Rix Bits

Based on previous articles in this series, it’s clear to me now that Hollywood has all the answers we need to guide our professional lives. : ) From consulting skills to self-promotion tips, movies provide more wisdom about our day-to-day lives than a box of chocolates. And for guidance on career planning, we don’t have to look any further than the digital drama known as The Matrix. Here are a few rules we can learn from the saga of these hackers-turned-heroes. But remember, as we all know, some of these rules can be bent… others can be broken.

I got a great response to my previous article, “Everything I Know About Consulting…”, and it made me realize that there are even more things to be learned from classic 80’s cinema. While good consulting techniques are certainly important to help us land our next client, they’re not the total package.  We have to also use certain skills after we’ve landed the project to show that we were indeed the right person to pick for the job, and worthy of even more projects. This falls into the category of self-promotion – our ability to display our expertise, ability, and confidence to those around us, so that we’re seen as the very subject matter expert we claim to be.  And what better piece of work to illustrate these techniques than that classic movie “The Princess Bride”*. Let’s take a look at what this movie has to tell us about how to promote ourselves:

Being a consultant can be challenging, and although there have been many books and articles written on the subject of how to be a good consultant (or even how to be a BAD one), much of what we learn about consulting comes from hands-on experience and trial-and-error. Fortunately, in the 1980’s there was another body of work produced on the subject of consulting that has been particularly useful for me. It was a film called “The Ghostbusters”*, and for me, it was an enlightening look at several areas of consulting that we’ve all had to deal with from time to time. Here are some of the subjects that this ground-breaking piece of work helped to make clear for me: