Copyright 2018 Jeff Kavanaugh
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1026-2
For my parents, Irma and Lee Kavanaugh
Mom, who inspired a lifelong love of learning, and Dad, who instilled an ethic of work and persistence. I love you both and appreciate all you have done.
Contents
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Ten percent of all the author royalties from this book will be donated to educational not-for-profits, including DonorsChoose.org.
Foreword
By Tony Gerth
Ive known Jeff for well over ten years. I was one of the initial partners at Infosys Consulting in 2004 and Jeff was one of our early senior hires. It was clear when I met Jeff for the first time that he had a lot of energy, experience, and enthusiasm for the consulting profession. It was no surprise to meor otherswhen he became a partner and a leader in the firm. In addition to being a great consultant, Jeff is a great developer of talent and this book is a clear result of that passion for developing people.
Jeff and I have a lot in common. Im a native Hoosier as well. I was raised in a small, rural town, went to college in Indiana, and went to work in a manufacturing company after my undergraduate studies. After a time, the work seemed dull and I stepped into the world of management consulting by joining Deloitte, a world-class firm. I rapidly made partner there and it was a formative time in my professional career, as was my time with Infosys Consulting. Overall, I spent fifteen years as a consultant before transitioning to an academic career with the Kelley School of Business and earning a doctoral degree in management.
Why is this relevant to Jeffs book? First, like Jeff, my skills in problem solving and communication were forged in the crucible of management consulting.
I know firsthand how valuable and impactful these skills are for both consultants and businesspeople in general. These skills are not generally taught in business programsUT-Dallas and the Kelley School being notable exceptionsbut rather during the new hire training of top consulting firms. Marvin Bower, a great early leader of McKinsey & Co., demonstrated that firms dont need a retired CEO to advise executives, but that young, intelligent people are effective if well-trained. Such knowledge is contained in this book.
As Jeff would say, so what? The so what in all of this is that these skills are critical to being a successful business professional. The world is forever getting more complex and digital technology continues to accelerate that complexity. In that context, the first chapter on learnability sets the stage for the rest of the book. Its a clich to state we should be lifelong learners, but its also a reality. In an age of accelerating change, we need to continually learn new skills. The later chapter on Agile also addresses this dynamic.
Critical thinking is the basis of the problem solving that we do every day. We are constantly inundated with information that we are forced to triage, prioritize, and incorporate into our decision-making, both professional and personal. It is said that a person today processes more information in a day than a person in the sixteenth century did in a lifetime. But how do we know were solving the right problems? In a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review , the authors make the case that, there are few management skills more powerful than the discipline of articulating the problem you seek to solve before jumping into action. Ive seen project teams waste a lot of time in analyzing the wrong problem!
The focus on soft skills is important. I can teach an eighteen-year-old without any business education to model with a spreadsheet or statistical software. What is missing is context, critical thinking, and effective communication. However, most business education at the undergraduate and graduate level focuses on technical skills, be they programming, spreadsheet modeling, financial analysis, market research, or operations improvement. That is fine to a point, since we all start careers as functional contributors. But to be a leader, its the soft skills that matter. In an environment where the world is becoming more dependent on technology in various forms, the soft skills tend to be pushed into the background. Thats unfortunate and this book steps up to the challenge of bringing them more into balance.
This book provides a broad tool kit for the consultant or businessperson who wants to keep pace in a rapidly changing environment, become a more rigorous problem solver and develop a more effective communication. In other words, its for anyone who wants to be a more well-rounded and successful professional.
Tony Gerth, D.B.A.
Clinical associate professor of information systems
Kelly School of Business, Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana, December 2017
Astor, T., Kieffer, D., and Repenning, N., The Most Underrated Skill in Management, MIT Sloan Management Review , 58(3), 2017: 39.
Introduction
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone elses path. If you follow someone elses way, you are not going to realize your potential.
Joseph Campbell, The Heros Journey
This book isnt a standard guide to consulting. It cant be, because Im not a standard consultant. I grew up on a farm in Indiana, like my dad before me. He was the second of ten children, told by his parents that he wasnt smart enough to go to college. He refused to buy that, worked a factory job to save enough for school, and became a teacher and coach, all while staying close to his farming roots. My mother came from humble beginnings herself; she was the daughter of a housekeeper, who went to college only through the GI Bill, after her father was killed in World War II. They were traditional people in non-traditional circumstances, who seemed to do things their own way, even if it was the hard way. Looking back, I believe some of those qualities made their way to me.
I may have grown up in a sports-crazed family, but work always came first. Between tending a three-acre family garden, keeping the overall farm in shape, and being lent out to work on other farms, I seldom knew free time during daylight hours. At times, it seemed to my siblings and me that my dad wanted us to be busy as much as he wanted us to be productive. It was a case of, Idle mind, Devils workshop perhaps, but it certainly reduced the motivation to work smart, knowing that some other task would simply take the place of any I completed. I wanted to break that mold. I worked hard, but I also wanted to make things easier, and to enjoy that rare elixir of time to myself. My father couldnt understand it at the time, but I knew that I wanted to help companies become more productive, even if I had no idea how.
I never had the standard consulting background. I graduated from our farming high schoolwith a senior class of forty-seven studentsand then from a small nearby engineering college called Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Rose-Hulman was a top-ranked engineering college, with 100 percent placement for engineers, but did not have a business school. Even after an engineering degree and well into my first corporate job, the world of consulting was alien to me. Until I was two years out of college, taking my first masters class, I didnt even realize that business consulting firms existed. It seemed to me that they were part of another world, far away from my day-to-day life and skills. I soon became very curious, and started to piece together an understanding of what consulting was, and how to get closer to it.
