Riddle me this: what is it that you can’t touch, see, or feel, but may influence your consulting career more than anything else?
It may be the most important real-world skill in existence, but young professionals lack it in droves.
And it causes them to fail interviews, delay promotions, and in some cases, stagnate their careers.
Outworking everyone is one way to reach your goals.
It’s how I advanced early in my career. Except, that wasn’t a sustainable strategy and it only got me so far in what I could produce.
We’ve all heard the conventional wisdom that says if you want to advance in your career, then you have to work hard.
Except, that’s only partially true.
If you want to move up the ranks from in any business, then you need to master a critical skill beyond work ethic: the ability to communicate more information, more clearly, in a limited amount of time.
While visiting London a few years back, I had breakfast with Shaa Wasmund, the author of Stop Talking, Start Doing: A Kick in the Pants in 6 Parts, which at the time was the #1 best-selling business book in the UK and continued for 14 months in a row.
Shaa’s crazy—in the best way. In her life she’s run her own PR firm, launched one of the earliest social networking sites, and served as CEO of the UK’s #1 resource for small business, Smarta.com.
You would think that with all the ‘doing’ happening in Shaa’s life that she’d be like everyone else: overworked, overwrought, and stressed out.
Except, she isn’t any of those things.
As I sit here writing this, preparing for another campus recruiting season, I’m reminded of thousands of college students I’ve interviewed — the ones well prepared by their schools for a career in consulting, but also the many who have been not gotten enough practical results to complement their academic training.
When someone asks, “what do you do?”, how do you show ‘what you do’? Let’s face it — it’s hard to evoke a mental picture of a process, a service, or even a component of product that is the output of one’s job. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could show someone what you do or create?
I am not certain where this began, and maybe a bit of a stretch, but it is too good not to share.
Of course, much of the credit goes to Jack Nicholson for his command performance and to Rob Reiner and the good people at Columbia Pictures for creating the classic, A Few Good Men. Someone has made a few tweaks for the consulting world:
Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. While memorials were observed globally, my metro area of Dallas/Fort Worth was literally ground zero for this occasion. The city of Dallas has carried the burden of being ‘the city’ for the last 50 years, and city leaders have been so concerned about the stigma that there has never been a public observance of that Friday in November – not until this year, with a formal hour-long ceremony replete with civic leaders, service academy choir, and prominent clergy. However, the highlight for me was the remarks of presidential historian and author David McCullough, who read a series of excerpts from Kennedy’s best-known speeches. It is a must view, and my favorite passages were the following: