I can deal with the politics of a much larger organization. After all, I have seen and experienced plenty of corporate politics.

What is driving me and my colleagues crazy is the number of management consultants we have to deal with.

The acquiring organization is largely run by former management consultants. They ask a lot of questions. But they have a very superficial way of understanding how our business is run.

They do all of their planning using spreadsheet. They never consult us – the general managers who have been running the different business lines for years.

They put together a budget with goals for us to hit, but they never talked to us about how to achieve the goals.

It’s basically building a business plan in the air.

Absolutely bullshits.

And most of these people used to work for Boston Consulting Group, as well as a few other top tier management consulting companies.

They’re not dumb, but they have absolutely no clue of running a business. And they don’t have the humility to learn. They think too highly of themselves.

I absolutely hate to work with management consultants – they’re useless.

Julie could have a million legitimate reasons to complain about Adam’s performance. However, when she said “I’m done with him”, she lost.

She made herself sound emotional and immature. She felt that she was the victim and she couldn’t do anything to improve the work relationship.

Her manager would feel

1) this issue is a big headache that manager has to spend time on

2) in a way Julie was sending out an ultimatum – let me tell you something, no manager would like to be held hostage by an employee. No matter how great Julie is, when she sends out an ultimatum, she is threatening. And in most cases, ultimatum will not be well received by management.

3) Julie is incapable of solving hard problem on her own. She feels that she is a victim. If you’re a manager, would you like to have someone on your team who feels she is a victim? Probably not.

No matter how difficult situation is at work, stay calm and collected. Focus on your key goals. The minute you become emotional, you lose.

We both left online display advertising recently and joined e-commerce companies. Amazingly, we reached the same conclusion about online display advertising:

• Paid search is still the king in online advertising. It performs better than any other form of online advertising.
• Next to paid search, contextual advertising is the second best option, followed by re-targeting.
• Behavior Targeting is better suited for brand advertising – it provides advertisers a pre-qualified audience. However, in term of performance marketing, Behavior Targeting is not a very good option. In fact, I’d challenge any behavior targeting ad network to share their performance metrics. There are tremendous amount of hype in this industry, but very little substance.
• Most ad networks are nothing but glorified ad agencies.

By the way, if you’re interested in the online ad network space, I highly recommend Top 5 Media Startup Mistakes by Mike On Ads. I particularly love this line from the article:

“Today, one great trafficker/optimization analyst can beat almost any algorithm out there A team of 5 temps working for a week can apply categorizations to the top 1000 internet sites with similar accuracy to the fanciest semantic engine. A smart BD guy can buy KBB data w/out a deep API integration to a data exchange. A buying strategy of “remarketing” will out-perform any other campaign strategy or behavioral data by at least 10x.”

I haven’t blogged much in the past five months – I miss the interaction with all of you, my dear readers!

I started this blog right before my daughter was born in 2008. As she is turning two years old, this blog is also turning two years old.

It has been quite a journey to write this blog. I’m very grateful for all of you – without you, I’ll be writing and talking to myself.

What’s next? I’ve several options:

1. Continue to blog infrequently and let the readership of this bog decline
2. Sell this  blog
3. Continue to grow this blog, and add new content and services to serve all of you

I’ve decided option #1 and #2 are not options – this is not time to give up on this blog because I’m too busy. Instead, I’ll find ways to grow this blog to the next level.

My goal is the next 6 months is to grow this blog to

• Traffic: 100K Unique Users per month
• Income: generate $2,000/month income from this blog
• Features: launch one or two innovative web services that provide values to the core audience of this blog

Ambitious goals. Very little free time. Limited resources.

Is it possible for me to get there? Why did I set these goals? What’s my plan of attack? That will be the next post.

A lot of them are super greedy — they want to make a lot of money as soon as possible.

They’re only interested in "strategy work".

They talk big and think big. But, they cannot execute.

They care more about job titles than job content.

They think they’re analytical because they know how to use excel spreadsheet to build models.

I don’t mean to over generalize. But, a lot of MBAs are like what I’m describing above.

If you’re graduating now from business school, I hope you’ll stay humble, live your values, and be kind to others as you start your first post-MBA job.

If you know someone who is graduating from business school, please pass this blog post to him or her.

I graduated from business school six years ago. I have seen and met plenty of MBAs I didn’t enjoy working. I want to see more humble, hard-working, kind MBAs in the working world.

Peace.

The Magic of Thinking Big is one of the few books highly recommended by Tim Ferris of the Four Hour Work Week fame. It has 161 five-star reviews on Amazon.com. Tim Ferris mentioned that he would re-read the first two chapters of The Magic of Thinking Big whenever he needed to overcome self doubts.

I have read the first two chapters several times lately because I was going through a period of change that was full of ups and downs. I was learning to overcome self doubts, anxiety, and uncertainties. I have to say Tim Ferris is right on — most of us sell ourselves short. It behooves us to think big.

Let me ask you a simple question: look around in your current company. What do you think about your CEO or Vice Presidents in the executive team? Are they all smarter and more capable than you? Probably NOT. There are a lot of incompetent senior managers in corporate America. The chance is that you can probably do as good a job or even a better job than a lot of the people with fancy titles such as CEO, President, or Vice President.

President Obama has never worked in the executive branch of the government. He had never governed anywhere. He was a senate for a very short period of time. Conventional wisdom would say that he lacked the experience. He needed to pay the dues before becoming a president. But, he had the audacity and ambition to think big.

My friend John works as director of business development at a start-up. He said to me that he would never be able to become a vice president at his company.

I asked him: “Look around your company. Can you find a VP that is stupid, incompetent, and political?” He said that there were several of them.

I asked John: “can you do a better job than those guys?” He said: “Yes. I’m sure I will do a better job.”

I told John that he must believe in himself. He needed to think big — he has the intelligence, work ethics, and ability to become a senior executive. Plus, he is a super nice guy. If he thinks small, he will never get to the top. We need more nice and capable people at the top.

I believe performance review is one of the worst inventions in human history. Most performance reviews are useless, but people actually believe them. I cannot believe how many times I heard friends and coworkers stressed over the performance reviews, telling me that they needed to work harder to address weakness and deficiency. How do you know your manager and employer have your best interest in mind when they review your performance? Do they know what they’re talking about? Inside your mind, you should only give permission to smart, good, and ethical people to give you feedback.

I think most people sell themselves short. Do yourself a favor today — think big, take massive actions, and make it big!

Related posts

• What are your Non-Negotiables?
• Do you have an identity outside of work?
• The anti dot com path to success: A different way of living and working

Excellent reading:

• How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur’s Guide
• The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less
• “This business has legs”: How I Used Infomercial Marketing to Create the$100,000,000 ThighMaster Craze

Tocquigny, ranked as the #2nd best b2b digital marketing firm behind Digitas, cuts 13% of their workforce.

Are we going to see more layoffs in the advertising agency worlds? I think so. Ad spending is dropping, and agency’s main cost drivers are people.

Recommended posts

Related posts that might be helpful:

1. Depression 2.0 Survival Guide (i.e. complete guide to survive layoffs and beat recession)
2. GeekMBa360.com Layoff Satisfaction Survey

If you know any unreported layoffs, send me an email – regularguy@geekmba360.com.

• “I got laid off from Long Lines on 1-20-09 and they are hurting for money planning on 100 more cuts and 25 more in customer care.”
• “Boeing in Seattle is laying off PMs that they hired less than a year ago.  Not sure how many, but I know 10 for sure in one small division.” I received this email last night, and today Boeing announced they’re laying off up to 10,000 people. But, given Boeing’s size, it’d be interesting to know which locations/departments are being affected.

If you know any unannounced layoffs, please email me regularguy@geekmba360.com.

If you’re laid off, please fill out our Layoff Satisfaction Survey. Your voice counts!