Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

I often get the question on how organizational learning is relevant to business consulting. Can a business consultant just be really good at their area of expertise and be effective at client organizations? It makes sense for business consultants to be aware of organizational learning and how organizations adapt to change. Org Learning challenges One of the key skills for a consultant is observation. Trying to observe the key organizational learning challenges for the client and adapting based on that is key to a successful consulting gig. This will be a continuous process and the solutioning would also have to iterative to help the client and for the client to appreciate the solution better. Tying transformation to business value The key to any consulting assignment is backing by a business sponsor. The only way we will be able to get continuous backing from a business sponsor is to be able to tie the transformation to business value. This is very tricky an...

Getting leads for a new product is very critical. It helps keep the momentum and helps us get initial feedback. When we design a new product and have a functional prototype ready, we typically do one round of testing and demonstration within our organisation and collect feedback. What matters more is the feedback from our prospects - potential users. When we have a functional prototype ready, we have 2 paths to choose from: Start a web-site , have some information and quickly get leads from the page Go out on the field and interact with potential users and prospects, demonstrate the application While we see a lot of product teams and startups doing the first one, It is the second path that matters till the product goes to beta. Taking a product to beta is a big task. Taking our example, we took 2 prototypes and 8 months to even start alpha and our beta is in 18 months with 2 customers. While all teams are tempted to have inbound leads, the problems there are In-b...