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Whittman Hart Sale

                 End of an Era? End of the WhittmanHart Story?

Today, Rolta TUSC acquired WhittmanHart Consulting. The deal effectively splits Whittman into two with WhittmanHart Consulting (WHC) being sold and WhittmanHart Interactive remaining as a surviving practice. While this sale does not close out the WhittmanHart story, it does leave the firm as a shadow of its former self. At its peak, the company was one of the largest systems integrators in the Midwest. The firm experienced explosive growth during the dot.com boom and contracted just as quickly during the years after the bust. The company, at times known as MarchFirst, has been rebuilding in recent years.

WHC has skills in the BI space, particularly with Oracle's Hyperion products. The deal should be accretive to TUSC give the potential synergies between the WHC Midwest operations and those of TUSC's in India and elsewhere. For information, click on WHC. 

KPMG Lawsuit

                       Cast Art Industries, LLP v. KPMG, LLP

For those of you who watch such things, I caught this email last week announcing that a judge had found sufficient evidence for a jury trial in a case involving KPMG. The suit alleges that the auditors failed to detect a fraud worth approximately $50 million at Papel Giftware, a firm bought by the plaintiffs, Cast Art Industries.

Fraud detection, something that audits often detect, isn't the key role of an auditor. This point may come as a surprise to many lay people but that doesn't stop litigators to try to convince jurors otherwise. When fraudulent activity goes to the very top officers of a firm and is well hidden, auditors may have a tough time finding it.

If you're looking for something more intense to read, get the latest issue of Portfolio and see the story on the Carvel estate. Talk about a page turner: allegations of murder, fraud, adulterous relationships, etc. Now that's a story worthy of print.

More on Rankings

               Phil Expands the Conversation Re: Outsourcing Rankings

Phil Fersht of AMR Research covers the outsourcing space extensively and has a blog, Horses for Sources, dedicated to same. He's pulling together a number of perspectives regarding the recent hubbub re: outsourcing rankings. He has already gotten Deborah Kops to weigh in and I've forwarded along to him a post I did last week on the same subject. I'd like to thank those who took the time to comment on my posting.

A "List" of Issues

            Some "Rank" Behavior Regarding Outsourcing Listings

Steve Hamm penned a blog piece and an article for BusinessWeek (see: "Outsourcing's Dubious Kingmakers", www.businessweek.com, July 14 & 21, 2008) re: Brown & Wilson's annual Black Book of Outsourcing. The article questioned the methodology used by the firm in creating its annual listing of outsourcers. The article also questioned the movement in rankings and the location of the company's office.

I also saw Ed Nair's editor's note in this month's Global Services magazine (see: "The Outsourcing Lists", July 2008, www.globalservicesmedia.com). He took offense to a document that purportedly touts the Black Book list and disparaged others. Since I cannot find this document, I can't comment on it but I was certainly intrigued to its alleged comments.

That a list could generate so much passion and print was interesting to me as I generally can't get many people to care that much about the general ranking of two outsourcers. People seem much more interested in People magazine's Sexiest Man choice than a list of outsourcers.

Today, Wachovia Capital LLC hosted a conference call with Scott Wilson and Doug Brown of Brown & Wilson. Mr. Brown and Mr. Wilson stepped through a litany of Facts and Fictions re: their study and its methodology. Just based on this, it would appear that many of stories attributed to their study are not true.

On that conference call, we learned that:

• vendors are evaluated by customers across 26 factors, each receiving a 1-10 score for a maximum score of 260 points
• each vendor is ranked based on the mean score across all submitted ballots
• customer ballots are carefully screened to ensure that only the customer, and no one else, completed the ballot
• at least ten ballots per company are needed for the company to be included in the rankings
• outsourcers who try to cajole more clients to vote statistically hurt their rankings on average

What appears to be the biggest point of confusion in the market is that there are now 4200 outsourcing vendors being evaluated and the differences in scores between one vendor and the next in the top 50 list could be a mere few thousandths of a point. For example, look at the difference in scores in the example provided by Brown & Wilson for the Wachovia call:

   

When the differences are a mere few thousandths of a point, the differences are not statistically significant. What we should be seeing are the standard deviations for these scores as potential users of this data would see that meaningful differences may not exist between large groups of outsourcers evaluated. In other words, the numerical differences between two outsourcers with similar scores may not be a solid basis for including or excluding either from a selection short-list.

Moreover, when the top 50 vendors in a pool of 4200 vendors are selected, you can bet that the scores will be close for these. In fact, the top 50 represent just over the top 1% of outsourcers evaluated. These scores are like trying to delineate the differences between your salutatorian and valedictorian. They're both great.

As for the Brown & Wilson report, I am satisfied that they have adequately calculated the results and protected the integrity of the inputs. People who rely on this data need to recognize that:

• a statistical score is no substitute for doing your own due diligence re: outsourcers
• narrow score differences are not reasons for including or excluding outsourcers from consideration
• with outsourcers and mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results

I do not have, nor have seen, the document that supposedly came from CIO magazine that alleged some other points.

If you'd like to see the Top 50 list, click on this Wall Street Journal link.

Be a Better Speaker (3)

Delivering a Great Keynote Presentation

Part 3 – The Story

A great story has a beginning, middle and an end.  It should also have moments that touch us deeply.  Some humor along the way often helps the story as does the personal touch.  How many elements like this can be incorporated into your presentation?

If you really want to nail your next keynote presentation then invite some colleagues in to hear you deliver it for them.  Let them tell you where the highlights and the flat spots are.  Let them tell you how you could soup up some of your slides to increase their impact on the audience.  What I’m suggesting is that you seek second party review of your keynote presentation before you give it.

I believe that each of us are capable of coming up with somewhere between 65-95% of a great presentation on our own.  However, a few minutes spent with others can take a passable presentation and make it outstanding if you are willing to seek the counsel of peers.

Sometimes the best movies or books that we see or read contain a plot twist.  It’s that a-ha moment that make us stop and consider why we were so sure the plot was moving in a different direction. A good keynote presentation should have some moments where the speaker confronts our biases, prejudices, or conventional wisdom and makes us see things in a different light altogether.

When you challenge the status quo, you may have an immediate impact on the attendees.  You are creating cognitive dissonance – that unsettling feeling we get when we realize we may have been wrong. In public speaking, you must engage the minds and hearts of the audience if you want to have an impact on them.

Great keynoters utilize a mix of proof points as they speak.  People in an audience distrust a single source of insight.  Just because you’ve done a research study does not mean that the conclusions are necessarily true.  It’s fine to share relevant facts with an audience but do not assume these will change the audience’s perspectives in and of themselves.  You must back up any research with anecdotal conversations with business executives or others who are facing the issue you’re discussing.  You should illustrate how one company has confronted this issue via a case study.  Audiences will not believe your conclusions until you paint a vivid, complete and colorful picture around the subject matter.

Try these techniques to make your story telling better:

-          Substitute a picture for each slide within the body of the deck. Find relevant pictures, graphics, etc. to use instead of text. Pictures are worth thousands of words and people remember them. Audiences are terrible at memorizing your text.

-          Incorporate music or a video clip into your presentation. Multi-media isn’t just for the artsy types. You can do it, too, especially since I’ve seen school age children do it all the time.

-          Ask people in the audience to offer up some answers to a question you pose. Put the question on a slide or ask it from the podium/stage.

-          Poll the audience once or twice. A funny thing happens when you ask an audience for their opinion. Funnier still, see how they react when you bust their bubble as to conventional wisdom.

-          Walk out into the audience. Walking around is visually more entertaining to an audience. It’s a rare person who can stand motionless behind a podium for an hour and still keep the audience’s attention.

The Consultant's Carbon Footprint

Manufacturers Aren't the Only Firms Affected By Carbon Emission Laws

                                Is Your Firm a Carbon Junkie? (Are You?)

Suppose there was a 12-step program for consultancies.  This program would help consulting firms wean themselves off of decades of bad social and environmental policy.

In my own case, if I attended one of these meetings, it might have gone something like this:

Brian: “Hi, I’m Brian. I am a consultant and for 12 years I was a carbon pig. It’s been almost 4 weeks since I last boarded a jet.”

Group: “Hi Brian"

Moderator: “Welcome Brian.  Please, tell us why you feel this way."

Brian:

“Well, for most of my early career, I worked really close to my home, shared a commute with my brother and drove a fuel efficient car.  For one client, I stayed at the family ranch to minimize my commute.  In fact, I never flew to a client for the first seven years of my career except for one interesting week in Jackson, Mississippi. Then, the management of our firm decided that my talents would be better utilized at intergalactic world headquarters.  Once I got sent to Chicago, I got hooked on flying."

Moderator: “Tell us about your addiction”

 

Brian: “It just came on so sudden.  I went from making one or two flights a year to seven or eight a week.  Before I realized it, I was spending over $250,000 per year, every year, just on airline tickets alone.  I kept this pace up for 12 straight years and in my last year alone I bagged 48 international roundtrips."

Moderator: “What made you realize this was wrong?"

Brian: “The travel was beginning to supplant my everyday life.  American Airlines special services agents were seeing more of me than my own family.  I realized that I had leisure clothes in my closet that I was never wearing because I was always flying to or from clients but spending no time at home.  When I saw that I was about to cross the 3,000,000 mile mark for American Airlines, I knew I needed to change.”

Moderator: “How did that go?”

Brian: “It was tough.  I didn't realize how difficult it would be to not go to Midway or O'Hare airport at least once a week. I had withdrawal issues. I even missed the smell of that sickly smelling de-icing fluid that seeps through the ground by Terminal 1 at O'Hare.  I missed the smell of burnt kerosene on the tarmac.  But most importantly, I miss those hot steaming towels they hand out in first class.

Yes, I know I had an addiction to flying.  I flew because I thought it was the right thing to do to advance my career and to serve clients.  And while I thought I was doing the right thing for me professionally and my family economically, I now see that I and many others like me wasted a whole lot of fossil fuel.”

Moderator: “This is good Brian.  You've moved past the stages of denial and acceptance.  What are you doing to make your consulting business today less of a carbon pig.”

Brian: “Well, for starters, I have embraced WebEx, DHL, FreeConferenceCall.com, email and Skype as my new higher powers.  With these tools alone, I have been able to eliminate a significant amount of my travel.  I'm proud to say that I'm now down to just one or two flights per month.”

Group: “Yeah”

Moderator: “That’s great Brian.  What else are you doing?”

Brian: “I've decided to work full-time from my home office.  Commuting simply wastes motor fuel and eats up a lot of valuable time.  An office, I have come to realize, seems to be more about prestige and ego - not around saving scarce natural resources.  As to flying, I almost never take trips of a purely promotional nature anymore.  I dovetail business development activities on the backs of other client related flights to minimize wasteful trips and the high SG&A costs they generate.”

Moderator: “That's great Brian but what else are you going to do?"

Brian: “Well I'm really worried about some of my friends.  I have a number of colleagues who are also consultants or bloggers who still aspire for the bad habits of yesteryear.  They still brag about free first-class upgrades, how brutal their six flights this week were, and how petty the airlines have become.  I just don't think my colleagues have developed a social conscience just yet.  They still can't decide the difference between “meetings” and “meetings that count”.  And until they do, I fear for their non-carbon-based soul. One of my colleagues has a carbon Jones really bad.  He's still flying to clients weekly as well as to numerous family events around the U.S. and Europe. We may need to stage an intervention for him.”

Consulting firms have had to scale back their travel and entertainment expenses in recent years because of a number of factors:

• closer scrutiny that clients put on them for their travel expenses
• outside investors in the these consultancies want less money spent on travel and entertainment and more money returned to them in the form of shareholder dividends
• rising travel costs
• pressure to make their businesses more family friendly

The current fuel and airline pricing environment will also drive more curtailments by consultancies. But, these changes are an economic reaction and not one based on social policy or an awareness of a new regulatory requirement: Accounting for one’s carbon footprint.

That will change and change quickly as businesses will soon be required to report their carbon consumption.

Consulting firms may be in for a shock when they realize how much carbon dioxide their firms produce via:

·         worker commuting activities to the office

·         commuting to client sites

·         pre-sales travel

·         company meetings

·         other air, rental car and personal automobile travel

Smart consultancies will get ahead of this issue to understand what their current consumption levels are and what options remain for them to rein in marginal activity that is contributing to their carbon footprint.

Reconciling new carbon reduction initiatives with newer personnel policies will be a tough balancing act for consulting firms.  In recent years, firms have changed their out-of-town work policies to permit employees more frequent trips home.  When these policies were crafted, fuel was cheap and carbon consumption was a non-issue for businesses.  Neither of those assumptions is still true today.

Consultancies would be wise to reevaluate their workforce satisfaction and workforce travel policies.  If a company must reduce its carbon footprint then can it afford to fly workers home every week?  Does this mean that firms will staff a significantly higher percentage of projects with local personnel?  How will clients react to the unavailability of critical subject matter experts because their presence on a project will have an adverse impact on carbon emissions?

Questions like the above will become fascinating fodder for the rank-and-file as well as the executive management of service firms.  Technology will go a long way to close some of the gaps; however, tough decisions will need to be made as to whose priorities will take precedence: clients, shareholders, environmentalists or the employees?  If I had to bet, the priority would fall in the order I just listed them.

Thoughts?

BE's New CFO

Cash Only Please – BearingPoint (BE) Gets an Interim CFO

Wachovia Weekly, a service industry research newsletter produced by Wachovia Capital Markets, LLC, reported this little factoid on page 4 of this week’s (7/3/2008) issue:

“BearingPoint (BE, Market Perform, $0.73) announced its new interim CFO, Eddie Munson, will receive a monthly salary of $75,000. He won't participate in the company's bonus compensation program or receive any stock compensation for his services as CFO. He remains a director on the company's board.”

When a new CFO of a publicly held firm negotiates their compensation package, they usually insist on a combination of salary, deferred compensation, stock options, perks, etc. When a CFO insists on a cash-only deal, then one or more of the following could be in play:

• The Interim CFO may truly be ‘interim’ and will not be in the position long enough to vest any stock options.
• The Interim CFO may believe the company’s financial picture is doubtful and sees no value/point in accepting stock options.
• The Interim CFO is already a board member and already has a nice stock option package.

It turns out that Mr. Munson is an ex-KPMG audit partner and has been on the board of BE since last Fall. With 30 years experience in audits and a former managing partner of an audit firm, Mr. Munson should be able to fill this role admirably. How ‘interim’ he will be is not known but the longer the better. BE is still righting itself and it needs a team that will work together for the long haul.

The track record of CFOs at BE hasn’t been great. This list may not be complete but from my records, I believe BE has had a number of folks in as interim or permanent CFOs in just the last five years alone.

• April 2003, Robert Falcone takes the role. He stayed until November 2004.

• Around the start of 2005, Joseph Corbett assumed the CFO spot. He left after four months.

• Harry You, ex-Accenture CFO, assumed the interim CFO position while also serving as BE’s CEO. Mr. You stayed until late last Fall.

• Judy Ethell had the role during the first half of 2008. She was a former PWC tax partner. She is still with the company but not the Interim CFO anymore.

• Eileen Kamerick took the role in May of this year. She stayed only three weeks.

• Now, Mr. Munson is filling the interim CFO spot.

Investors get nervous when the CFO spot changes hands. A periodic change in CFOs is fine but this many changes in a short time period look questionable.

Good luck Mr. Munson.

Be a Better Speaker (2)

Delivering a Great Keynote Presentation

Part 2 – The Presentation Deck

Great presentations should be heard and seen but not read.

Your slides should support your audible dialogue and visual effect. They should never be read-only.  If the audience wanted to read your overly dense and text filled slides, they would have asked you to e-mail them in advance and they would've skipped your keynote altogether. 

Some of the greatest presenters use no slides or written scripts.  They know the story they intend to tell and they move across the stage making their well rehearsed talk seem like a friendly conversation between two colleagues.  These speakers understand that slides are not the star of the show.  Slides are secondary or tertiary to the message and the emotional impact a speaker is trying to deliver.

Many speakers use PowerPoint as an organizing tool.  Whether they use the outline feature or not, the structure that a PowerPoint presentation deck enforces or helps create a familiar method of constructing a set of presentations slides.  However, the presence of a slide deck does not mean that a great presentation will be delivered. 

The worst presenters use something I derisively call “The Un-deck”. These presenters confuse their keynote address with a sales presentation.  Worse, they use a really bad sales deck as the core of their presentation. See if you recognize this bad keynote speaker:

“Hi, I’m Jane Doe and I am the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Nefarious Software, Inc.  Before I get to my remarks, let me take 30 or 40 minutes to tell you about my company.  Nefarious Software was founded in 1847 by Adolphus Gearhead…here is a picture of our glorious leader… here is a picture of our glorious headquarters building… here is a map of the world that highlights all of our office locations… here is a list of our 6000 customers… here are three short video clips of customer testimonials…”

“In the remaining 10 minutes, let me tell you how our firm defines today’s topic and why you need to hire us to solve it”

This type of bad keynote speaker usually wastes our time with irrelevant trivia about their employer because they are:

-          insensitive to the needs and wants of the audience

-          unqualified to speak about the topic they are supposed to address

-          inconsiderate boobs

-          all of the above

If you would like any tongue in cheek version of the “Un-Deck”, just drop me a line at contact@finalanalysis.com. I actually built one of the most offensive decks a presenter can ever use as an illustrative backdrop for a webinar I recently did with the PSA vendor OpenAir.

The cardinal sin that bad keynoters often commit is to spend too much time on the setup. They take too long gabbing about their company, their product/service and how delighted/honored to be there. The audience is there to learn and be entertained. They are not be lectured to or bored. 

Ideally, a good presentation deck contains the following:

-          Title slide

-          The Credential slide – In one and only one slide, tell us who you are, a tiny factoid about the company you represent and your relevance to be topic at hand.  Any more than this is disrespectful to the audience and boring.

-          Top 3 Messages slide – Here you tell the audience the top three takeaways they are going to hear from you.  If you don’t know them before you create your presentation, you cannot give a concise and to the point presentation.  Moreover, great speakers can adjust the length of their presentation when they know their top three messages.  I’ve had keynotes scaled back from 50 minutes to five minutes because of schedule screw ups that were out of my control.  I would have struggled to do so had I not focused my presentation and remarks around the top messages.

-          12-15 slides that make up the body of the deck – These slides should directly correlate to one of the top three messages.  If they don’t, then take them out of the deck.

-          The Summary slide – This slide recaps the top three messages in slightly different verbiage. The purpose of this slide is to remind the attendees the three critical points you are trying to make.  This solidifies in their mind the value they received from your presentation and it provides you an opportunity to wrap up the last 50 minutes.

-          Questions? – This slide simply allows listeners an opportunity to pose questions to you.  In a large setting, this slide is not utilized.

-          Thanks and Follow-up Info – This slide serves two purposes as it thanks the audience for their interest and time while also providing your contact information for those who wish to follow up directly with you.

Remember, great presenters spend on average three minutes per slide.  If you believe a given slide requires a 10 minute soliloquy, you probably have too much information on the slide or you have failed to distill the guts of the slide to their most important components. You should simplify the slide, simplify the message or break this slide into one or more other slides.

There are some other guidance points involving the body of the deck.

-          Avoid using more than 20 words per slide – No one will have time to read more than this anyway and too much verbiage takes the audience’s attention away from the speaker.

-          Avoid using histograms – Researchers tend to use histograms with three data points per column to an excess. These are fine for research reports but they show poorly in a large auditorium. Pie charts can be equally obtuse when used incorrectly.

-          Put some pictures in the deck - Text is soooooo boring.

Next – Part 3 - The Story

Please Be a Better Speaker

Delivering a Great Keynote Presentation

Part 1 - The Delivery

We have all suffered through our share of bad speakers.  But the most unfortunate experiences occur when a keynote speaker really lets us down.  In my profession, I get to hear hundreds of presentations annually and invariably there are those that make me wish for a Dr. Kevorkian for public speakers.

Last week, I attended an event where the keynote speaker was supposed to be some sort of distinguished, polished professional.  He should have handed out vials of Novocain to the attendees because his talk was peppered with sentences with such enthusiastic and emotionally captivating thoughts such as “the ontological and semantic underpinnings behind the RBAC² constructs in neo-dynamic enterprises…..”

This fellow’s talk was bad on many levels. He:

• wanted us to believe he was important because he max’d out the Fog Index
• stated an incredibly obvious fact (e.g., “IT projects need executive sponsorship”) and acted as if he had discovered the Holy Grail
• read to us a number of arcane data points from some histograms none of us could read anyway
• had no personality, no humanity and no warmth

I know a person’s a bad speaker when I can imagine my 14-year, with absolutely no advance preparation, could be way more entertaining with the same material.

So, let’s get some positive action going. Here are my tips for delivering a great presentation:

Part 1- The Delivery

A technically brilliant presentation is worthless if the delivery is flawed. If we can't hear you, then your presentation serves no purpose.  If you can't convince us that you truly believe in this material that you are presenting, then we won't believe it either.

An effective delivery is one where people can hear you speak.  A startling number of individuals cannot tell if they are "on microphone".  This takes some practice so that you know your voice is being picked up by a microphone and is being boomed out to every last chair in the venue.  It is far better for a speaker to ask the audience if they can hear him or her than to assume as much and be incorrect.  When you are on microphone you should be able to detect a bit of latency in your voice as it moves through the room.  If it sounds like you are merely speaking to yourself, then it's a sure bet you are.

But great delivery means that you think about how you come across to a crowd.  If you are not comfortable speaking before a large group, then go ahead and admit it.  Let the audience know that you are a fellow human being with your own particular set of concerns, strengths and fears.  Tell us that you're not a great public speaker but you really know love the subject matter and that you hope they will understand the spirit you have about this subject.

Honesty goes a long way with forming a connection between a speaker and the audience.  An audience is far more forgiving of a fellow human being than they will be with a supposed expert who lacks the humility and awareness to know that their delivery is bombing.

Many public speaking coaches will suggest that you open a talk with some sort of joke.  But let's face it, many of you are not comedians and joke telling is not your second career.  Don't use a keynote opportunity as a place to test drive some material you've been dying to use on an open microphone night at the local comedy club. Substitute a joke for a genuine if not heartfelt story involving yourself and the subject matter.  This will pull the audience into your perspective and your unique point of view about this material.

Nothing makes people pay attention more than a good story.  Human beings will listen for the longest time until they hear the conclusion, moral or punch line of a good story. Think about some of the great speakers you have heard.  They start their talk off by describing a problem, story or other event and then tell you how they will discuss this throughout the next 45 minutes.  They will likely use some sort of shorthand mnemonic or other gimmick to keep you guessing and waiting to hear the story through its completion.  These speakers use techniques like: the nine habits of effective….; the 10 steps to...; or, what the XYZ model stands for. People will pay attention to hear each and every one of those individual components.

Great keynoters also utilize props.  A funny thing happens when you bring a big box on stage.  Everybody in the audience wants to know, subconsciously, what's inside that box.  Throughout the presentation the audience wonders in anticipation what the next new strange item you will take out of the box.  But props hold another value beyond attention retention.  Props move the focus of the conversation between you and the audience away from a PowerPoint slide show.  The audience can now focus on a completely different area of the stage and they use a different part of their mind.  Props do not require the brain to think in textual or language terms.  Props appeal to different parts of the brain that deal with images and creativity.

Props can be humorous as well.  In a sales training session I gave, I changed clothes in front of 1,800 people on stage.  When I walked onstage I was attired in the worst possible polyester-based, mismatched used-car salesman attire known to mankind.  When I left the stage, I had filled a box with the worst professional clothes possible.  People laughed as I shed my seven pinkie rings, gold chains, etc. to fill a box full of these horrendous clothes. More than a decade later, people still bring up that stunt and still remember the points I made at that talk.

A great delivery also requires you to be self-deprecating and not self important.  No one in the audience is perfect and they all know that you aren't either.  Sure, you need to have an air of confidence in your material but you do not need to assert yourself as the most important person in this space.  Remember, if you weren't already deemed to be an expert in this space, you wouldn't have been given this keynote opportunity in the first place.  Do not spend a moment during the keynote re-credentialing yourself or reasserting your legitimacy to be on the stage.  No one really wants to hear it and secondly they will give you the respect you crave after you earn it from them.  The best way to earn it is to act like a colleague of theirs and not some sort of prima donna.

Lastly, make sure your delivery is aligned with the brand of your company.  If your firm is a hip, cool California operation, then why are you giving a dull, dry, academic, preachy and stiff talk?  The keynote presentation is an opportunity for you and your firm to make a lasting and favorable impression on hundreds or thousands of audience members.  If you come across as imperious or arrogant, then won't the audience assume as much for your firm?  Think about your delivery and think about what it says about you and your firm as you may want to seriously rethink how and what you present.

Next post: Part 2 - The Presentation Deck