About
Biography
Karen Phelan is a speaker, consultant, and author of the international bestseller, I’m Sorry I Broke Your Company, a humorous dissection of management consulting practices. The Toronto Globe and Mail named it one of the top ten business books of 2013, and it topped the business bestsellers in Japan for several months.
In addition to writing and consulting, she is developing a tool that uses role modeling to improve communication, innovation, and team building. Karen has twenty years of business transformation experience, both as a consultant at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and Deloitte, and in several management positions at Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. Karen also holds two engineering degrees from MIT and considers herself to be a creative problem-solver.
Philosophy
Business is not something outside of "life" or other than a group of people
Businesses are organizations, and organizations are people. People don’t behave differently once they become employees.
Economic theory had been built around the concept of rational agents – unemotional individuals who act in a purely self-interested manner to maximize financial rewards. This rational agent model became the basis for business management theory. However, while most economists have abandoned this model for behavioral economics, it still provides the basis for much business theory.
The philosophy of our art
Life can be fun, rich, and meaningful
We can create environments where people belong, feel free to express themselves, care about each other, and work to enrich people’s lives. Or we can create environments that crush people’s souls where people dread coming to work each day. Which environment has better morale, higher retention, better customer service, innovative ideas, and stronger loyalty?
As human beings, don’t we have a moral obligation to each other to spend our days trying to uplift the human condition?
The philosophy of our art
We make decisions based on our beliefs, not facts
While most of us think we make decisions and judgments based on external factors, the truth is that we make decisions based on our feelings and then we rationalize them. We filter our outside world all the time because we cannot process all the details of our environment. Therefore, we create mental models of the world, which we use to take action. The accuracy of our mental models to the external world is the sole determining factor of how good our decisions are.
But our mental models are usually beholden to our belief systems, like are human beings inherently selfish or selfless? Is the world hostile or beneficial? Should life be fair or is inequity inevitable? Do we have a purpose or is life random? While these are big beliefs, businesses are beholden to belief systems which are rigid and inaccurate.
The philosophy of our art
Bad business beliefs often start with management consultants
Management consultants aren’t evil or incompetent. The inherent problem in the industry is that it is not scalable. Obtaining advice from an expert or relying on additional resources on a temporary basis are all sound business practices. The problem is that wisdom and experience can’t be easily replicated in order to grow a consulting business. So the consultancy develops methods to solve specific business problems and changes their business model from advisory to selling solutions.
However, these solutions address a mental model based on an aggregate or average of multiple businesses. To illustrate, the average US family has 1.9 children, but no family in the US has 1.9 children. No business will fit the aggregated or average model.
The philosophy of our art
