The consulting world has slipped into a crisis of its own making once again, and I'm wondering (not for the first time) if the rest of the world is ever going to come to its senses and put the whole darned thing out of its misery. The world has a short memory and a penchant for masochism, so I sort of doubt it…
In the meantime, despite this crisis, there is no shortage of things to do where I am.
Have you ever seen that claim that we're all born with 2.5 billion heart beats in us, and once we've used them up they're all gone?
I have a similar theory about the quantity of words we're able to output in the average day. Don't ask me what this quantity might actually be, because I haven’t a clue, but my experience has been that if the day job demands that I generate a lot of words then there aren't any left for anything else. It doesn't seem to matter what kind of words they are. If I spend all day writing or talking, then there are no words left when I get home. Doesn’t help being a natural introvert.
A lot of what I do when I'm properly engaged at work is story telling - of one form or another - and so, unsurprisingly, if I wear out my storytelling muscles on the treadmill of work then there's no juice left in the tank for writing any other types of story.
If you're a loyal follower on LinkedIn then you will have seen just a few of the many things that have been absorbing my storytelling time in the past few months. Where COVID kept me locked up in Hong Kong for a couple of years, the absence of COVID has impelled me right back out there onto the world's stage…(so to speak).
That's what's been going on in my life. That's what's kept me off this platform for the last while. How ‘bout you?
When I was working as a contractor - often with my work reliant on some consulting firm who would be putting the tenders together - it always felt like they waited until there was a nice big public holiday coming up before they'd launch them into the market.
Day before Christmas or Easter or Ramadan? Here you go, world. Turn this around in two weeks while we all have a nice rest…
It used to really get on my tits.
One of the things I think consultants forget is that at the tender stage of a project, the only company in the supply chain that’s getting paid is (wait for it) the consultant.
The bidders are working speculatively in the hope that they will win the work and recoup the cost of bidding on the job, but of course, that can only be the case for one bidder. All of the others have burned their time and effort for nothing.
Even that winning bidder probably won't see a penny of revenue out of the job until after contract negotiations and maybe an advance payment guarantee has been issued…which costs them money.
I honestly don't believe that most consultants are even aware of this. They can't be, otherwise they wouldn't treat contractors so badly.
Okay. I know that a lot of people will object to this claim because “contractors are the enemy”. Apparently…
These days I live on the consultant side of the fence. It's a lonely place. But we get paid.
Contractors are contractors, and in some parts of the world (this part of the world) they're absolutely crap, but making their lives difficult, costing them more money (eroding their margin) is not the way to fix the problem.
It was interesting reading Genetec’s 2024 security market forecasts this week, seeing how they portray a shift in the security sector towards more cloud, more IT, more skills, but I don't buy that. For me, this is an indication of the market Genetec occupy (and would like to dominate), where security has been subsumed into the IT function of the organization, and as a result there exists a more mature approach to managing systems and risks.
This does not reflect the reality of the ‘nuts and bolts’ security world that is low-to-no skill, low pay, managed by ex ’some-other-job’ people who’re just trying to cling on until retirement’, with the ‘just make sure the guards are awake’ mentality that is so common wherever the outward security posture is allowed to be loose and lackadaisical because the threats are low enough frequency for management to decide that everything that happens is a ‘black swan’.
Last week I spotted a prediction I made a few years ago that turned out to be true…so maybe I’ll put my own set of forecasts together in a post before the end of the year and see whether any more of these little gems come true.
If your memory is long enough, you'll recall that I kicked off a series about urbanisation a while ago. The follow-on articles are in progress. I got sidetracked.
There's a chunky article about quantum computing that I'm hoping to finish proofreading pretty soon. We need to get to pondering this topic.
Advanced Air Mobility and the eVTOL ‘revolution’ is high on my work agenda right now and I'm sure to get into writing some more about that quite soon, along with a whole bunch of other aviation security stuff that’s occupying my interest.
It would probably be more accurate to say that I will get ‘back’ into the AAM/UAS topic quite soon, because this is not a new area for me, it’s just that my current employer has chosen to fall asleep on the topic for the past couple of years, forcing me to remain in listen-only mode for much too long. Time to go into output mode again.
And of course, the ongoing AI conversation keeps on tugging at my vent valve…because there’s still so much to say and so many chunks of nonsense need stamping on.
The Securiosity never goes away, I just need the extra fingers and head space to get it out there.
Bear with me.
Securiosity is a place to have the conversations that irritate people who work in this risk management world when they’re not toeing the company line.
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