Ndarala launches new blog

I put the Wednesday forum aside this week because I have been working on another project.

I have not talked much on this blog about my own activities because I have seen the primary purpose of the blog as improving the management of professional services firms. However, I need to talk here about what I do because this sets a context for this post.

My day to day activities centre on two things:

• trying to help individual clients, especially professional services firms, improve performance
• coordinating the activities of the Ndarala collective.

Ndarala is a funny animal. Formed in April 1996, our mission is to help the independent management related professional practice and professional achieve their objectives through cooperative action while maintaining true independence. We try to achieve the first through the creation of a framework that will facilitate cooperation, while the second dictates that members chose the level and direction of participation that suits their individual needs.

Making this work is not all beer and skittles. The very fact of independence that creates the need for cooperation also creates the main barrier to cooperation.

One of Ndarala's strengths lies in the spread of its people across professions including law, engineering, training and management consulting, a second in the service spread of its professionals, a third in the different marketplaces served. While this diversity creates its own challenges, it also provides an opportunity for cross-fertilisation. Certainly I find it very valuable in a professional sense.

Collectively, the Ndarala people create a lot of material of value. This is presently widely spread. We have therefore decided to create a new Ndarala blog to try to make this material more accessible to a broader audience while also providing a forum for comment on specific issues of professional and management interest.

In doing so, we have also been influenced by the increasing tendency of people to search blog posts for material as compared to broader web searches simply because so much current material is now best accessed by blog.

The new blog does not pretend to be an easy read. Because we are planning to use it as a point of reference as well as a place of comment, many of the posts will be much longer than normal, full articles in their own right. Further, the spread of interests of Ndarala professionals makes for a wide range of potential topics.

Still, we hope that it will prove to be of value to a broader audience.