargo in underground logistics tunnels and shooting transportation capsules through vacuum tubes. Meeting new ideas and meeting new people worked as a wellness session for the brain. Again, it led to a highly productive Thursday – and even fueled a new topic for TNF.

Despite all the hard work we need to deliver as consultants, we need to build in some time for giving our brain some rest, gaining some new impulses and receiving some rewards for motivation.

Enjoy your recreation!

Malte

TNF #074: Professional mindset

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Welcome Professionals…

…I have a colleague who recently brought his professional mindset clearly to the point. He said:

“I strive to serve the individuals that I accept in my circle of people. Sometimes I will get paid immediately for my service. Sometimes I will be paid in the future, sometimes even by different people, sometimes never. Either way, I am doing it because I believe in my service!”

What a bold mission statement! This mindset is both professional and liberating. He is truly dedicated to client service, but remains independent. He decides who enters his circle. And he decides to deliver his service. He is not asking for any approval by people served. He is just applying his own principle of service because he believes in it.

I definitely admire this professional mindset and truly hope that it inspires you, too.

Happily serving

Malte