Tag: stat

The Trouble with Management Consulting

While I was pumping iron (I know, I know!!) at the gym on Wednesday evening, I got a call from a client seeking to confirm our meeting yesterday afternoon. “Why don’t you put together a presentation with all the insights you’ve gathered so far?”, he suggested, adding that he was planning to call a few more stakeholders to the meeting and it would be good to give them an insight into what is happening.

Most of my morning yesterday was spent putting together the presentation, and I’m not usually one who bothers that much about the finer details in a presentation. As long as the insights are in place I’m good, I think. I had also worked late into the night on Wednesday trying to refine some algorithms, the result of which were to go into the presentation. In short, the client’s request for the presentation had turned the 18 hours between the phone call and the meeting topsy-turvy.

It is amazing how many people expect you to have a powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation every time you walk into a meeting with them. For someone like me, who doesn’t like to prepare power points unless there are specific things to show, it can get rather irritating. Some presentations are necessary, of course, like the one to the CEO of another client that I made last Thursday. What gets my goat is when people start expecting powerpoints from you even at status update meetings.

Preparing presentations is a rather time-consuming process. You need to be careful about what you present and how you present it. You need to make sure that your visualizations are labeled well and intuitive. You need to sometimes find words to fill slides that would otherwise appear empty. And if you are not me, you will need to spend time with precise and consistent formatting and dotting the is and crossing the Ts (I usually don’t bother about this bit, even in presentation to the CEO. As long as content is there and is presentable I go ahead).

So when you have to make presentations to your clients regularly, and at every status update meeting, you can only imagine how much of your time goes into just preparing the presentations rather than doing real work!

The other resource drain in the consulting business is working from client site. While it is true that you get massive amount of work done when you are actually there and have a much shorter turn around time for your requests, spending all your time there can lead to extreme inefficiency and lack of thought.

When you spend all your time at the client site, it invariably leads to more frequent status updates, and hence more presentations and thus more time spent making presentations rather than doing real work. The real damage, though, is significantly more. When you spend all your time at your client’s site, it is easy to get drawn into what can be called as “client servicing mode”. Since you meet the client often, you will have to update him often, and you are always looking for something to update him every time you need to meet him.

Consequently, you end up putting on yourself a number of short deadlines, and each day, each hour, you strive to simply meet the next short deadline you’ve set for yourself. While this might discipline you in terms of keeping your work going and make sure you deliver the entire package on time, it also results in lack of real thinking time.

Often when you are working on a large project, you need to take a step back and look at the big picture and look at where it is all going. There will be times when you realize that some time invested in simply thinking about a problem and coming up with a “global” solution  is going to pay off in the long run. You will want to take some time away from the day-to-day running so that you can work on your “global” solution.

Unfortunately a client servicing environment doesn’t afford you this time. Due to your constant short deadlines, you will always end up on a “greedy” path of chasing the nearest local optimum. There is little chance of any kind of pathbreaking work that can be done in this scenario.

In my work I have taken a conscious decision to not visit my client’s office unless it is absolutely necessary. Of course, there are times when I need to expedite something and think being there will increase my own efficiency also and spend time there. But at other times, when I”m away, here in Bangalore, the fact that there are times when there are no immediate deadlines also means that I get the time to invest on “global” thought and on developing ideas that are long-term optimal.

The long-term productivity that emerges from spending time working off-site never ceases to amaze me!

Analyzing #LFC

It’s been yet another frustrating season as a Liverpool FC fan. You might say that this can be said but just about every season, but unlike in the last two seasons when we played shit and there was no hope, we have actually been playing well this season, and just haven’t been able to convert that into goals. I didn’t watch the loss to Fulham and I agree we  were absolute shit against Spurs, but King Kenny’s statement that we “deserved” to have won every game apart from that Spurs game does have some merit.

I don’t remember the exact stats right now, but two things stand out. LFC has the maximum number of shots that have hit the post or crossbar this season (eighteen, if I’m not wrong). And we also have the lowest ratio in terms of goals to shots on goal. So basically it seems like we’ve been doing pretty well getting the ball into the D, but have been quite wasteful from there. The other notable stat that comes to mind is that we have conceded the least goals this season among all teams (13, I think), and that includes the time when Johnson and Agger were injured, when we had become somewhat porous. Now, with a settled back five, we seem to be doing quite well defensively despite the season-long loss of Lucas Leiva.

Despite the attacking opportunities and number of shots on goal that we’ve got, I’ve felt throughout this season that there has been something missing about this team. There’s something disjointed about the attacking moves. There’s a lack of cohesion. Back when we had Xabi, we had a natural route to switch flanks on the attack – simply pass the ball back to Xabi who will control the game. Unfortunately, good though he is, Adam is not in the same class, and so this route doesn’t seem to be that fluid.

For the first month, I thought the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle was Gerrard, and though he was good (against Man U, etc.) after seeing him play I realized he was not the answer I was looking for. To be absolutely frank, I don’t think his absence from the team (from a purely sporting perspective, without taking into account leadership and morale) has had that much of an impact.

The win against Aston Villa came quite easy (after the couple of early goals, the game was won on autopilot), but I think the big gain from the game was the performance of Jonjo Shelvey. Of course, he wasn’t involved too much, but the little I saw of him (including that back-heel that set up the first goal) showed immense promise, and hopefully he can be developed into a fine advanced midfielder. Speaking of which…

So, I think, the missing piece in the jigsaw is a clever advanced playmaker. A classic number ten, as they would call him in South America. Someone like Juan Roman Riquelme, or Mesut Ozil, or even Iniesta. Someone who plays high up the pitch, and can distribute intelligently and pass accurately. It seems now that Adam has taken on this role, but he seems a bit too slow at times, and not accurate enough. I think he is suited for a more withdrawn playmaking role, and a good number ten in front of him can do a great job of tying the team together.

It is for this reason that I was sad to see Raul Meireles go, for I thought he was someone who was quite capable of being developed for that role (I quite enjoyed how the Arsenal game transformed after he came on). Gerrard has the drive and ambition and pace and all that, but I don’t think he’s smart enough for that. Shelvey might be developed there but for now he’s too young. I’ve seen Henderson play there but again he seems to play much more like Gerrard and much less like an advanced playmaker.

That leaves two players in the squad who are capable of playing that role, but both are away on loan, and both displayed horrible form when they played for LFC. Hopefully the loan spell will help either or both of Joe Cole and Alberto Aquilani to get back to form, and hope that King Kenny and co realize that the advanced playmaker role is the one that they’ve been sorely missing, and are able to keep either or both of these two when it comes to next season.

For now, though, there are other worries, with Suarez having been banned for eight games. I guess the season will continue to frustrate.

Kabaddi and Jesus Navas

I’ve always talked about the Kabaddi style of solving a problem. In Kabaddi, when you are defending, six out of the seven players in the team form a chain in order to encircle the attacker. The seventh defender, however, strikes it alone, in a different direction, trying to draw the attacker into a position where he can be effectively surrounded.

Now there is a footballing analogy to this – the Jesus Navas style. Those of you who watched either Spain’s game with Honduras or the second half of their loss to Switzerland would’ve noticed that Spain effectively followed two lines of attack. The first was the traditional way – attack down the middle in a series of slow passes and build-up. Five of Spain’s front six players would get involved in this attack down the centre, almost rendering their game one-dimensional. And then there was Navas.

I haven’t confirmed this stat but in the game and half that he has played Navas has completed more crosses than anyone else in the tournament. He would strike it on his own down the Spanish right flank, hug the touchline, beat the full back and put in crosses. Minute in and minute out. Sometimes with a little help from full back Sergio Ramos, but mostly alone. It was fantastic to watch.

What this ended up doing was to divert the attention of the opposing defenders to cover Navas. If everyone were to have been attacking down the centre, the defending team could’ve just parked their bus in front of their centre and prevented any scoring. Spain letting free this one guy to take a different route meant that the opposition needed to cover that also leading to insufficient cover in the centre (it is another matter that Spain failed to score against Switzerland. But they did get so many more chances after Navas came on).

I’ve always been fascinated by such strategies at work, in business. You have a bunch of guys who try to attack the problem front-on, in the conventional way, working together, passing to each other frequently. And then there is this one guy who has been left out of this clique who attacks the problem “from the flank”. In his own way, without fear of failure. He knows that he is only an auxiliary solver, that he has nothing to lose (Navas lost his place in the XI after the Honduras match but I don’t think he had expected to ever play at all), and he can just go for it. The option value of letting one guy in the team loose in order to search for alternate solutions while everyone else is building up down the middle is immense, I think.

This is similar to Nassim Taleb’s “barbell investment strategy”. Acccording to that, he parks some 90% of his assets in ultra-risk government securities. They don’t give spectacular returns but his money is safe. And the rest of the 10% he uses to punt by buying stuff like out-of-the-money options. If they expire worthlessly, he hasn’t lost much of his wealth. The optionality (here, literally) of that additional 10% is, however, immense, and there is potential for spectacular returns from this strategy. with losses being capped.