Blogs

154 Consulting is looking forward to participating in Finovate2009.

You can find an explanation of our partnership with Finovate here.

If you are presenting a demo at the conference, you can find more detail about the services Finovate has arranged for us to provide here.

It's been a long week here at 154 Consulting. We faced an unwelcome attack on our website. We've recovered, but rather than simply putting our old site back up, we've pulled forward a site redesign we had planned for Fall 2009. We appreciate your patience with us as we relaunch the site, and in particular thank those of you who are revisiting our blog. We will be reposting many, but not all, of our prior postings. Please update your RSS reader with our new feed.

With our thanks, it's back to business. As always, please feel free to contact us at info@154Consulting.com.

When Continental Airlines flight 3407 crashed in their community, the Clarence Center Volunteer Fire Company responded quickly and performed admirably under immense pressure. They have been invited to share their experience at the Fire Department Instructors Conference in Indianapolis in order to help other fire companies prepare for disaster response.

No one is helped by diagnostic tools that funnel you to one “right” answer and serve only to suggest that you need to purchase expensive consulting services.

Instead, we offer these questions as a way to help you assess whether your presentations, the presentations you hear from your direct reports, and your offsite meetings/retreats are serving you well.

If you don’t like your answers to these questions, 154 Consulting would be happy to help you make some changes. Email us at info@154Consulting.com for more information.

Assessing Your Own Presentations

154 recently offered the following advice to a sales team that wanted to build a presentation internally. I thought it might be useful to share here.

Most presentations answer the following questions, in approximately this order:

1) Who are you?
2) What do you do?
3) Do you understand my business?
4) What are the answers to my problems?

We have been very lucky to recently wrap up a project with Denise Lee Yohn, who partners with her client firms to help close the gap between brand promise and business execution (see note below).
Working with Denise was not only a pleasure, it also provided us with lots to think about. Her work suggests that a company's brand cannot be separated from the day to day work of the employees of the company - and that ensuring that there's no gap between the two is what makes for successful brands.