Coming back online

Just a short note to say that I have largely been of-line for personal reasons. I am now coming back on-line, so you can expect more regular posts here.

People management dominates blog traffic

While I have been very slow in posting for some time, search engines have continued to draw some traffic to this blog.

It's interesting that eight in the top ten posts in the last month have been concerned with people managements issues. A similar pattern holds if I extend the time horizon to six months.

This has not always been the case. There was a time when business management issues dominated.

  What I don't get much traffic on, something that I find a bit disappointing, are my discipline of professional practice posts. This is an area I really care about as something that we all share across fields.

It may just be that search engine algorithms have changed. Still, it is disappointing.  

Management Perspectives merges with Managing the Professional Services Firm

After a far bit of thought and soul-searching, I have decided to merge Management Perspectives with this blog.

Originally, the two blogs were intended to serve very different purposes. However, I found that limits on my professional time meant that neither blog was getting proper attention. You can see that from the posts or lack thereof.

The merger means that this blog will carry a broader range of material without, hopefully, losing its original focus.

Welcome to visitor 25,000 and Happy Christmas to all

Time pressures this year have really limited my ability to post to the point that I almost decided to archive this blog. Then, for a number of reasons, I decided to continue.

Noric Dilanchian was one reason. He sends me a steady stream of material that he thinks, correctly, is worthy of comment. Then, too, the blog still attracts traffic despite my poor posting. In this context, welcome to visitor 25,000 who came from Finland.

A lot of the traffic is attracted by the nuts and bolts posts I have written, the how to do material. This seems to meet a real need. Just yesterday I got an email from someone seeking advice on resolution of a very specific problem.

Finally, there is other writing that I should comment on. Yesterday in Pin Striped Prison, for example, Legal Eagle reviewed Lisa Pryor's The Pin Striped Prison, dealing with some of the issues that I have written about.

I find it hard to maintain a very active posting pattern. What I will try to do, however, is to maintain a regular posting pattern to keep the blog current.

For those to whom it is relevant, have a happy Christmas. May 2010 be a good year for all of us.   

Leader vs manager – reflections on Hitler as this blog turns three

I have been reading Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire: Nazi rule in occupied Europe (Penguin Books, London 2009). It is quite a gripping if also depressing book.

Mazower focuses on the way Nazi Germany administered the large European empire it acquired so quickly and then lost. There is no doubt that Hitler was a great leader. He was able first to place his stamp on a nation and then lead that nation into a huge and initially successful war. He failed, something for which we can all be thankful, because he was such a bad manager.

I do not think that Hitler would have claimed to be a manager. In fact, he would have dismissed the concept. He was simply the leader. Management was the responsibility of others.

The problem is that Hitler’s own leadership approach made effective management impossible.

The Germans were very good at managing particular things, Adolf Eichman and the death camps are an example, yet the overall Nazi empire was run in an increasingly ramshackle fashion. Even those things that were effective had unforseen side effects.

Hitler’s difficulty, although he did not see things in these terms, is that he was the leader. Power was increasingly centralised in his hands. The German system dissolved into a series of satrapies each competing for the leader’s attention.

Reading the detail in Mazower left me with the very strong feeling that Nazi Germany could easily have won the Second World War or, at least, worked to a peace that preserved their core gains. The leadership that drew them into the war and gave them initial gains condemned them in the end.

Leadership versus management, that’s the rub.

When I started this blog all that time ago in July 2006, I called it managing, not leading, the professional services firm. I used the word managing deliberately, because it reflected my view that management in professional services was not very good.

In my first post on 2 July 2006 I said:

This blog has been created to encourage debate about and to provide information relevant too the management of all professional services firms.

With time, I hope that it will develop into a valuable resource.

I am not sure that I have achieved the second. However, I remain convinced that improved management in professional services is critical.

Managing the professional services firm - end month reflections November 2008

So we come to the end of another month and a rocky month it's been in some ways.

Just to take our mind of current troubles, this poster is from an exhibition by Australia's National Library, Follow the Sun - Australian Travel Posters  1930s to 1950s.

The scene is quite iconic of Australia then (c1930s) and now.

I continue to wonder whether I should merge this blog with Management Perspectives simply because two professional blogs are difficult to maintain.

I have decided not to for the present. To my mind, the two blogs are complimentary.

Management Perspectives provides a vehicle for my writing on economics and broader managements issues extending beyond this blog's focus.

I am better of maintaining both for the present, cross-referencing material as appropriate.   

Managing the professional services firm: a pause for reflection

As I write this post, it is twenty two days since my last post.

There is so much to write about. I have written many posts on other of my blogs, plus I have a large number of part completed posts on this blog. As issues come up, I start a post.

What to do? I have decided to bring up this explanatory post, then back-fill. I really want to maintain the continuity in my thinking and writing.

Updated

Return from China

I have been in China, hence the further delay in posts.

While we were there the financial crisis broke. There was a sort of morbid fascination in watching it unfold. At the same time, it was also fascinating looking at China on-ground, comparing what I saw with perceptions formed through Australian reporting in particular.

Perhaps the strongest impression was the weakening in the Chinese economy as compared to continued Australian reporting on China's economic strength. This came through in things such as local reporting on declining car sales, declines in manufacturing because of declines in international demand.

Then there was the milk scandal, something of immediate interest because we both drink milk. The damage to China's reputation has been significant, something the country could well have done without. The economic knock-on effects as well have been significant because of the sheer size of subsequent product recalls.

Managing the Professional Services Firm - stocktake of posts

From time to time I do stocktakes, pulling together past posts. These get submerged. It is also more difficult to edit posts that may be a fair bit back in the past.

Given all this, I am in the process of updating past stocktakes and then bringing them to the front of the blog.

Blogging Perspectives - the need for persistence

This seems to have been a difficult year from a blogging perspective.

At the start of this year my own posting became very irregular, with just one post in January, none in February, five in March, then a long break to July. Looking around, I am not alone.

Just to take three examples on my regular visit list: Chris Marston hasn't posted since February, David Maister stopped posting in June for at least a long break, while the Juris blog morepartnerincome also appears to have entered a state of suspended animation in June.

Maintaining a blog can be hard work, especially when busy. Further, as postings become irregular it actually becomes harder to post because the ideas generated through the act of posting drop away. Think of a blog as a professional conversation; the pauses in the conversation increase until the conversation stutters into silence.

Most regularly maintained professional blogs have at least a few regular readers. Some rely on feeds, others simply visit. Depending in part on the frequency of posting, some visit once a week, some just drop in from time to time.

As posting becomes less regular or even stops, regular visits decline. People still drop in from time to time to check, but finding nothing new, they stop coming. Search engine traffic continues, although this too declines with time as newer content comes to dominate.

I noticed all this on this blog during the low post period. My own flow of ideas declined. The number of repeat visitors dropped right away. Then search engine related traffic started to fall.

One of the points I try to make about the role of blogging in a professional services environment is that the reason for blogging must be clearly defined. In my case, blogging is central to my continuing professional development. It forces me to articulate ideas, to search for new material. This is especially important if, like me, you are often working in a degree of isolation from day-to-day professional interaction.

All writers, bloggers included, mine their own experiences. In writing, we capture and present ideas and lessons from those experiences. From a purely personal perspective, blogging has been invaluable as a device that allows me to stand-back from and reflect on my professional work.

All this explains why I have resumed active posting on this blog. However, resumption of the blogging conversation has been harder than expected because the pauses in the conversation had become so long.

To manage this, I have chosen to back-fill. By this I simply mean that I am adding posts from a past point (in my case from the 1 July post - Break in posting) to create momentum and discussion, if only with myself!

I mention this because it explains the gaps between the dates on the post (in this case 9 August) and the actual publication dates (23 August) that some readers have noticed. I have to say that while the re-starting process has been difficult, it has also been invaluable because of the way it has encouraged me to revisit previous thinking.

Break in posting

This has been a long break in posting. There have simply been too many pressures to allow me to post regularly.

In all this, I have missed the discipline of posting. Even when posts are short, they provide an opportunity to consolidate my thoughts.

There is an irony in my failure to post because I am such a strong supporter of the use of blogs as a professional device. I am failing to deliver on my own advice!

Despite my failure to post on a regular basis over the last six months, the blog has continued to attract search engine traffic. In December 2007 it passed 11,000 visitors. The number today is 16,477. So my previous work is still attracting readers.

So I am going to try to resume posting as from 1 July, simply catching up on the July back log and thus getting back into a pattern of regular posting.

A break to recharge

I am taking some weeks off from posting to recharge. I expect to be back on line at the start of March.

End Month Review - August 2007

Welcome to visitor 10,000 who sneaked in while my attention was elsewhere. But then, that's the way this month has been.

Because of work pressures, July postings were irregular. This was quickly reflected in a decline in blog traffic. So I started August with a determination to do better. However, work pressures again quickly intervened.

To provide discipline, I adopted the practice of reserving posts, starting them on the due date even if I could not finish them at that time. This meant that the posts would finally appear with the right date, even if the real publication date was somewhat later.

This may be somewhat annoying to the reader, but it has imposed a discipline on me. So to that extent it has worked.

While posts over the last two months have addressed a range of issues, the core unifying theme has been ways of improving management. Drawing from my own experience as both manager and consultant, my aim has been to provide simple how to do guidance.

I am not sure that I have been fully successful. It's hard to know how much stuff is used once launched into the ether, but there have been a small number of readers with multiple page views. This suggests some interest.

September is also likely to be a messy month. As I write this, I have three part completed September posts yet to be published. But I do seem to be catching up!

Happy Birthday Blog

It almost escaped my attention, but this blog turned one on 3 July. Since then I have written 160 posts exploring different aspects of the management of the professional services firm looked at in one way or another by 9,500 visitors.

Maintaining the blog has not always been easy. In the last month or so I have struggled to maintain regular posting because of other pressures.

Has it been worthwhile? I think so, although one can never tell just what impact a blog like this has had. Most visitors come to the site via search engines, a second group via links from other blogs. I like to think (hope) that some at least will have got some benefit from the visit.

Now that I have got a reasonable body of work up, I hope over the next twelve months to broaden and deepen the work. That way I work towards my longer term goal of a site that will really be helpful to all those wrestling with management and professional issues within a professional services environment.

Return to Duty

Short post just to say that I will be resuming posting after my short break.

I did not get as many things done as I had hoped during the break, but I did at least get to do some catching up.

A Short Break

I have decided to take a short break, probably only a few days, from posts to allow me to recharge and to read and comment on other people's blogs that I am interested in.

While the great majority of visitors come to this blog via search engines with some staying to read a little more (the average is 1.8 pages for every visitor), I greatly value the much smaller number of regular readers, many of them fellow bloggers. This creates a problem in that if I spend all my time writing, I cannot participate properly in civilised conversation and exchange of views.

So I want to get out there to again capture the interest and stimulation that comes from broader debate.

A Note on Progress

I hope to complete the posts in the depression series today, then launch the Wednesday Forum discussion tonight.

Wednesday Forum Resumes

A little while ago I started a Wednesday Forum to allow for discussion on particular topics. It did not work, primarily because so much of the traffic on this site has come from search engines. Hence no comments.

I am now going to try again. Each week I will select a topic relevant to individual professionals and then let them comment. Next week the topic will link to the depression series that I have been writing.

A Short Break

I intend to take a short break from posting because I am going to be away and will not have real time.

When I return next week, I will take another case study because I think that they are a helpful way of drawing out key management issues.

Explanation for Pause in Posts

I apologise for the pause in posts. I have been tied up on some specific projects.

Regular transmission will resume later in the week!