Ohh boss, I love you so much!

Don't we all love our bosses? I had a BOSS once, who was very powerful and had a huge personality. I loved him and I hated him at the same time. Our relationship lasted 2.5 years and it was very rewarding, both for me (sometimes etremely frustrating though..) and for him (as I was a very profitable resource).

Here one of the last emails (slightly changed for confidentiality reasons)

Dear BOSS,

I hope you are well. I haven’t written to you for quite a long time, since we worked together on the last business development campaign. I have been reading a lot in the past few months, including strategy books (Competitive Strategy – Porter, Foundations of Corporate Success – Kay, books on small business strategy, inside stories of management consultants etc… and I am now on the meaty volume of “Marketing Management” by Kotler), I also attend events on a regular basis and I am always researching the internet for papers, forums and other stimuli.

I often think about BOSS COMPANY, the fact we work for the best tier 1 technology companies and what we do is innovative and intelligent. I have a concern now and I need to try to communicate this to you.

I don’t know what are your plans for the future of BOSS COMPANY, last time we talked you mentioned you weren’t in decision making mood and I don’t know you well enough to understand what your priorities are now.

I have tried to analyse BOSS COMPANY in the most objective possible way (trying not to get involved with emotions too much).
I have loads of ideas about the company, too difficult would be for me to try to outline everything in this email. I know we work in a very fragmented industry with low entry barriers and lots of freelance/small companies as competition; because of this large clients like HP, Nokia, SAP… have a great buying power and they put big pressure on price. I also feel that considering the 4 generic company strategies (invest, hold, harvest, divest) it looks like you probably are harvesting the company?

What is not completely clear to me is where the company is going, in terms of product strategy. It seems BOSS COMPANY is in between a “cost” strategy, working in the commodity market, cheap to produce, very competitively priced (like the SME type of projects) - this justify the use of average contract staff for research -; and a “differentiation” strategy, based on higher value add and creativity (account profiling type of work, real consulting + workshops and potentially other high value services) which requires good skills in the company and which, to mitigate the risk of delivery failure, would justify the vertical integration of primary research and the attraction of new skills, with higher fixed costs, effort on recruiting, training and retaining good employees etc. (This doesn’t work well with an harvesting generic strategy). It seems to me we are now somewhere in between cost and differentiation. According to Porter there is a risk of being “stuck in the middle” and so to lose competitive advantage.

I understand that if you are harvesting, (and looking to divest and exit the industry, or work as a consultant on you own), this strategy could work for now, but if you are looking to stay with BOSS COMPANY, I think something should be re-evaluated.

I have attached a small document that really stimulated my thoughts and that I would like you to have. I think BOSS COMPANY is in the Go-Go stage, as I recognise some traits (see below for attachment, June 24). I welcome any feedback on this. I am starting the SAP project again tomorrow.

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What do u do with your boss? Do you talk to him in an honest and direct way when you feel it's needed? I do. I guess it's matter of wording what you have to say in a sensitive fashion.. I think I know how to do it now!

Anyway, thanks BOSS I learnt so much from you...

Internet reputation???

Do you care of what people know about you? Do you like to shine and always seek popularity or prefer to remain in the shade? How many names do you have ;-) ?

I have a great first name I truly love, it's cool and easy to remember. I really don't like my last name though..

Anyway, a good piece of advice, if you care...

"Growing Number Of Job Searches Disrupted By Digital Dirt.

According to a recent survey of 100 executive recruiters conducted by ExecuNet, an executive recruiting network, 77% use search engines to learn more about candidates. Of those who use sites such as Google and Yahoo! to check the background of job seekers, 35% have eliminated a candidate from consideration based on the information uncovered online – up significantly from 26% just one year ago."

We all love those networking websites and forums don't we? Or better, we never heard of them and one day we do, we register for a trial period and find out 70% of the subscribers are.. well.. nice people but you wouldn't want to be associated with, just in case..

Do you care?

I am slowly becoming more posh, my clients are very, but in a cool and smart way, not boring or old-fashioned (some maybe, but most aren't). So I do care, but not too much, if u're cool u can do anything you like, right?

Communication: Art or Science?

Communicating with others is an essential skill in business dealings, friendships, family affairs, and romantic relationships. Are you a dynamic people person that can understand others and get your message across loud and clear? YES!

Communication is the process of exchanging information and ideas. An active process, it involves encoding, transmitting, and decoding intended messages. There are many means of communicating and many different language systems. Speech and language are only a portion of communication. Other aspects of communication may enhance or even eclipse the linguistic code. These aspects are paralinguistic, nonlinguistic, and metalinguistic. Paralinguistic mechanisms signal attitude or emotion and include intonation, stress, rate of delivery, and pause or hesitation. Nonlinguistic clues include gestures, body posture, facial expression, eye contact, head and body movement, and physical distance or proxemics. Metalinquistic cues signal the status of communication based on our intuitions about the acceptability of utterances. In other words, metalinguistic skills enable us to talk about language, analyze it, think about it, separate it from context, and judge it.