having fun while doing a great job would be killer, right?

There’s a thing about consulting. It’s a high-demand, always-on job. You live and breathe it. Throughout the week. It’s fine, it’s almost a necessity to be good at the job.

Being able to become a normal human again, though, is an equally important quality. You need to relax. You need to take care of the rest of your life that is more or less on pause during the week. Friends and family want their attention. If you keep your suit on (in your head), there are problems ahead:

• You don’t give yourself a break. That’s the sort of people who just keep on working on their assignment during the weekend and think it is a great achievement when they had a beer instead of a coke while crunching on the next slide deck. As a result, you burn out quicker.
• People outside of consulting don’t really get you. It might be funny for your friends the first time you squash them with consulting lingo, but it gets boring and then annoying quickly. Especially if you simply don’t notice it and think that it is totally OK to talk to your girlfriend about certain pain points that pose the risk of being a show-stopper for the next milestone in your relationship.
• You become a boring person. You will. If everything you can talk about is related to your job, that’s awful. What about all those other interests you have?

Convinced now? Hopefully. Now, on to the plan. Three easy steps you can use to transition from hotshot consultant to likeable human being:

1. Establish the fact that you are not working on the weekend
   Oh, I hear the screams already. “I can’t do that!” “all my colleagues work on the weekend, too!” “but I get emails from my boss!” “I need to show that I am putting in the extra effort!” For crying out loud, that’s rubbish.
   Of course, there are times when you really have to work on the weekend, be it because you were a slacker during the week or an emergency came up on Friday evening. Still, these should, need to be exceptions. And it can be done. I’ll actually write a post about that, next – simply because it is such an important thing to achieve, in my opinion. And because I strongly hold the believe that if you work 7 days a week, that’s not a life worth living. [Update: Here is the post on "how to NOT work on the weekend"]
2. Use the travel home for winding down
   For me, this is a way of starting the weekend early. The moment I checked in for my flight home, out comes the iPod and the non-project-work-related book I am reading at the time. Take off the tie for added relaxation. Take your thoughts on vacation, and after a few minutes, you will be able to look around you and pity those worker bees who still have nothing better to do than be stressed and see if there still is someone sending them emails they can reply to and make a busy impression.
3. Create little rituals that make you really come home when coming home
   Everything goes here. For some, it might be changing into something comfortable, hanging up the suit and kicking the laptop bag into the far corner of their apartment. For others, it is calling up the (hopefully still existing) friends and checking for the latest news or the plans for Saturday night. Some might simply watch their favorite sitcom or pick up their guitar and play a few tunes. As long as it is not work-related and gets you back in touch with your private life, it works.

Now you are ready to kick back and relax. Plus, your friends will keep liking you because you remain a cool dude / girl. Double-plus, you will still be interesting to the rest of the world because you talk in normal sentences and have actually seen the new Bond movie.

Extra-tip for the 5-4-3 people:
(For those not in the know, that is 5 days working for the client, 4 days on client site, 3 nights in the hotel)
Hey, you got it good – things should be way easier for you, simply because winding down happens in two steps: First you come home, then there is still a working day left, but in your office, and then you can start into the weekend directly. Use that advantage! Dress casually in the office (people wearing a suit and tie on office Friday simply get a sneer from me… really, what is the use?), chat with your colleagues, and get as much paperwork done as possible (one tip that will come up again in the post on how to NOT work on the weekend).

There’s a thing about consulting. It’s a high-demand, always-on job. You live and breathe it. Throughout the week. It’s fine, it’s almost a necessity to be good at the job. Being able to become a normal human again, though, is an equally important quality. You need to relax. You need to take care of the ...

Consultants do present in front of board rooms full of CXO’s the whole time, from Monday to Friday, even the most junior ones.

Nah, ‘course not. Most of the time, the Powerpoint slides you do never end up being projected on a wall, but rather emailed and printed. And, I hate to brake it to you, there are weeks when you don’t have a sit-in at the CEO’s office. He still calls you, of course, but that’s just a given. (If you haven’t noticed the tongue-in-cheek yet, for all its worth, go become a banker)

Still there regularly are occasions when you get to actually present. For those times, the right tools can kick your performance up a notch. There’s no use in gadgets without solid preparation – both of the material to be presented and the performance itself – but let’s assume that you did your homework for now.

Think about one of the last keynote presentation Steve Jobs gave. See what you don’t see? Right. He doesn’t stand there hunched over his laptop, clicking the slides forward.

He’s got a remote. You need one, too.

Maybe not the exact same one – that one costs you around 500 EUR minimum. It’s a great piece of tech, but for 99% of the settings… a bit over the top. But fear not, there are many affordable options out there.

What you want is a device that advances the slides on the push of a button, remotely. There are many option out there, the cheapest I saw cost about 25 EUR. I got myself a Logitech Presenter (about 60 EUR), mainly just to pamper myself, but there are some features I like:

• It has a built-in timer that gives you  a countdown, an indication which quarter of your time you are in, and buzzes when you are about to run out of time: This saves me looking at the watch, plus I can glance at it relatively unnoticed.
• It has buttons to get the presentation started,  to blank the screen and a switch on the side to control the volume of the computer – great when you are showing embedded video/audio files and the sound level is not perfect from the start.
• There’s a laser pointer embedded. I mostly use it to fool around, but it might come in handy.
• It has a three-level battery indicator which reduces guesswork
• The USB dongle fits inside the remote, so risk of losing it is minimized.

The basic feature set you are looking for, anyway: Slide forward / slide backward, a button to blank the screen as bonus. Don’t go for anything that just submits “left mouse click / right mouse click” – especially in consulting presentations, you almost always have to get back a few slides when questions pop up, and it’s worth nothing when on a right click the context menu pops up. Too much hassle.

What is in it for you?

• You can move about freely. Most often, you still look at the screen of your laptop to see the slide that is shown behind you, but now you don’t hunch over it like a hen protecting its eggs. This leads to…
• Better presence on stage. Your posture is a big part in how you are perceived as a presenter. Plus, it has a feel of professionalism to it when you don’t have to glance over to your colleague to have him click to the next slide or do it yourself.
• Last and most importantly: You are more relaxed while presenting. This cannot be paid in gold. When you are in front of the client, presenting the results of that big, expensive consulting project – you need all your mojo on the content and on your performance.

Consultants do present in front of board rooms full of CXO’s the whole time, from Monday to Friday, even the most junior ones. Nah, ‘course not. Most of the time, the Powerpoint slides you do never end up being projected on a wall, but rather emailed and printed. And, I hate to brake it to ...

While reading through “born to be riled” by Jeremy Clarkson, the fabulous motoring journalist and presenter of BBC’s “Top Gear” (the best show about cars – ever. Period. Even girls love it. It’s the best going show on all of BBC… nuff said.  Now where was I?) … right: reading this book, which is a collection of Clarkson’s newspaper columns, I came across a very interesting tidbit:

“I’m often asked what qualifications you need to work on Top Gear, and I’ve always given the same advice. Like cars by all means, but love writing. Love it so much that you do it to relax. See the new Alfa or whatever as nothing more than a tool on which your prose can be based.”

Let this sink in for a second. This is a guy who gets to drive the newest, fastest, most exciting cars in the world in the most exciting, remote, fun and crazy locations in the world, and is paid for it. But his message is not “boy, you got to be a complete petrolhead to be fit for this job” – he says that you really need to love writing, the journalists’ basic process, so much that you do it for relaxing, to be fit for that job.

With consultants, I think, it is a similar story.

There’s the consultant’s lifestyle. Although of course not as glamorous as often depicted, there is a lot to it, especially for the young and eager types out there. You travel a lot – in fact the airplane is your bus and the taxi is your bike. You sleep in fancy hotels. You wear a dark suit. You get to meet the top management of large corporations – and they even pay you really good money for all that exciting stuff.

If your motivation to be a consultant is to lead the lifestyle (of course, only thinking about the shiny advantages), then you might not make it far. Or become quite miserable fairly fast. Probably both.

Here’s the inside scoop: Consulting, at the entry level that I (can) talk about, is all about the basics. You don’t get paid for looking posh. You get paid for doing a lot of work, under often less-then-perfect constraints (like… time). This work entails hell of a lot of research, analysis and synthesis of data – what other people sometimes call “gruntwork”. I call it crunching. You’ll have to sift through thousands of pages in search of one key figure. You’ll need to take an unsorted mess of data, throw it up in the air, and catch it in wonderfully organized, storylined, factchecked, approved and finetuned Powerpoint charts.  There is nothing fancy about the work. It can be tedious. Yet, this is what you are mostly measured by. What you do to help a project succeed, your firm and your clients.

Jeremy has it right. He tells us that only when you are good at the basic tasks of your job, then you can hit it off. I, for myself, don’t love every data deep-dive that I have to make. I don’t love spending hour after hour in Powerpoint (though I trade Excel for Powerpoint at any time. I loathe Excel, powerful as it may be). So I don’t expect you to do it. But I do absolutely believe that you cannot be a good consultant (as I said, in the junior’s ranks) without being comfortable with it, and the more enjoyment you get out of it, the merrier.

For all of those contemplating the move into consulting, this means you should think about the actual WORK you’ll be doing at least as much and as seriously as you do think about the perks you’ll have.

As a closing remark, this posting has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I, after a year in consulting, find it almost comforting to work in Powerpoint. I sometimes get so much fun out of making good slides that I am scared of myself. That is a totally unrelated issue, and I am dealing well with it, thank you very much.

While reading through “born to be riled” by Jeremy Clarkson, the fabulous motoring journalist and presenter of BBC’s “Top Gear” (the best show about cars – ever. Period. Even girls love it. It’s the best going show on all of BBC… nuff said.  Now where was I?) … right: reading this book, which is ...

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.

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 ...

I just finished “Air Babylon“, and it only took me two days because I had bought other books in between and had to get started at them as well. It is a made up story about people working for an airline – but based on real tales from people in the industry – taking the reader along for an event-packed ride of one working day at a british airport. It features ground staff, from baggage handlers to the chaplan to the girls at the check-in desk, and also the pilots, the stewardesses and last not least, passengers. There’s fun, grief, blood, drugs, sex, love, crime, the whole lot and then some.

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?

I just finished \"Air Babylon\", and it only took me two days because I had bought other books in between and had to get started at them as well. It is a made up story about people working for an airline - but based on real tales from people in the industry - taking ...