Plague Rats (consultants) (previous quotes in a PDF file)

Inspired ideas workshop
'I would like to invite you to join us for our next Inspired Ideas Workshop where our Engagement Specialist, James Wright, will share the insiders view to developing, launching and managing a unique and successful reward and recognition program ... James will walk you through tried and tested development strategies ... The workshop will kick start your thought process and you will walk away with an action plan to make it happen in your organisation.' Corporate Marketing Manager, Red Balloon.

Synergy, leverage, customized engagements
'Synergy and Leverage is a consultancy specializing in systemic organizational transcendence . Working with an integrated methodology based in communication, collaboration and inclusion, we have cracked the code on how to implement and execute complex organizational projects and initiatives. Our work addresses the interdependencies and differences between levels of leadership and management to establish cohesive efforts in moving projects and organizations forward to their desired outcomes and results. We provide customized engagements addressing the needs of our clients that are designed to fulfill what they want to accomplish. Our offerings in organizational design, leadership development, team projects and individual development include hands-on support and coaching. As our client, we promise you results and transfer our bias for action into implementation and execution.' Synergy and Leverage consultants: 'Stands for honor and dignity being expressed in all relationships'. Thanks to Dey Alexander.

Enhance core competencies, strengthen managerial language
'Our ILP [Integrated Leadership Program] is the sharing of an amalgamation of proven Peak Performance Leadership Tools, Technologies and Resources to assist today's Leaders and Managers to be the best they can be. The engagement of our ILP is primarily initiated via an interview process designed to indentify a Leader's current skills set, personality traits, leadership style and managerial strengths ... Collaboratively, we work with organisations to assist their Leaders to enhance core competencies, build on interpersonal skills, solidify role clarification and workplace boundaries and strengthen their managerial language, behaviours and actions. This approach has realised significant improvements in individual and team performance, outcomes, workplace harmonisation and workforce retention.' Brad Lockwood Consultancy.

The 3 day event is a jargon-free environment ...

•How can SharePoint boost performance? What is the business case?
•How does SharePoint fit into an organization's information management strategy?
•How do you make the most of your SharePoint implementation?
•How do you increase user engagement?
•How do you demonstrate ROI and build a social enterprise?
•Experience exciting new releases, products, and demos from Microsoft and partners
•Relax, meet, and network with like-minded professionals at our fun-filled evening event

Attend the event to discover how to enhance the performance, efficiency, and reliability of your SharePoint platform. Learn from fresh new case studies, evaluate the business case, and collate best practice. SharePoint Conference

'Bold and Brave Consulting gets things done, implements that change you know you need and works with you to find the road map to be Who you need to BE, to Do what you need to DO that will ensure that you HAVE and ACHIEVE what you want to HAVE and ACHIEVE. This might be personal success or development, increased choices, team achievement, improved organisational performance. Your staff and team can be involved to feel like they have contributed to your future and theirs ...
- Stakeholder Management
- Brokering partnerships to leverage expertise, eliminate duplication and maximize outcomes...
- Planning – strategic, business, project, stakeholder, individual performance ...
- People Needs and Workforce Planning – team building, capacity building and skills identification, position and role clarification, reward and recognition programs, volunteering schemes...
- Building Specific Log Sheets for "paths of travel to exits", "discharge from exits", "doors" etc.'

Experience of commitment and sustainability of human resources
'Our commitment is to design an event that is inclusive for all our traders, so each one can showcase their best. Our commitment is to design an event that provides enough time and enough space for people to enjoy more of our High Street Northcote experience. Our commitment is to design an event our volunteer team can deliver every year and still run their businesses. So that's our plan. We're taking the best bits of High Noon and spreading them out across the year.  We know it's soon but it reflects our responsibility as the NBA executive to strengthen and protect our strategy, relationships and sustainability of our human resources and financial capacity.' Highstreetnorthcote.com Thanks to Spencer Skehill.

Not against permanent workers?
'Conference director Trevor Vas acknowledged the event's title may have been misinterpreted but denied it was about promoting contingent work over permanent work. "We are not anti-permanent, we are saying, 'how do you best match the employee for the type of work'," Mr Vas said.' Conference on part-time work angers unions, The Age, 11 September, 2012.

'The optimum blend and utilisation of a Permanent and Contingent Workforce provides an organisation with significant competitive advantages including:

• Cost reduction and greater value generated  - measuring, managing and optimising 100% of the costs of your contingent workforce;
• Increased productivity - being able to match the best type of skill to the business need or project; 
• Increased agility and alignment  - the ability to ramp the workforce up and down in different locations as required; 
• Reduced risk  - providing a framework that ensures compliance to statutory, regulatory, and health and safety requirements with a minimum of red tape and overhead; 
• Improved 360 degree experience all stakeholders including; hiring managers, candidates, contingent workers, recruitment agents, staffing managers, procurement and finance gain efficiencies and repeatable best fit service; and 
• Continual improvement  - measuring and reporting relevant lead and lag indicators to key decision makers.'

Australian Talent Conference: Contigent the new Perm. Sydney Australia.

'To help you think and define your future, Tim Longhurst, one of Australia's leading futurists will keynote at EMC Forum 2012'. Thanks to Kyle who says: 'I hate it when a noun is used as a verb'.

'Orbis Performance is a boutique consultancy that maximises performance by developing high level leadership and harnessing the spirit and potential of your people and aligning their discretionary effort behind your purpose and strategic goals to create and maintain a high performance culture, leading to sustainable, breakout business performance.'

On-boarding pain points
'What are your organisations HR pain points? At Antares, we use Nintex to address the most common HR pains:
Employee on-boarding

Is your on-boarding process fragmented? Have you lost control of employee on-boarding? Are you manually sending and receiving information from IT, Finance and other departments? Are you simply using a time-consuming, error prone, manual employee on-boarding process?

Using Nintex technologies, Antares can automate the most complex employee on-boarding processes. Ensure new hires get everything they need for their first day while taking the burden out of on-boarding for HR. Integrate communication between departments, organisation-wide, to drastically improve the speed and reliability of the on-boarding process. First impressions for new hires are everything, starting with employee on-boarding.'

Clean sheeting
What consulants are apparently doing in a workplace. Thanks to Peter who says: ' Gone are the "R" words of the 20th century (restructure, reorganise, right-sizing, realignment ...) and in with clean sheeting, which was essentially described as a reorganisation/restructure/right-sizing exercise.'

$5300 course in the categories of being
'Will this course cover Ontological Coaching? This would really go a long way to further  empowering us in bedding down a business culture that is becoming more culturally diverse, and provide significant organisational benefits as we endeavour to manage change in a synergistic way, across a multi-stakeholder platform.' Karl's reply to an email inviting him to join an executive coaching course. He says: 'My email was written as a joke, rich with weasel words. I wasn't expecting a response from Swinburne.  I thought possibly they would see through the sarcasm, but then they sent me a response the following week. They took me seriously.'

'Dear Karl, Thank you for your interest in our Executive Coach Certification Program. Our program does cover ontological aspects of coaching if you are referring to the categories of being.' And from the attached file: 'Swinburne University and Coaching Australia are proud of their partnership to deliver this industry leading executive coaching program. Swinburne is constantly seeking to provide our clients with the best possible solution to their training needs and often this can mean developing programs in conjunction with industry professionals, who know the market well.' Swinburne Training and Development.

Moving forward with brands and social emotions
'We use disciplined thinking and years of experience to identify opportunities for our clients. We take on their problems and we find the best available, research based insight to help them move forward. Research is our tool.

We know that the world of brands and communications has changed and become more complex. Engaging campaigns work in lots of different ways and therefore need different, more forward looking and sensitive development and evaluation metrics – including for instance, how people sense the brand or social issue (not just what they have heard said), what they do with it (not just what they say), and the shared social emotions that surround it (because the main influence on our behavior is the behavior of others).' Hall & Partners, Open Mind. Thanks to Rod who comments: 'Having read what they are about I have no idea what they do.'

Coachable moments
'Would you like to add high quality coaching skills to your leadership capabilities and increase your ability to engage, motivate and empower your people? Do you see yourself influencing a culture of transformation in your organisation by embedding coaching into your leadership behaviours?

Swinburne University in partnership with Coaching Australia is offering an information session for the upcoming Executive Coach Certification Program in June 2012. The information session will contain important details about the program, how to take advantage of opportunities in the growing coaching industry and examples of "coachable moments".' An invitation by email from Industry Solutions, Swinburne University, Melbourne. Thanks to Karl Hellbusch.

outcomes agnostic
A seminar on ‘design thinking' was recommended as ‘outcomes agnostic'. Thanks to Jen who says: ' I'm thinking I'll adopt the outcome atheist approach and just decline.'

"The Performance Management Index confirms the complete drop away in the lead-to-close rate is due in real part to people not listening and not learning how to approach the buyer." Brett Allan from Pitcher Partners and Debra McQuinn from Prova in 'Spending up but deals not closed', The Australian, 18 February, 2012. And talking about whether companies can afford the profiling and training services they offer: "Discussions can be frank and necessarily hard because you're signalling clear change. As to how much needs to be done it could mean a return to year zero. It all revolves around commonsense and a clear desire to recognise where you are and where you aren't," Allen says. "Everything old is new again," McQuinn says, "but now we have far more sophistication to add to the equation." Thanks to Des who says: 'Could that be: We tell people everything they've been doing so far is useless, so that they'll feel helpless and agree to pay us a truckload of money to re-train them, using common sense about getting to know customers and their needs, but using also our fancy tools, so we can show them nice graphs and they won't feel it's something they probably could have worked out for themselves.

Pain points

'At Social Fresh our purpose is to help marketers use social media to build better businesses ... What social media task, strategy, platform gives you the most trouble? Where do you lose the most time? Where do you need to improve results? Leave your topics, questions, and pain points in the comments below ...'

'All of it is connected. Technology is an enabler in the Human Age that makes things really fly and more pointed. We're appreciative of technology but we're into maximizing it as a tool. That's the difference between the Information Age and the Human Age.' ManpowerGroup's chairman and CEO Jeff Joerres responding to Golden Flannel Award from Financial Times for “utter gibberish from a company that should know better.” The Business Journal, 20 January, 2012.

How Ways of Being impact on the quality of human behaviour
'Ontological Coaching is an extraordinarily powerful methodology for effecting real change at the individual, team and organisational level. It is highly effective because it is based on a new practical understanding of the power of language, moods and conversations for behavioural and cultural transformation ... Ontological Coaching supports people to become more powerful Observers, capable of not only taking more effective action, but also for becoming more self-generating as learners to meet the imperative for the continual development of flexible modes of thinking ... Ontological Coaching has a holistic orientation that is applicable for Executive Coaching, Organisational Consulting, management and leadership. An ontological approach to coaching is based on a practical understanding of how Ways of Being impact on the quality of human behaviour, relationships and accomplishments, all of which are critical to leadership and management performance.' The work of Newfield Institute is based on the new discipline Ontology of the Human Observer.

Diverse ethics
'Supporting you to create INNOVATIVE, SMART and ETHICAL people services.
Workforce and Client DIVERSITY
REsponding to a culturally diverse workforce and client profile provides significant organisational benefits. We can supply you with tailored solutions to maximise the potential of your workforce and create respectful and inclusive services to your customers.' Goodrun Solutions mission statement

Coalition of volunteers
'Successful transformations are driven by teams of enthusiastic employees—“coalitions of volunteers,” if you will—who take it upon themselves to move change forward. They are committed to their organizations. They are excited about the opportunities that lay ahead. And they are among the most important elements of a winning change process.' Words Matter: Getting Rid of Business Jargon by John Kotter, the chief innovation officer of Kotter International, a change company that helps leaders build the capacity to drive transformation in their organizations.

'Department deputy secretary of enabling services Barbara Bennett confirmed to the committee the workshop had taken place. Ms Bennett said the workshop was "an ice-breaker and team-building exercise. [It] cost $2660 and it was used as a way to have an informal moment to get to know each other better."' Herald Sun,
21 October, 2011.

'Effective clinical leadership is known to be an important driver of health care quality and safety improvement. On this basis, the VQC has engaged a provider to develop and deliver a leadership program that explores how best-practice clinical leadership can be applied in a practical way to address quality and safety issues within health care settings. The 9-month pilot program will comprise a range of delivery modes beginning with a one-day workshop scheduled for early December 2011.' Victorian Quality Council. Thanks to Malcolm Morgan who nominates this for the National Fatuous Gobbledegook Award (NFGA).

'...having diversity constituted “collective intelligence” in theworkplace. In order to leverage diversity, she [ Cara Morton, managing director of Accenture Finance and Performance Management Consulting Asia-Pacific] said the first step is to build an inclusive culture by instituting protocols which will assist moving beyond unconscious bias.' 'Elephant in the room: the diversity gap', HC Online, 25 September, 2011. Thanks to Mary Blackwood

'The one day session on September 26th in Sydney will help participants understand carbon related issues, unravel the jargon and learn strategies on how to reduce an events impact on the climate, translating into cost savings and tapping into the growing demand for highly promotable sustainable events.' Spice News.

'CONSORTIA has developed its own 360 Assessment Tool using evidence based behavioural indicators of supportive leadership. The 360 degree feedback process draws on data from a range of stakeholders within the work environment including management, peers and subordinates. The 360 degree assessment results in the user receiving individualized feedback and a development plan highlighting various actions to build on strengths and develop areas of improvement within the supportive leadership domain.

The key point of difference for CONSORTIA's 360 Leadership Assessment is the focus on integrating feedback from smaller groups of individuals who accurately represent the complex inter-dynamics between the leader and their key work relationships as opposed to broader 'averages' - which are not reflective of the true complexity of interpersonal relationships. By having an intense focused in 360 degree feedback from a smaller number of peers and accurate behavioural items - leaders are able to more fully grasp the impact of their behaviour within the nominated reference group and as such have more clarity and motivation to make realistic behaviour changes quickly and effectively...

The key advantage in CONSORTIA's approach to business s[sic] and strategic planning is the capability of our consultants to facilitate deep levels of discussion and practical outcomes in delivering on the strategic agenda through strategies that effectively maximize human resources, optimize communication strategies and have strong under pinning metrics to enable both accountability and clear delivery of results.' CONSORTIA. Leadership, Strategy and Performance. Found on the PsyCare Leadership website by Paul Ross.

Mathema Analytics is a 100% subsidiary of Copal Partners, one of the largest knowledge service ecosystems in the world serving the financial and corporate sectors.' Thanks to Craig Duncan

'This is the proportion of the Vertical variable that answer “yes” to the horizontal variable.' Answer given to Joe Podsky when he asked what the term “V%” meant in a Roy Morgan research document.

'Good asset management integrates with corporate strategy development and business planning to ensure that non-asset solutions, life cycle costs and risks are considered through the key phases in asset life cycles.' Asset Economics, Lifecycle
& Costing Management, 20, 21 June, Auckland, Mercure Hotel. Thanks to Mike Durand.

'To create an effective internal audit function, internal audit's primary stakeholders must determine how the function will deliver the desired value. Through this process stakeholders should define specified outcomes or “value drivers” expected of the new function ... Your organisation is ready to move to Step 2 when you can articulate how your key stakeholders expect the new internal audit function to deliver value ' PricewaterhouseCoopers, Building a Strategic Internal Audit Function. Thanks to Craig Duncan

Climate change was identified in the 2009 Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report as a threat to the Great Barrier Reef. In order to address this threat, the Great Barrier Reef Climate Change Action Plan 2007-2012 was developed.

The Environmental Assessment and Management (EAM) group within the GBRMPA, is responsible for permitting activities in accordance with the Great Barrier Reef Zoning Plan, managing joint permit arrangements with the Queensland Government and implementing policy and plans of management...

RPS is assisting the EAM group identify and scope options to manage climate change impacts, both in the form of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, to better protect the Great Barrier Reef and stakeholder interests.

The project will guide the incorporation of climate change management measures into the core business of the EAM group, and lead to Environmental Impact Assessment processes that target climate change adaptation and mitigation.' RPS assists the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority combat climate change, 21 March, 2011. RPS is an international consultancy providing world-class local solutions in energy and resources, infrastructure, envrironment and urban growth. Thanks to Craig Duncan .

'Developing a compelling scope of work: Maximising value and de-risking the process.' Invitation to a Procurement conference / workshop which also mentions: ' Acceleration techniques for stakeholder input and sign off & Empowering the business.' Thanks to Peter Laing

More forward movement...
'The Dairy Moving Forward initiative is a national dairy industry initiative funded to establish how pre-farm gate research, development, and extension can continue to support and underpin an internationally competitive and sustainable Australian dairy industry through a nationally managed collaborative approach.'

'The highly unique Moving Forward Personal Development programs will deliver you with the spiritual and physiological tools that are required in order for you to take the necessary steps in developing the most fulfilling life possible. You will develop a diagnostic technique (unique to the Moving Forward Personal Development programs), that will give you ... the ability to become the coach and mentor of your own life.' Thanks to Craig Duncan.

'A finance person may use the phrase 'financial modeling,' while a design person says 'rapid prototyping.' They are both talking about necessary tasks that are part of exploring opportunities. Challenge them to build a common language and to use terms that resonate with everyone on the team.' Management Tip of the Day: A common language for innovation. Today's management tip was adapted from "Eight Communication Traps That Foil Innovation" by Georgia Everse.

(previous quotes in a PDF file)

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