10 fun ways to stop annoying telemarketing calls

Excerpt from here.

1. After the telemarketer finishes speaking, propose marriage to him/her.

2. Tell the telemarketer you are busy at the moment, and ask him/her, to give you his/her home phone number and cell number so you can call back maybe very late at night.

3. Keep asking the telemarketer to tell you his spiel all over again. Do this several times.

4. If you receive a call during a meal, tell the telemarketer that it's lunch time, but ask him/her to hold. Switch to loudspeaker mode and eat your food in a languid noisy fashion, chomping away and continuing with the conversation.

5. Tell the telemarketer that all business goes through your representative, and hand the phone to your five-year-old.

6. Say that you are hard of hearing and that he/she needs to speak up -- louder -- louder -- louder!

7. Tell the telemarketer to speak really really slowly because you want to write every word down.

8. If the telemarketer starts off with "How are you today?", say "I'm so glad you asked, because no one these days seems to care, and I have all these problems..."

9. Cry out in astonishment, "Rani, is that you? I've been hoping you'd call! How is the family?" When he/she insists it's not Rani, refuse to believe it and say, "Stop kidding me!" This works especially well if the telemarketer is female.

10. Tell the telemarketer to call at your office number and give him/her the number of a rival telemarketing organisation instead!

The Difference between Development and Consulting

Excerpt from here:

This topic is part of my Personal Manifesto. What makes a great IT consultant is different and also the same as being a software developer. What do I mean? I mean that you can be a great developer and not be a great IT consultant. To be a great IT consultant you must be a very good developer. Not a great one but just a very good one. The key to consulting is listening, understanding and then finally modeling.

The first thing a great consultant must do is listen. I do not mean just to be in the room and hear what your client is saying. You must fully listen. Listen to their passion. Listen to their hope. Finally you must listen to what they dream. In the end you are not the Dreamer but the Dreammaker. You must take the dream and make it reality. Not an easy job for most projects. You will get the project where the client needs a report or a data repository which you could do in your sleep. What happens when a client comes to you and asks for a Purple Cow? What happens when they want to transform their business and entrust you and your team to make their dreams come true. That is pressure and what we true consultants live for.

To give tour client their dream, you must understand their views and business. You must do it in days and weeks when the client has taken years to understand it. You do not have to have a 100% understanding of the client’s business. But you must get to the 80/20 level. 80% of their business must be known cold and the other 20% must be able to be quickly gathered from known people, departments or teams with the client’s organizations (I will cover the Law of Knowing in a later posts).

The last key to consulting is to be a great modeler. Now I am not talking about the model airplanes that we built as kids or UML models (but these do sometimes play a part). What I mean is that you can build a model of their business that can lead your team and also confirm to the client that you fully understand the dream. This can be done with use cases, functional requirements documents or even storyboards. In the end, it just matters to show the dream back to the client as a picture of reality.

If you master these 3 keys to consulting, the development of the clients dream is for the most part the easy part. Technologies around software development have given developers the ability to build most of the common pieces of software (such as database development, business objects and UI construction) quickly and efficiently.

Here is an initial short list of books (more suggestions coming) that should be required reading for consultants:

1. The Trusted Advisor, Maister, Galford, Green
2. Blue Ocean Strategies, Kim, Mauborgne
3. Consultant’s Little Instruction Book: 101 Rules to Guide Consultants to Better Business, Payn