What is competitive intelligence? 20 tips

When I was working overseas, I was on a competitive intelligence project. It might sound super-crafty, and Mission-Impossible, but it was not. It was actually quite boring.  Lots of meetings to share information, and try to piece together the competition’s...

Good interview advice

Was recruiting on Friday. This was on the wall of the business school’s career management center. All good advice I believe. Related Posts: Case interviews: Time to start practicing Why culture trumps strategy...

Consultants are hired to be the bad guys

Sometimes we are the bad guys People hire consultants for many reasons, one of which, is to be the bad guys. Look at this article about how Deloitte is helping some of Iowa’s public universities cut costs here. Consultants usually stay behind the scenes This is...

Foreign aid, a few charts and graphs

After reading some news this morning, I wanted to re-post this from 2 years ago about US foreign aid. For my non-American readers, hope you find this not-too-boring. Consultants make tables and graphs That is a large part of what we do. Please see some visualization...

What is the potential for MOOCs?

MOOCs are not new Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) have been around in their current form for about six years. They continue their march to democratize education. If you are not familiar with these free online courses taught by some of the best professors in the...

Data analysis in 20 minutes

Consultants are in the business of taking messy, unorganized data and turning it into information, and hopefully, some insights. Here is a simple example of excel clean up, and the steps to copy, paste, filter, sort, and cleanse data. For most consultants, the data...