Insight: On Having Human Business Ideals
Then he gave me some advice about teaching that’s stuck with me for more than three decades: “Just pretend you’re teaching you. How would you do that? What would you want to know? What did you dislike when you were taught? What stories would you tell to make it understandable? What would keep you interested and engaged?”
—Steve Blank in Teach Like You’re the Student
As a boutique/specialist consulting firm, one of the nice things about breaking the mold of big-box companies is that we have an opportunity to create our own culture. A lot of that affects how our employees experience working for us (something we’re proud to say we’ve done pretty well), but also how our clients experience working with us.
One of the precepts we hold dear is candid conversation. We’ve turned down available work because we’ve told a client what he needed to hear instead of what he wanted to hear (in this case, that he didn’t need our services for another application he was considering). We’re not afraid of the difficult conversation in the name of championing a client’s best interest. And we’re dramatically opposed to the opaque, buzzword-filled communications that infect so much of business, especially in the enterprise IT space. Don’t believe us? Check out our Twitter feed, Facebook page and this very blog to get a feel how we engage our clients. (We even try to humanize our datasheets.)
A lot of what drives us to this idea is that we don’t like being talked at in a jargon-heavy style any more than most of our clients do. We find the best way to help clients understand our value as a specialist firm is to speak openly and naturally with them. When we help clients with knowledge transfer, we teach them like we would want to be taught ourselves, because it’s stickier that way. People remember not only what you’re helping them with, but also you as a company.
It’s not always easy to explain how a consulting firm can be different above and beyond the standard R&R: resumes and rates. But in 2005 we founded our company on ideas that ran a bit counter to the norm, and our clients have noticed. And that’s the most we can ask for.
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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.
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