“Then you fix it. And that’s amazing.” — The beauty of consulting.
A graduate of DePaul University and a Senior Strategy Consultant at Covalent Marketing, everything about Kyla from her posture to her words is sharp, composed and focused. Ask her a question and without missing a beat, she returns a purposeful blast of insight.
It’s absolutely as impressive as it sounds.
I had the pleasure of being able to chat and interview with her at Merchandise Mart.
RILEY MASUNAGA: So everyone has a pitch for their company, but what’s your personal pitch? What makes you special?
KYLA MORAN: The thing that makes me special is that I approach things from a multitude of angles. If I could describe myself in a word it would be “incisive”, I don’t just look at general problems, I cut straight to the point.
On top of that I’m an inherently lazy person which would sound like a bad thing — but in all honesty that’s how you solve problems the fastest. If you want a job done and you want it done quickly and lastingly, give it to a lazy person.
That also means that when I’m passionate about something, I’m going to dedicate myself fully to it. So, I’m lazy with busy work and silly things… That will still get done, but when I’m passionate about something, I’m going to find the best way to do it and devote all the energy I’ve been storing up by being lazy directly into that and mainline it.
Passion and laziness kinda work together. A friend who programs told me that the best programmers are lazy but passionate people trying to find the easiest way to get a lot of work done.
Exactly. And sometimes taking the time to let your brain meditate [on the big issues] by doing busy work rather than being totally invested in being the best all the time all the time all the time, you have those breakthrough moments of brilliance.
You’ve just been gently thinking about a problem. So when inspiration comes, you aren’t busy sending emails, trying to schedule appointments or being the best notetaker ever and you can get information where it needs to be.
How do you manage your time so that you can “meditate” and take those breaks?
I go for much bigger chunks of time [to finish my work ].
A lot of the time when I’m working with clients they’re calling the shots. So during the first half of a project when the client is managing the time, I just let go of the reigns and let them schedule me whenever they want to.
But as far as managing time to make sure things happen on time — the core of it is that if you want to get something done, it’s going to get done. There’s a going to be a question of how much panic is going to go into getting it done on time, but it’s going to get done so worrying about it doesn’t help that much.
David Ogilvy said something along the lines of, “Sometimes you stay up all night to meet a deadline and that’s just going to happen.”(sorry, I lost the citation)
Yup. And that’s going to make up for the days you spent all day on Reddit. So if you balance those two life’s pretty happy.
Lots of people say, “You gotta do this — too bad slog through it now.”, but for you it’s like, “When can I be interested in this and when do i absolutely have to do it?”
Mhhm!
So what do you like about working at Covalent Marketing consulting?
I love solving problems. I love that you get different kinds of problems, that you get to look at them from all different angles and that you can ask any question you want to try and fix them. So you get not only the [company’s point of view] of what you’re trying to fix but also this zoomed out view of the company, who’s interacting with who and where the common problems are.
A lot of companies grow very organically, which is interesting in this day and age where we have so many structured [technology] systems. A company will implement a system, it will grow organically and you get to see how people behave and how those companies grow. So [when you look at a company], you’re getting the consumer behavior in the company (How people interact with each other and systems), which people hardly ever focus on, and you’re guiding [the department] back onto the basic trellis of technology to make it grow healthier.
My other favorite thing is that as a consultant, you’re never stuck with,“I’m reporting to my manager, who reports to the director, who reports to the VP, and my job is this tiny little cubicle of work.” When you’re in [a project] as a consultant, you’re talking to the decision makers first. You’re talking to the people whose problems you’re solving. You’re talking directly to the VPs, directly to the directors of marketing and directly to the people that matter and make decisions. Then you’re talking to people on the ground floor getting the stuff they won’t tell the managers, the information on problems where you can really make a difference without anyone on top even knowing. You get a very balanced view and you never have to worry about if you’re playing a game of telephone with what could be a genius idea. If you have a genius idea you can get it straight to the people who can do something with it.
How often can you see the scars where a company has stitched together systems A and system B together while they were growing organically?
It’s pretty obvious. We do what we call current state analysis where we listen to them talk for hours about what happens [at their company]… It’s kinda business therapy with different groups at the company. At that point it becomes very obvious where things got stitched together and where more attention really needed to have been paid. Those are really some of my favorite parts. If you can smooth over those [problems] they become the places of your biggest wins.
There are moments after figuring out where the biggest problems are that you go out for a drink afterwards saying, “OH MY GOD WHAT DID THEY DO”.
Then you fix it.
And that’s amazing.
So how do you reign in questions and keep them really focused?
First of all, we try not to focus too directly on anything one person says. We’ll write everything down and keep a very careful pokerface of “Oh that’s interesting”.
People talk to fill silences, so we give them a specifically shaped silence to fill. We’ll ask,“Give us a fifty thousand foot perspective. What’s your day like from that height? What is something you hate about it?”… and then you let them go.
“What is something that you really like and you want to keep around?”
“What’s something you’ve seen that you’d like to have that brought in?”
So you’re reading these questions that are not attacking the company — you don’t want to attack their position. You don’t want to say, “Oh yes that’s terrible. Everything you know is horrible and we’re going to fix things right away”. You want them to build an idea for a solution in their head. Then, when you pull an element from that solution they already have this image in their head that you’re fulfilling. [When you ask good questions], you’re not only pulling in better information, you’re also heading down the path to adoption… A sense of ownership [over an idea] is really important.
The stock photos with the puzzle pieces suddenly make sense. You learn about certain elements and look for the gaps in information to fill.
Although… Being a marketing engineer, I absolutely picture it as a conveyer belt of machinery. I see, “oh my god this is an overworked valve. There are 100’s of things going back and forth between 5 people everyday, how is this not breaking everyday!?”
Then you find out, ‘Oh it is breaking everyday because theres too much pressure on that one little valve…’
Other than work questions, Something I’d asked you before the interview was about how you conceptualize your thoughts, both passively and actively.
Primarily, I think of things through lenses… When I’m thinking and producing from in my own mind, I think in terms of lists. I lay [my thoughts] out in a very organized structure. Then, as soon as that organized structure is down, everything goes haywire because there are all sorts of things you can tack onto that [structure]!
When I’m looking at other people’s problems, or clients issues and current processes, I’m looking at things from a photographic angle, zooming out, looking at the full process, seeing where the moving parts actually are and adding on different lenses of context… How would this look If I was looking from the point of view of a different industry, or from the point of view of an engineer? Where would I be finding different problems?
This makes me think of the glasses Benjamin Franklin made with the colored lenses that you can flip up.
They totally brought them into National Treasure which was super cool. Go Nicholas Cage.
But in [thinking like] that, you can add or remove different lenses at the same time and see things that nobody else has seen. And because you’re not in the trenches everyday with [your client] you’re also seeing issues from an overhead perspective.
If you’re in a company It’s almost impossible to take a step back a lot of the time.
Absolutely. And it’s impossible to think that what you’ve been doing is wrong, because you haven’t been doing a bad job. You’ve been doing a really good job with what you’re set doing, but there are all these politics, implied issues or all these imaginary boundaries in your way.
‘This is the way we’ve always done it’
‘This is they way they’ve asked us to do it’
You have a lot of people [at a company] going one foot after another, so being able to go in [as a consultant] and say ‘Why don’t we just make this easier for you’ makes you feel like the smartest person in the room, which is a dangerous thing.
It’s easy to get big headed.
Very much so. Coming in and seeing things from a different angle can make you think you know more than the client and thats another major life lesson to learn… You really don’t. But yeah, seeing things from that view changes how you look at businesses.
What advice would you give to people in upper management who are stuck with those “imaginary boundries” in their head?
Walk before you run. (It’s an internal joke to say it in the flipped way, which is unfortunately pervasive)
I’ve seen many companies where there’s this pressure because so much new stuff coming out in the market and the industry and everything is changing so fast. For a company, adapting is like changing the course of an aircraft carrier. There are a ton of tiny little motions that have to be put in place. If you’re doing tiny little motions that affect hundreds of different groups that all interact with each other and you’re doing them all at once, that means you’re going to be tripping yourself trying to run too fast.
So if you’re going to commit to change and updating your company, commit wholeheartedly, but commit wholeheartedly to doing the simplest iteration first, making things more complex with time and trusting in the resources you hired and paid in order to be able to do this.
My other piece of advice… And this is the flipside, dear god, if people start complaining because they don’t want to change how they work, they need to understand that the benefit for them [in having job] isn’t having their way — the benefit is that they get a paycheck. They were hired to do a job and it’s your job to update their job’s requirements as the market changes.
That makes sense. I don’t I’ve ever heard someone say that before, but job requirements are always fluid.
Job requirements are fluid, and what got you hired might not be what you’re responsible for 3 to 5 to 10 years in. If you’re going to fight back against them, you’re probably not up to the requirements. Business is not a democracy, the point of the business is to be successful as a business. The point of you as an employee is to have as damn good of a time as possible being an employee of this business and do a good job with the molding requirements.
And if you keep moving with [fluid requirements], there are so many opportunities to do better things, do independent projects, have creative inspiration and make a difference…
But you’re never going to get there by not moving.
