ulu21
Never before did I spend so much energy into truly trying to solve the problems our clients had. More than once, our recommendation was to go along with an idea that was already present within their organisation (presented sharply and as factual as possible).
But it also happened that we recommended going a completely different way to whatever their CEO, the VPs, middle managers or employees wanted, because we discovered they were so entrenched in their way of thinking. I am grateful to have had the privilege to do this work.
So the title is overly alarmistic IMHO. Greetings from Western Europe, we're I feel we still have better balance in both liberty and moderation.
On a recent project we
- made the C suite hard-stop an IT program that had a projected cost/time overrun of three figure mUSD and two years, while the operative levels were still riding the dead horse
- Pulled long hours for 4 months straight to come up with a new solution approach that was technically feasible AND (techies might not get that this is important) at the same time acceptable to the stakeholders and employees
The recommendation that we gave was exactly the opposite of what the C exec who hired us thought would be the best solution when we started. It was not the 45 slides that were the hard work. The hard work was to get the facts together, engage in difficult conversations with all levels of the organization, creating conviction to change course without giving anybody the feeling that what they did before was wrong.