My decade of consulting, training and coaching across the globe
With many of the clients I work with I encourage retrospectives and honest reflection at the end of work cycles. Its important to take time to really think about what we have learned and what actions they might take to do more of the good stuff and less of the bad. As with most things we teach its much harder to do that kind of work personally. When I try and reflect and look back across the last 10 years I see so many lessons and I’m reminded of so many great people I have had the good fortune to work with.
Some lessons learned:
Subject Matter Expertise: Looking at the various domains I have been able to work in there is very little consistency. The only real pattern here is that each of the companies and agencies listed had similar challenges inside of their specific domains. They all had patterns of building products using slow and counter productive systems and policies for managing development. While they all used different definitions of what a product actually was the chances that they could deliver an outcome their customers cared about, that would add value to their strategic goals, and do so quickly and efficiently was generally very low.
The power of Agents: The sales process for getting to work inside large corporates and governments agencies is insanely challenging and often insanely protracted. There is simply no way for a sole practitioner to work inside a government agency the US Dept of Defense. For about 75% of the work I’ve done I’ve been able to leverage the great sales teams at a variety of consulting and training organizations. Between General Assembly and The Lean Startup Company I’ve had exposure to some of the gnarliest challenges at some of the best companies in the world.
