Business ethics, the ultimate competitive advantage

Business ethics, the ultimate competitive advantage Business ethics is easily one of the most talked about subjects today, but poorly defined. It is seen as merely a requirement to discuss in meetings versus being a sustainable competitive advantage that can lower the cost of conducting business. There are virtually no guidelines for business ethics and very few business ethics principles that can be practically applied. Summary: Business ethics is not a criminal issue. They can overlap but are generally mutually exclusive. There are no absolute rules for business ethics and the right decision is determined by the context of each situation. Many ethical decisions are usually selfish when analyzed over the long term. Ethics is a significant career competitive advantage where the benefits can be measured in dollar terms. What is business ethics? Business ethics applies to three types of actions: Actions not covered by the law. Actions for which the law is not enforced. Actions for which the law is clearly wrong and should not be enforced. That's because in most other types of situations, the law applies and we need not worry about ethics. Therefore, when someone tells me, “I made this recording because it is legal in…

Business Ethics Principles

Business Ethics Principles Strong business ethics principles are vital to ensure a successful long-term career. One single thing that you can do that will make you stand out in life and in business is to cultivate very strong fundamental values and make it define who you are. In practice, strong business ethics principles are not common in employees, as you may have noticed yourself. If strong business ethics principles were common we would not need so many laws and enforcement agencies. We could simply expect employees to do what is right. A reputation for strong business ethics principles, however, gives you a sustainable competitive advantage. In business, strong fundamental values could include many things but the underlying value is integrity at all times. Integrity must guide all dealings with internal and external stakeholders. When it comes to success, as important as having integrity you need to have an image of having integrity. It is a halo that can protect you from accusations. It takes years to develop this halo but it can be lost in one act, lasting just one second. To cultivate strong business ethics principles, one needs to acquire or strengthen several business values that are vital for anyone who…

What a Strategy Workshop Will Not Give You at the End

What a Strategy Workshop Will Not Give You at the End In today's article I want to cover what I believe is a major misunderstanding about general strategy workshops and visioning workshops. We have called the strategy workshop a visioning workshop in this study. It is a common term used in corporate strategy studies and transformation studies, depending on the firm you work at. You may call it a strategy workshop, or a planning workshop. They are all the same thing. A strategy workshop does not create the strategy, but helps you narrow down the problem If you are building up to this big strategy workshop, and think that at the end of it you are going to get a strategy, that is not true. The strategy workshop helps you narrow down things but it does not create the strategy. I am going to to talk you through the meaning of that as well as the implications. A version of this article, with the slides and the exhibits, is available on YouTube as well. If you like exhibits and it is useful to look at, you can view it below. https://youtu.be/NEz6H3WETyA Many of you who are FC Insiders, which means…

Corporate Strategy Development

Corporate Strategy Development What is a corporate strategy? Is corporate strategy different from the business unit strategy? Is the process a corporate strategy development process is the same for a business unit? Corporate strategy is the most challenging of all strategy engagements since engagements lack an objective function, are less quantitative than one would assume, and require stronger business acumen/business judgment to interpret ambiguous findings. Summary: We focus on the first two steps in a corporate strategy development engagement. How a partner develops the overall viewpoint he will bring to the engagement, and the process to develop an objective function/problem statement. This will eventually lead us to the three parts of all corporate strategy development studies: selecting a market, the segment of the value chain to service, and the business model. HBO’s Corporate Strategy Imagine you are the CEO of HBO. You are pondering your corporate strategy. Do you need a new corporate strategy or need to better execute your existing corporate strategy? For years you ruled the roost as the most celebrated cable channel with the lions share of Emmy Awards. You produced premium content, charged premium fees, and had very few competitors. Network channels like Fox, ABC, CBS, and…

Business Consulting Services: What is your point of differentiation?

Business Consulting Services: What is your point of differentiation? Hi everyone, and welcome to the next episode of our management consulting iTunes channel where we discuss the business of running and growing a consulting firm. The title of this episode is, "Business Consulting Services: What is your point of differentiation?" So, for those of you listening to this podcast channel, remember we have two other podcast channels. We have the Strategy Skills podcast channel, which dives into, usually, one particular study and explains the mechanics of how we develop the thinking. So that's heavy on the analysis side of things. And we have the Case Interviews & Management Consulting podcast channel, which is about case interviews, where we help people develop the skills to secure employment at firms like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and so on. But that is very useful channel because we teach foundational skills like brainstorming, business judgment, hypothesis generation, and so on, which will be useful to anyone, whether you're launching a boutique consulting firm or you are trying to do analyses. This channel is about the business of running and growing a consulting firm. https://youtu.be/S820m4xxrGk Your point of differentiation is the reason you think clients will hire you.…

Consulting case study: the one thing every consulting case study must produce

Consulting interview preparation should start with these 3 skills

Consulting Interview Preparation Should Start with These 3 Skills Firmsconsulting placed well over 1,000 clients into McKinsey, BCG, and Bain via one-on-one coaching, and MANY more via our online Premium membership program. To RAISE our placement rate, we have developed some advanced consulting interview preparation techniques. Candidates that follow them will have the best chance of succeeding. And we will discuss one critical preparation technique today. Congratulate Heidi on joining McKinsey! Let's start with a story about a client named Heidi. Heidi is a 26-year-old Ph.D. in management. She is married with no kids and had been the assistant-to-the-CEO at a major hospital group for the past 2 years. When Heidi joined our consulting interview coaching program she lacked confidence as a result of many failed case interview attempts, despite practicing extensively with many well-known case books. And her lack of confidence was worsened by her slow math and weak business judgment. Heidi started her consulting interview preparation with very tough cases without first learning the foundational skills to tackle those cases. Once we adjusted her learning strategy, she performed much better. She eventually joined McKinsey, which was quite an achievement considering her starting point: her math was slow, her…

The Audacity of Hope

Most of us, myself included, don’t have the capacity to read all the books we want and should read. So to help the Firmsconsulting community not miss out on important learnings we come across, we will periodically share lessons from important, influential and insightful books. After all, one insight can change the trajectory of your entire life. Today’s focus is on lessons learned from Carly Fiorina’s memoir “Tough Choices”. As you probably know, Carly was president and CEO of HP from 1999 to 2005, and Fortune named her the most powerful woman in business. She is someone I deeply admire as a professional and businessperson. I first read this book when I transferred from working as a receptionist to becoming a management consultant and it helped me greatly in maintaining the right mindset as I continued building my career. Insight number 1 – your life is your own. Until the age of 22, Carly spent her life pleasing her parents. Her mother was an artist and Carly played the piano, so she considered becoming a professional musician. Ultimately, she decided against it because the isolation that came with that career was too much to bear. This, by the way, is…

3 ways to stay motivated while starting a career from nothing

It’s very easy to feel inspired when you have a nice job and are sitting in an air conditioned room viewing motivational stories on the TV, online or in magazines. Yet, what if your environment is challenging. It’s very difficult to be inspired, to stay motivated, to see your potentially bright future when you are struggling to pay your rent, when you have no money to buy food or if you are in a horrible job. When your life is bad, when your job is terrible and you are hungry and humiliated - you feel like a failure. And those circumstances reinforce themselves. You struggle to see beyond them. We can’t ignore the power of momentum. Success breeds success and failure breeds failure. So in this episode lets talk about how to stay motivated to create a big life for yourself, even if you start from humble beginnings. First I want to talk about some of the challenges that people, who don’t come from a difficult background, fail to appreciate. I will explain this with a story from my past. Way back when I worked as a receptionist one of my roles was to restock the office. There was a kitchen in…