September 8, 2009 – 1:57 am
Just landed in Hong Kong…what a week!
At home in New York last week, discussions with two potential partners, scoping two major assignments, sneaking in a lovely 10 kilometer walk from near the pier to the West Village to Soho to Chinatown to Little Italy back through Washington Square Park, to Union Square and finally up [...]
September 1, 2009 – 8:51 am
I’ve taken a brief hiatus from posting — being inundated with guests, clients and the exhilarating billows of life.
We’re on the verge of the next trip: Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Dubai, London, Marseille.
I’ve waited 15 minutes for someone to call who missed a phone appointment last week and zealously promised to call this time. [...]
August 17, 2009 – 8:02 am
Consultants often congratulate themselves gratuitously on providing great service, caring about their clients, being trusted advisers, etc and ad nauseum.
Here is a simple but non-negotiable check-list to ascertain whether you are really providing premium relationship value — value by virtue of a client relating with you — over and above the type of general expertise [...]
We’ve just been at the Shaw Festival and saw a superb production of “The Devil’s Disciple”.
While it has many themes, one of the most intriguing is the story of the British General Burgoyne. Burgoyne is known as the man who lost the Battle of Saratoga, a decisive turning point in the Revolutionary War. The American [...]
My co-author Alan Weiss and I received some unsolicited, hopefully well-intended, feedback about our book, THE GLOBAL CONSULTANT. The person bristled at our suggesting the world by and large sought out American thought-leadership in business and management.
In acknowledging other world-class centers of learning however, by error when we wrote our draft, we placed INSEAD in [...]
If something is stupid, one technique, slavishly followed by opinion manipulators, is to keep repeating it as if it was a self-evident triusm.
We shouldn’t proceed with Health Care reform because it would be tantamount to “socialized medicine”. Okay, but a “socialized military” and a “socialized fire brigade” are just fine? “No one knows how to [...]
A dear friend and long-time client recently asked me whether I felt we in the United States were peculiarly afflicted with poor service. I had to confess that hotels and airports here do seek to redefine “rancid” in terms of service. He regaled me with a story of an endlessly snaking check-in line at his [...]
Organizations abound with teams. And no other area of organizational life, or shall we say recurring corporate chagrin, gets nearly as much attention in the literature as teams: functioning, malfunctioning, well formed, deformed, performance-enhancing or productivity-depleting.
A critical insight honored more in the breach than in the observance is that a collection of people is not [...]
It’s July 4th in the United States, and we here celebrate the audacious experiment in self-government that was launched through the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…,” it’s hard not get chills and goose-bumps,even centuries later. We must remember though that the Declaration launched a war and the Founding Fathers would [...]
The Four Seasons Hotel in London (formerly The Inn on the Park) was my London home since the late 70’s (first courtesy of my Dad’s fondness for it, and then my own).
Last year it closed for renovation and we found ourselves facing “homelessness” (of sorts) in London for the next few years. John Stauss, the [...]