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You are here: Home / Archives for management consulting

June 19, 2019 by Eric Butts 5 Comments

How to Take Notes in Meetings Like The Rich and Powerful

 

How to take notes

Do you ever feel like your day has so many meetings they all start to blend together?

So many details to capture. And sometimes not even knowing anything about the meeting topic.

It’s a real struggle. And because of this, one of the most important things you can do in your career (especially management consulting) is make sure you know how to take notes in meetings.

Working on consulting engagements, it’s not uncommon to have multiple meetings to prepare for the “real” meeting with the client. If you’re lucky, the meetings will yield some useful information.

There’s a huge problem with all of these meetings though – people have short-term memories. By the time the participants leave the meeting and get back to their desks, they remember minimal pieces of the discussion.

And even worse, when you ask people later about their commitments made in the meeting, they act like you’re speaking in a language they’ve never heard before. (Maybe accountability could be considered a language and that’s why they’re not familiar with it.)

That’s exactly why you’ll find the rich and powerful to be avid note takers.

When it comes to meeting notes, you’ll want to email those out to all invitees and be sure to focus on capturing the 6 following pieces of information.

Don’t worry if you’re having trouble following along in meetings. I’ll show you what to do in that situation too.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Management Consulting Tagged With: client management, consulting, how to take notes, management consulting

October 14, 2018 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

I found a business travel bag on Amazon that made me do a double take

Yes, a travel bag. I know it may sound a little crazy, but here’s the thing. Part of living the consulting lifestyle means there is some travel, for many that travel may be up to 80%. Some people love business travel and some people want to keep their business travel to a minimum. Regardless of which side of the business travel dichotomy you fall into, there is always a shared struggle about the luggage used. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Travel Tagged With: management consulting

February 27, 2017 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

4 Ways to Win When You’re Against the Odds

4 Ways to Win When You're Against the Odds

After being in management consulting for so long, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m wired to identify problems. If you think about principles of performance management and project management that are large parts of what consultants do, it makes sense that you get the most bang for your buck by spending your time addressing things that aren’t going well and need attention/change more so than the things that are going just as you planned.

The downside of this exception-based management is that people who are performing well don’t always get the recognition they rightfully deserve to encourage them to keep it up.

This brings me to Tom Brady, a guy who by most accounts is winning at life. He’s rich, a pro athlete, has a supermodel wife (also rich), and may have just solidified his status as the greatest quarterback in the history of the National Football League based on the outcome of the Super Bowl (his 5th championship).

And what did I do? I sent you an email about the train wreck that was the Atlanta Falcons. While the lessons to learn from the Falcons’ collective shortcomings were legit, we can also learn what it takes to beat the odds by looking at what the Patriots did during that same game. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Career Advice Tagged With: career management, management consulting

September 17, 2016 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

ESPN Violated One of the Major Rules of Consulting


ESPN fantasy delay

In case you don’t like sports or somehow manage to interact with zero people who like sports (or maybe you live in a place where American football isn’t so popular), something pretty interesting happened this past Sunday. The worldwide leader had a “not top 10” moment of its own that I bet they won’t be replaying for the entertainment of its millions of viewers. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Management Consulting Tagged With: client management, espn, management consulting

September 6, 2016 by Chloe Hull 4 Comments

Three Things I’ve Learned in One Year of Management Consulting

 

Management Consulting Skills

Most people will tell you that college is the time in your life when you learn the most, but I have to disagree with those people. While I agree that college is an amazing time for learning (and a heck of a lot of fun, too), both in the educational sense and the social, interpersonal sense, the real learning comes after you walk across that stage.

While you may know how to calculate EPS or how to use Lagrange multipliers in macroeconomics, there’s so much more you need to know to be successful in your career. Being only one year into my management consulting career, I’m well aware that I have many miles to go before I can claim any real knowledge on how to attain career success. That being said, I’ve learned a thing or two in the past 12 months that I’d like to share for those of you who may be on the first few steps of your career paths as well. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Management Consulting Tagged With: career advice, guest post, management consulting

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