Ten Years of Global Gigs—Lessons Learned*

Context, context, context, peripheral vision, and careful with those best practices

During the decade just ended our firm underwent its third major transformation—from an earlier core focus on international management consulting to one based on development consulting.  Not that we do not still do strategy consulting, market assessments, due diligence, and regulatory work.  Yet the latest phase has brought new practices, new lands to learn about (beyond the 30 counties we had worked in previously), and new challenges.

In this latest period, we worked across 40 new countries—from Argentina to Algeria and Tanzania to Thailand.  We also added affiliated consultants in more than 20 countries, including Costa Rica, India, Kenya and United Arab Emirates.  We served a wider range of clients than ever, including investment funds, Ministries of Finance and Justice, and multilaterals like the World Bank.  And we took on new streams of projects in digital development, Public Private Partnerships, judicial disputes, and national broadband strategy.

We also learned some useful lessons.  Lesson One—each country presents a unique context that must be understood to give worthwhile advice.  Lesson Two—do not impose “best practices” that have not yet been proven to work in countries similar to those where they are being recommended.  Lesson Three—learn to work within client decision-making structures and schedules.  And Lesson Four—do not be captured totally by the lessons of the past (including One, Two and Three above), as this would prevent learning any new ones.

Another lesson came from the way our teams, which often have members from three or more continents, work together.  In some cases, the work is remote, with team members meeting over virtual channels like Skype, screen sharing, and multi-person calls as well as  at client sites.  The underlying lesson is that the mix of team members is key to working effectively as well as minimizing the need for “management interventions.”  And what helps especially is experience working with a range of clients with different expectations of the project process and deliverables.  Ergo consultants with 20+ years of experience, as almost all of ours have, are more likely to thrive in such diverse contexts, require far less day to day management, and carry off remote and virtual team work compared to novices.

We also learned a good deal from our clients.  One explained how mobile phone operators compete with beer producers for prepaid users with little disposable money.  Another, a government, closed down an international telemedicine link while we were developing a strategy for the country’s digital transformation.  A breach of national sovereignty (due to patient file storage in the partner country) was the given reason.  In another country, we saw the tax authority target an undersea cable’s revenues well beyond its 12-mile territorial jurisdiction and the 30-mile rule as well.  Also, the terrestrial cables in countries we worked were being cut, sometimes by the same workers who had dug the trenches.  And we learned why there were few mobiles to be seen in some parts of the world and why Internet use was so low.

The underlying lesson is that each new country and market should not be approached head on but with a good degree of peripheral vision.  Best practices, yes, assuming they have been proven in the country in question or highly similar ones. And it helps to learn the questions to ask when stepping into a new country—no less how to interpret the answers.

* An excerpt from Kas Kalba’s Global Gigs—How to Find Them, Manage Them, Learn from Them