Improving from the good and the bad

When you work as a consultant, you get to see the inner workings of a lot of different companies. There’s always plenty to learn from and to help you grow.

Some things as simple as how somebody runs a meeting (which could be a good or a bad thing), to the tools the team uses, to the interactions with business groups and/or senior management - they vary wildly from person to person and organization to organization.

I try to take parts of the good with me, thinking about how I can put some of that into use in my own practice.

I try to learn the most from the bad; figure out what they’re doing wrong so I can avoid making those mistakes in my futre work.

And the ugly (broken, toxic, company-wide mis-functioning)? I’m not sure there’s anything one guy can fix, so I mostly remember to never accept a job offer from those organizations.

Life is a long road forward - making consistent improvement, no matter how small, compounds significantly over time.

- Chris Butterworth