Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Organisations need to grow. However, they should not grow for the sake of growth. That would be a virus. Orgs should not grow to survive as well. Orgs should grow with a purpose.

This post is a list of my perspective and questions on my journey in shared spaces. My first experience of learning in shared spaces was back in my MBA days - Where we learn , experiment , fail and reflect as a team. It has been a long time and I got 2 opportunities to do the same in a shared space. Learning in Shared spaces - A Journey

Policy Making is a very good instrument that any organization can use to communicate to its participants and help further the organization's goals. Policy - in a nutshell - is the course of principle of action proposed by the organization or entity. Why do we care Consulting, in a lot of ways, has to deal with processes. There are processes that as consultants, we need to be aware of and respect in our client organizations. There are processes that we have to work around and eventually suggest replacing or retiring. All of these are a lot simpler if we understand policy making better. Under what constraints or conditions was a specific policy made? Why is it still relevant? There are many more questions that we need to ask as consultants. Organizational structure and Policy Making

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...