Florian in travel mode - Copyright: Malin Schulz, 2008

I know I mentioned this before, but for those of you who didn’t catch it while in print: Zeit Campus recently released the article they did about me and (mainly) the content of my suitcase on their website.

So, in case you were wondering what the heck a consultant has in the black trolley, this is your chance to get the inside scoop.

“Der Typ mit dem Koffer” (Zeit Campus online)

Thanks again to Inge Kutter and Malin Schulz from Zeit Campus who made this a really pleasurable experience, and to Achim from my employer’s press department who gave me this fun opportunity.

One word: Hilarious.

So much for the fun part. The book got that down pretty well.
But wait, there is more! Every consultant should consider this mandatory literature… because it teaches you a hell lot about what to do and what not to do when dealing with airline personnel, and I take it you all do this more or less every bloody week, enjoying it or not. This book might just save you from getting the worst seat in the airplane, or having your coffee spit in. Not that I assume any of you do behave in any way that might tickle such behavior. Of course you don’t.
But maybe you have a cousin - you know, that bloke who behaves really badly sometimes, especially when it is 6am on a Monday morning and he just wants to get on that f’ing flight and really has no time to be friendly or stuff, and happens to be a consultant. Just by chance, of course. Then you should really recommend this book to your cousin.

On a sidenote - yeah, I am back. I really had no nerve for blogging in the last months, but the skies are clearing now, so let’s kick this thing back into gear, shall we?

For those of you who are wondering if there are some rules to follow when packing your bags - well yes, there are! My heroes at Manager Tools recently started covering travel-related topics, and as luck has it, they cover packing your bags first. You find that podcast here.

Now what?

First of all, let me put a disclaimer. I am not an expert on this stuff, I just have been there before. As they say in the sunscreen speech - my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

Alright, alright. Still - Now what?

They want you, so they made you an offer. Realize that this is the point where you have the most power in the whole process, but you need to play your cards wisely. Once you signed the contract, you can of course try to further negotiate and do stuff - it might just not lead so much more than some very confused and borderline angry people on the other side. Including your future boss.
As is described wonderfully in the book “What color is my parachute” (a great what-am-I-good-at and how-do-I-search-for-a-job-that-fits-me-right book), you can/should only try to wiggle the posts that make up the contract before they are hammered into the ground.

• The cash
  You were waiting for this the whole time, right?
  For a junior consulting job, normally there is not that much room to negotiate in the first place: Many firms have tight ranges that they pay for entry positions. Still, they are ranges. If you are so lucky to know what the range is, and you feel that your double MBA and PhD in theoretical maths are not priced into the contract well enough - you COULD ask for more money. I did not do this, as I was content with what I was offered, so for tactics and stuff you’ll need to ask elsewhere. Take this thought with you, though: They are constantly hiring people as smart and as well educated as you are. Heck, they have even seen better ones. You should make sure to know exactly what your leverage is before you ask for more money.
• The benefits
  If you think everyone gets a car and it is not in the contract? Well, then you might not get one. Ask for such stuff once you got the contract in your hands and once you talk to HR. DO NOT ask for goodies in the interview rounds - that’s a killer, and not a good one. So - when the time has come, and you think something is missing to make this package real gold for you, ask for it, politely. Be reasonable and as humble as you can manage to be. Chances are that they ramp up a bit. For Germany for example, one thing is moving assistance. Often, a company does not include it in the first offer, but when you ask for it, they are happy (more or less) to help you out with some cash to get your stuff to the city where your “point of affiliation” (=home office) will be.
• The home office
  When working for a bigger company, they have many offices, and you might have only interviewed at corporate headquarters. Check if you are assigned to an office in the contract, and if it is the one you want. If not, call them up and have it changed. Basically, this is a thing you should have talked about in the final interview, at least briefly - but who knows, maybe you were thinking about the (for sure!) upcoming Porsche too hard.

If you got that all settled, had a nice chit-chat with HR or the hiring Partner, the offer is final, and you should have a pretty good idea if you want to take it or not. But if….

You got other irons in the fire?
It was probably a good idea to not bet on one horse only in search for your first gig. Now you got an offer - or more - and maybe some applications are still in the process.
Most offers have an expiry date. It is reasonable to ask for an extension for one or two weeks, to be able to see how other things turn out - but much more, without a very good reason, just makes it obvious that you are waiting for something better to come around the corner before you take the offer they made you. This is not the perception you want to create, right?
If you have multiple offers on your desk at the same time - make the decision led by your heart and gut feeling (how did I feel around those people? Am I looking forward to working with them? etc.), and supported by facts. DO NOT BASE YOUR DECISION ON SALARY ALONE! Money can buy a lot of things, but not job satisfaction (ok, there might be people in iBanking who are an exception, but still). The money has to cover your basic living expenses, and more is better than less for sure - but really, I can’t stress this enough. It must not be all about cash.
If you are still in the process with other companies and you want to take the offer you got - play it fair, tell them that you took up a different opportunity (no details needed), and that you’d like to talk to them another time around. Be friendly, be polity - remember that people always meet at least twice, and maybe next time, they are your must-have-oh-my-god-I-want-to-work-there choice. Don’t burn bridges.
Some people might still go to an interview after signing a contract… make up your mind if you want to steal those people’s time, and if it really gives you anything to do so.
Avoid at all costs to sign a contract “just for safety, in case I find nothing better”. Many contracts contain a fine for not showing up, and although this can be settled in a talk in many cases, it certainly does not make the other side happy, because they just have to start all over again. If you are unfortunate, word gets around… especially if you are joining straight from university and the company’s HR talks to your school’s placement people. Seen it happen, wasn’t pretty, ’nuff said.

Now celebrate!
Hey, you just signed up for a challenging and exciting career, and maybe even your first real job. Celebrate! Invite your friends, have a blast… and use the time before you start. Travel, move if you need/want to, get settled… and maybe even prepare a little bit.

This post is part of Consulting 101, a series all about starting out as a consultant.
I’ll cover the preparation in the next installment - stay tuned!
As always, your feedback is most welcome.

Consulting 101 is laid out to be a helpful guide at the very beginning of your consulting career - from preparation to the first days. I’ve already outlined a number of topics for this, and the series will probably start in the next week.

In the meantime, please let me know in the comments what content you’d wish to have covered in the series, I’ll be likely to include it.

Be enthusiastic to power yourself
Are you thinking self betrayal right now? Well, this is one way to put it. What if you are facing a severe excel-cranking session and all you can do is think “when will it be done?”… and how could anybody ever be enthusiastic about powerpoint slides? That is not the point. The point is that you can influence your reactions. Make it a self-fulfilling prophecy! “This chart is gonna be rock`n`roll when I am done with it!” … “I’m gonna beat some awesome result out of this excel!” … make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has to be done anyway – so why not tell yourself that it can be fun? It might work! To prove the point, lets do a little test. For ten seconds now, smile brightly and laugh – regardless of what mood you are in, in almost all cases your body will sense your smile and your laughter and send out an internal happy pill to the brain. By acting as if you were happy, you can induce real happiness…. and that is the mechanics you can use to make your work more fun / less pain, too.

Be enthusiastic to power the team
We are working in a high-stress, high-pace, high-pressure environment, so there is energy inherent in the system. Deliverables need to get ready, the project is moving fast, and so do the tasks. With enthusiasm – or as I put it for myself, outspoken positive energy – you can bring a good spin to all that stress. Does that sound too touchy-feely for ya? I understand. See, it is not about sticking smiley badges on everyones chest. It can be as simple as sharing the image of a desired outcome with a colleague in a positive way - “hey, when we get this analysis done and melt it down to three slides, that will be a killer argument and really opening the clients’ eyes!”. I think that sharing positive images can make a difference in the attitude you and your colleagues have towards the things you work on (which can be tedious tasks sometimes).

Be enthusiastic to power the client
Towards the client, of course, you are the serious and all-business consultant. Still, I have made good experiences with conveying a positive mood. This can easily drift towards promising the client stuff that you are not sure you can deliver on – thin ice, that is. Don’t make promises you are not sure about. They will hold you accountable. Instead, show enthusiasm when delivering results! It is not making your presentation a circus show… but you want to make your results shine. Invest in your presentation skills. Smile. Use your voice. Convey to them the meaning of what you show them, not only the pure content.

1. Get the plastic
   Every car rental I know of has a bonus card. The standard ones are usually free for everybody and only carry your details, so that you don’t have to provide address, etc. every time you rent. The better ones (”platinum”, “privilege”, etc.) often entitle you to free upgrades. You get them by either simply renting a lot of cars (just a matter of time) or, if you are lucky, your company already has a deal with them, so that you not only get a special rate, but also that desired piece of plastic. Check with your colleagues when you are new - everybody plays this game, so it should not be hard to find someone in the know.
2. Build a relationship to the people at the counter
   This works great when you are renting in smaller airports / train stations / cities, where the crew at the desk of the rental firm does not rotate too much. In the best case, there is always the same person there when you arrive, half awake, on Monday morning. This is your chance! Those at the desk have, most often, direct influence on what car they give you. The hold, so to speak, the keys to your rental luck. Be nice to them. Cheer them up. Don’t be pushy, and don’t force it. The key (again!) lies in making it a positive experience for THEM, so that they can happily reward you with a bigger/faster/nicer car. If not this week, then next.
3. Ask for an upgrade. NICELY.
   The times I got a shiny sportscar while paying for a Golf? That was when the customer before me was a rude idiot who tried to push the clerk at the desk into giving him a big car. Of course, he did not. If I remember correctly, he walked away with a Ford. Serves him right. When it was my turn, we first shared a laugh about that ridiculous guy, and when I gave her my piece of plastic and said that I had a reservation, I just said “something that fits the good weather would be great!”. Her response: “Hm, let me see. Wait a minute!”… off she went to the back office, and when she came back she was almost apologetic - “I am sorry, there was no convertible left… but I think you’ll like it still!”. Let’s just say I was never faster at client side than that day.
   Remember: Asking for an upgrade is perfectly fine. Just be nice and casual about it. And don’t bitch if it doesn’t work - see point two, you might see her again next week!

On a sidenote: I do recognize that it does not matter at all in a real-world-sense what car you get as long as it takes you where you want to go. Still, being a road warrior, it often is a very welcome goodie that makes the Monday-morning routine just a bit more fun.

| View | Upload your own

What do we learn from this?

1. When you do fun stuff on your company’s CI, be prepared for it to hit the street eventually. This one is quite old, so no harm done I guess - but your boss might not be amused at all about your version of this that you just thought of. If you have to do it, don’t use a company template.
2. The author did not use the action title correctly at all… but I think we can forgive this
3. When communicating, you have to adapt to the audience. Leave your consulting talk and your ppt slides at work. Your family and your girlfriend will appreciate it (otherwise - see last slide!)

I told you about Jello Dashboard, a nifty tools that plugs into Outlook as an alternative “home screen”, a while ago. Last week, the developer Dr. Uqbar released the new version 4.5 of Jello Dashboard. It is still beta software, and still free.

Pain free GTD implementation in Outlook
While there are ways to model tasks and task views in Outlook so that it gets many GTDish features, it always involves some compromises. For example, I got the context view down, I can see items for review, “+ waiting for” and “+ someday maybe” items get out of my way, and I can sort by context – but still, there is no good way to group contexts by project, which for me is an important feature, and no good way to assign Next Actions, which is a crucial part of GTD.

Jello Dashboard takes the weight off your shoulders. It knows your calendar items. It knows your tasks, and your inbox. After installing it, you can dig right in, create the categories and projects you need, and then work right out of it.

The important thing is: Jello does not tinker with your Outlook. It is basically a (very sophisticated) HTML/JavaScript page that plugs into Outlook. All functionality of Outlook remains the same, your tasks stay where they are, so do your mail and your calendar.

Speaking of my experience, running Jello on Outlook 2007 and Vista, Jello installs easily and can be removed just as quick. Plus, the small community (see the Google Group) is active and the developer is very responsive (he just recently added a feature that allows me to use the “+” in category names after asking for it in the forum), so when you got issues there is support. It is free. It gives you projects, Next Actions and context views just like you wish you had them. Enough reasons to give it a spin, if you ask me. I am doing the same on this side of the internet. I like it so far – maybe struggling with manual implementation in Outlook for a few months made me more accessible for the idea that this could work for me. The killer feature is Outlook integration, for sure, and for this I am ready to forgive minor performance issues (it could be snappier) and wait for a few little kinks to be worked out.

Don’t forget the basics
Remember: Jello Dashboard is a nice tool – but you can only use it to full effect when you are familiar with the basics of GTD methodology.

Have you tried it? Share your experiences in the comments!

Now, a new book is coming together. It is called “Lores of Wizards”. It is written by Richard and Jon Metzler, both of extensive consulting background – but they do not talk about themselves. Instead, they interviewed with many mavericks of the consulting industry (mostly US focused), and let them speak. The result is very lively, and as I see it, hits close to home.

You can see (and read!) the book grow!
Chapter by chapter, the Metzlers have decided to publish the book online. As of now, you can read the first three chapters, free of charge, right here on the book’s website. I printed them out and read them in one swoop sitting in the garden today. Maybe you want to do the same? You are in for some war stories, some chuckles, and some big truths of our profession. I am sure going to buy the book once it is finished.

Do you have other consulting-related weekend reading tips? Let us know in the comments!