Blue Field Strategies

Wisdom of Wizards done and available

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:20:54 +0000

I’m happy to announce that my book collaboration with my father, The Wisdom of Wizards: Insights from Leading Consultants, is done and available for purchase. All proceeds help fund the Richard Metzler Scholarship awarded by the Foundation for Excellence in Management Consulting, in affiliation with the Association of Management Consulting Firms.

About the Book:

Put any veteran management consultants together and the stories will quickly begin to fly.

Father and son authors Richard Metzler and Jon Metzler interviewed over 35 senior management consultants whose careers represent nearly 1,000 years of experience. These veterans are smart and have a keen eye for the moment, attributes that make them great consultants and great sales people. They see and seize the moment, and they remember that moment. They also are great story tellers and whenever they get together the stories just seem to pour out.

Dictionaries define a “wizard” as a wise man, one who is knowing, or very clever or skillful. Another definition is a magician, or a sorcerer, or even an alchemist who can turn lead into gold. The reader will see that good consultants have a lot in common with alchemists and wizards.

“Wisdom” is the accumulated facts, beliefs or traditions, or knowledge acquired through experience. It is the big gorillas teaching the little gorillas about life, and what is needed to survive to thrive. And this is what this book is all about, senior consultants passing on their experiences, knowledge and wisdom to the next generation.

The book has been designed with clever art work and selected cartoons from Dilbert and the New Yorker Magazine.

For those who have been consultants or who have thought of becoming one, this book is a must read. It is an unbeatable collection of insights and lessons from the “Wizards” of the profession. The reader will find something on every page that informs and deepens your understanding of why management consulting is such a fulfilling profession.

Tipping Point

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:32:34 +0000

Nielsen’s announcement on August 2nd that (1) it estimated that smartphones had grabbed 25% of the US wireless market (if that includes prepaid, then about 70M subscribers); and (2) that Android had surpassed iOS in terms of new activations over the past 6 months was well-covered. Given that Android has been adopted by 5 US carriers (Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular, collectively representing over 90% of the market) and a multitude of handset makers, it was only a matter of time. That said, the announcement represented a tipping point of sorts. Nielsen’s chart on this is below.

As if to corroborate this, that same week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that on a global basis, 200K Android handsets are being adopted daily, or 6M per month, or 18M per quarter.

When I bought the second Android available handset available in the US (HTC’s MyTouch 3G, from T-Mobile) back last fall so I could keep up with the joneses, finding an Android OS handset to play with beforehand was a bit of a challenge. (Thank you, Seamus.) Not so any more.

The icing on this particular cake came in the form of a call with my father, who casually dropped that he’d picked up a Samsung Galaxy from AT&T. The Galaxy falls in the “superphone” category, i.e., 1 GHz processor and up. Yes, that’s my Dad, rocking the Galaxy superphone running Android 2.1. That is a tipping point. He was migrating from Windows Mobile, also somewhat symbolic in itself. AT&T was apparently of little help during the data porting process, and I have to imagine that this issue will only grow going forward.

New report for KDDI Research: The State of TV in America

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:13:34 +0000

KDDI Research released a report (Japanese-language; PDF download here) I authored on The State of TV in America (English abstract). This is part 1 of 2, and focuses on the traditional broadcast TV and cable industries, and the advent of “three screen viewing”, to paraphrase Nielsen’s term. Part 2 looks forward, and will focus further on multi-device viewing, and innovations in the video viewing and distribution fields.