M Squared helps clients attain market leadership through the intelligent use of the high-end flexible workforce.  Consequently, we closely track the economic and social factors that affect working professionals.  And in the current economy, “baby boomers” (those persons born between 1944 and 1964), face particular challenges.

Prior to the economic slowdown, companies were focused on preparing for the exit of baby boomers from the workforce. While many boomers are staying on the job longer to compensate for their depleted retirement accounts, they will retire sooner or later, and talent managers need to take both those factors into account.

“You probably will see less of an impact as far as the retirement of the baby boomers than [was] originally thought,” said John H. Hudson, CEO and owner of The Growth Coach of Ventura County and author of Choosing the Right Path: Insights on the Changing Face of America’s Workforce. “I’ve talked to a number of people, and essentially they aren’t sure what they want to do in this next chapter of their lives, but they really don’t want to continue to do what they’re doing.

“The problem is if they are not able to leave the workforce on their own terms, organizations are going to have to deal with a lot of older workers who are there and don’t want to be, but are sort of held captive because of their economic situation.”

In order to re-engage boomers who were originally planning on retiring soon, Hudson suggested providing them with more free time.

“Many organizations are going more to telecommuting, part time [and] those sorts of situations - allowing people to have more free time but remain engaged and not have that brain drain occur in terms of people just walking away from the workplace altogether,” he said. “Organizations are going to have to think about how [to] keep that level of talent, history and information in the organization in creative ways, so that it’s not the same situation where [workers have] to do a 9 to 5 every day as they have been for the last 30 or 40 years of their lives.”

In addition to meeting the needs of boomers, companies also must ensure they continue to prepare for the coming boomer retirements.

“The first thing companies must do is understand the magnitude of the problem, including the knowledge and skills at risk - and it’s going to be different for different organizations,” he said.

“Secondly, they’re going to have to develop a strategy to capture and transfer knowledge and core skills from these retiring employees and to identify and retain new workers with those critical skills, either internally or externally, to fill those gaps.

“Third, they’re going to have to manage and measure the progress of the entire effort. They have to have metrics to measure how well they’re doing because capturing critical workforce knowledge and skills can’t be left to chance.”

Hudson said using soon-to-be retirees as trainers and coaches and having them assist in the identification and mapping of key job competencies would be good for both the organization and the boomers.

“If organizations allow [boomers] to walk out the door, that loss of experience and skill will drop straight to the bottom line in terms of lost productivity,” Hudson said. “That’s how organizations remain viable - the experience base and the knowledge base of how things get done - if that walks out the door, we start to lose a lot.”

Knowledge retention, knowledge transfer, and the intelligent use of talent are issues that we are passionate about at M Squared.  We remain focused on providing our clients with innovative, flexible consulting solutions delivered through the skills of our people and the abundant expertise that resides within our consultant network.

A recent article in Strategy + Business by David Rock entitled “Managing with the Brain in Mind” was a fascinating look at how neuroscience research is revealing the social nature of the high-performance workplace.  In particular, the essay focused on how brain impulses respond to certain social situations.  As M Squared Consulting is focused on helping clients maximize the benefits of the high-end flexible workforce, it was enlightening to explore how business conditions and management styles can be adjusted to improve employee performance.

The entire article explores numerous aspects of this interesting topic.  The short excerpt below examines the response of the brain in familiar and unfamiliar circumstances, and offers some suggestions on how to break down complex projects so that an individual can feel more comfortable and confident:

“When an individual encounters a familiar situation, his or her brain conserves its own energy by shifting into a kind of automatic pilot: it relies on long-established neural connections in the basal ganglia and motor cortex that have, in effect, hardwired this situation and the individual’s response to it. This makes it easy to do what the person has done in the past, and it frees that person to do two things at once; for example, to talk while driving. But the minute the brain registers ambiguity or confusion — if, for example, the car ahead of the driver slams on its brakes — the brain flashes an error signal. With the threat response aroused and working memory diminished, the driver must stop talking and shift full attention to the road.

Uncertainty registers (in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex) as an error, gap, or tension: something that must be corrected before one can feel comfortable again. That is why people crave certainty. Not knowing what will happen next can be profoundly debilitating because it requires extra neural energy. This diminishes memory, undermines performance, and disengages people from the present.

Of course, uncertainty is not necessarily debilitating. Mild uncertainty attracts interest and attention: New and challenging situations create a mild threat response, increasing levels of adrenalin and dopamine just enough to spark curiosity and energize people to solve problems. Moreover, different people respond to uncertainty in the world around them in different ways, depending in part on their existing patterns of thought. For example, when that car ahead stops suddenly, the driver who thinks, “What should I do?” is likely to be ineffective, whereas the driver who frames the incident as manageable — “I need to swerve left now because there’s a car on the right” — is well equipped to respond. All of life is uncertain; it is the perception of too much uncertainty that undercuts focus and performance. When perceived uncertainty gets out of hand, people panic and make bad decisions.

Leaders and managers must thus work to create a perception of certainty to build confident and dedicated teams. Sharing business plans, rationales for change, and accurate maps of an organization’s structure promotes this perception. Giving specifics about organizational restructuring helps people feel more confident about a plan, and articulating how decisions are made increases trust. Transparent practices are the foundation on which the perception of certainty rests.

Breaking complex projects down into small steps can also help create the feeling of certainty. Although it’s highly unlikely everything will go as planned, people function better because the project now seems less ambiguous. Like the driver on the road who has enough information to calculate his or her response, an employee focused on a single, manageable aspect of a task is unlikely to be overwhelmed by threat responses.”

For the complete article, please visit www.strategy-business.com.

Why is Keeping it Simple So Difficult?

When it comes to company leaders I have found that there are two typically types of executives that exist in every workplace – “Simplifiers” and “Complicaters.”

Simplifiers – seek simple and graceful solutions. They are those rare leaders who take the time to analyze a problem or opportunity, seeking first to understand all the variables, then to understand what the fundamental issue is. Once they’ve boiled the challenge down to its basic elements, then they are in a position to formulate an intelligent solution.

Complicaters – tend to react quickly and often over-engineer a solution. They rely on rigid processes, complex frameworks, and overly inclusive teams to design a solution that is usually viable, but also so bloated and complex that it has a greater chance of failure.

Unfortunately, it has been my experience that Complicaters vastly outnumber the Simplifiers in management ranks.

The uncomfortable truth is that complex design is far easier and takes much less planning than simple design. It encompasses what your user might want to do, rather than understanding exactly what your user needs. Simplicity, it seems, requires more thought, planning, research and vision.

To see the benefits of simplicity let’s take a look at Apple. One of Steve Jobs’ first actions when he returned to the company was to reduce the number of computers they sold, allowing customers to easily identify which machine was appropriate for them. Similarly, with the iPod, simple navigational design on both the player and the iTunes store played a crucial role in its success. Later, Apple used the same philosophy when designing the iPhone.

No company makes more coveted electronic gadgets, or has made it easier to purchase and consume digital content, than Apple. Of course Apple has entire teams it can dedicate to keeping things simple. We could all learn from their example.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you strive toward simplicity with your strategic planning:

Begin with a core set of needs – Above all, it’s critical to know your essential deliverables. What needs must be met and what features are essential to most directly meet those needs? Articulate an initial vision of your product or service with the bare essentials.

Always look to eliminate features - Spend as much time analyzing what you can eliminate from your product or service as you do analyzing what should be included. It takes very little thought to add features or service complexity, but the end result is usually a complicated mess. By constantly adding elements, you risk making the user experience more complex and less enjoyable.

Customers don’t always know best – This sounds crazy, but there is some truth to it. Customer interaction is essential to most successful products and services, but the questions you ask are crucial. Asking your customers what they need and what problems they are trying to solve is the key. Do not spend a lot of time asking for feature requests. When you validate your design, focus on whether it meets their need and not what they want to see. Unrestrained feature requests result in bloat – and will cripple your delivery team.

Have vision – It’s essential to be able to look at your offering as a whole and understand how it will ultimately be used. Vision based off of a deep understanding of market needs – not feature requests – revolutionizes industries. Feature driven development, for instance, would have resulted in an iPhone with a keyboard.

Know when to say no - Careful market analysis will teach you when not to pursue an idea. Look at your company as if you were a skeptical outsider as you decide upon new initiatives. Time and company resources are precious for every company.

Simplicity is a key ingredient to innovation. It comes from thought, experience, and expertise. Those three attributes (thought, experience, expertise) are great descriptors for the consultants M Squared Consulting deploys on client engagements. By having senior-level talent working on client challenges we are able to deliver graceful and impactful solutions.

As the holidays approach and companies finalize their FY 2010 plans, more than ever the topic of the contingent workforce surfaces in human resources discussions. While utilizing external consulting expertise such as the type M Squared provides is now standard operating procedure for many companies, other organizations have yet to realize the benefits of flexible employment solutions.

For those companies on the fence, one element of hesitation can be knowledge transfer. That is, how to ensure the institutionalization of knowledge once a project is concluded and the expert has gone on to a new engagement. In the groundbreaking book, “A New Brand of Expertise: How Independent Consultants, Free Agents, and Interim Managers are Transforming the World of Work” (Butterworth-Heinemann), M Squared CEO Marion McGovern and co-author Dennis Russell address this issue head-on, and what they penned in 2001 is as relevant as ever today.

The following passages succinctly describe best practices in knowledge transfer:

“The best way to enable (knowledge) retention is to make it part of the contract with the consultant. He or she must be able to turn over the baton to an employee; the consultant must train someone in the organization on his or her approach, constructs, and activities. Someone in the organization must be left aware of potential issues remaining from the course of the project of that could arise in the future. This should be a formal requirement; for example, a product-costing project would not be considered complete until a manager is trained on the model and all associated documentation is provided.

Beyond these types of training requirements, managers must become sensitive to expertise networks. As success in an organization becomes more dependent on project management performance, those who are best able to rapidly deploy expertise will be those most recognized and rewarded. Managers must be able to rapidly identify individuals with expertise in disciplines that may be useful in the future. They must actively and deliberately develop formal and informal expertise networks, so that when the time arises they know where the knowledge may be found. This can be as simple as creating a list of individual consultants and intermediaries to call on when the need arises, or as complicated as cataloguing in a specialized database the skills of consultants used and/or considered for projects.”

In short, within every organization are people who know and people who need to know, and the lasting value of a successful consulting project is not only performing the task at hand, but making certain that knowledge transfer is built into the process.

The book, A New Brand of Expertise: How Independent Consultants, Free Agents, and Interim Managers are Transforming the World of Work” by Marion McGovern and Dennis Russell (Butterworth-Heinemann) is available at www.amazon.com