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    You know all the Answers, but do you know the Questions?
    You know all the Answers, but do you know the Questions?
    You know all the Answers, but do you know the Questions?
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    You know all the Answers, but do you know the Questions?

    By Karin Buechler

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    About this ebook

    You’re the manager of a business, or a part of one, that you think might benefit from professional assistance in diagnosing problems and correcting them. You consider calling in a Management Consultant to fix the problem, but, before you do that, you would like to know more about the possible fixes. This book is a guide to the processes, enabling you to do the work yourself in many cases, or to manage a consultant to undertake a full Management Consultancy project effectively. It will give you an understanding of the work required, the traps and the opportunities. It will certainly give you the background and understanding to get the most out of your company or management area, and will give you the opportunity to lift your management capabilities to the next step!
    This book is one of the standard training sources for numerous Management Consultants. It will become one of those books that you return to time after time!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKarin Buechler
    Release dateJan 26, 2012
    ISBN9781465834737
    You know all the Answers, but do you know the Questions?

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      Book preview

      You know all the Answers, but do you know the Questions? - Karin Buechler

      You know all the answers, but do you know the questions?

      K Buechler

      Copyright Caravan Publishing 2011

      Published by Caravan Publishing at Smashwords

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Chapter 1 Background

      I, your writer, have been in management consultancy almost as long as the profession has been recognized as a profession.

      I realise that I need to win your trust, but you also want to get into the meat of the book as quickly as possible. To meet both these needs, I set out my experience in the Appendix. Please look at it if the matter interests you. At this stage, suffice it to say that I know what I am talking about.

      --**--

      During many years of seeing that many businesses are striving to do the best they can, and often failing in that task, I could not help asking why? This question was one that that I had asked throughout my working life, and I could not understand why others did not ask it.

      The answer is simple.

      Everyone in a business, usually, and not least, the top executives, know all the answers. The only problem is that they do not know the right questions.

      The way to success in most cases lies in asking the right questions. The right question has the answer built into it. Arriving at the answer before you have asked the question almost invariably denies you the opportunity to understand the real situation. Even worse, ‘knowing the answer’ before you have formulated the question defeats the whole object of asking.

      This book sets out to correct the situation as far as possible, by providing a method to allow a manager of a business, or any part of it, to conduct a mini-management consultancy and to improve the operations of that unit almost beyond belief.

      If you follow the rules and the methodology set out, you will be able to find most of the problems that make life in business so difficult, (and that will be probably the most important thing you will do this year), generate appropriate solutions for the problems you find, and implement these solutions in a way that will stick.

      Chapter 2 Plan of this Book

      A glance at the index will show how this book is organised. We started at the point of building credibility – you won’t follow any advice, no matter how good it may be, until you are personally convinced that the advice is credible and from a source that, in your opinion, has shown that it is capable of offering good advice – but gave you the choice of reading that now or later. I hope that we are now past that point.

      Having achieved this, or, possibly, convinced you that it may be worth your precious time to read further, we proceed to why you should follow the advice offered.

      We then have a close look, becoming progressively closer, at how to determine firstly if something needs fixing, then how to find what is wrong with it, then how to go about figuring what is wrong. Knowing that a situation could be better does not tell us how it could be better. Having determined precisely what is wrong, we generate an appropriate solution. End of story? Not really. The hard part is still to come. We must then implement the solution, taking care not to allow the company to implode while we do this.

      We need to go through a rigorous analysis of the problem area before we jump to any conclusions. The title of this book says it all. You know all the answers, but do you know the right questions?

      What we are trying to achieve, in a nutshell, is to get you to understand that all the answers you and your staff have, and fervently believe in, are not necessarily correct or complete. An answer may be correct today, but totally wrong tomorrow. It could be that most of the answers you can give now are not completely right or complete.

      In the modern world, we can recognise this process all around us. The very basis of science has undergone numerous enormous upheavals and reversals in thinking and understanding over the past three centuries, and, in many cases, our understanding of how things work has changed dramatically since we learned them at school. If this is true of the world, why should it be less true of our business environment? At the micro level of our business, everything is in flux. It is our responsibility to put in place a structure for our company, division or office that enables us to recognise the real facts facing us, not only our view of what those ‘facts’ might be, and to cope with the situations that will flow from them. This depends, of course, on knowing at the starting point, what the real facts are.

      As in the world of nature, only those best fitted to face the problems and to make use of the opportunities thrown at us, or, more likely, sneaking up on us from unexpected directions, will survive the stressful environment of the future. And the future is now.

      Back to the plan of this book.

      Having looked at why you should consider whether your business has a problem, we give some illustrations of the sorts of problems our clients have encountered. These will provide you with an understanding of what to look for, where to look, and, in some cases, how to look. The most obvious problems are often hidden behind a situation of pride, self-defence, ‘old experience’, reasons, ‘we’ve always done it this way’, unfounded explanations, untested assumptions and so on.

      In a career in management consultancy spanning over many years, I have never found an employee who comes to work with the intention of destroying or hurting his or her employer. They all believe that what they are doing, and how they are doing it, is the best way to go about it in the circumstances. In many cases, they have views on how things could be improved, but do not believe that ‘management’ will accept a proposal for change. In any case, the work required to generate a well-founded proposal for change, and to convince management that it is both right and necessary, is far too daunting for most people. Anything less than this would not succeed, and would redound to the detriment of the proposer.

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