About

Who Am I and Why Should You Let Me Help You? 

I’m Douglas Brown, your Business Paramedic.  I use that title because it represents what I’ve learned over many years an organization manager and business consultant. Much of what you are told about how to manage organizations and solve problems just doesn’t work. That advice comes from large consultancies and big names, and maybe it works for Fortune 50 companies that can sink millions into “transformations” without even noticing it, but for the 99%, that isn’t an affordable or practical solution (and it hasn’t worked for those that have tried it anyway).

Who am I to say this? Someone who has been involved with improving organizational results and processes for decades. I got tired of wasting time and money doing things the books and experts said were the way to go but didn’t actually lead anywhere.  I had to find my own way around the “school solutions” that didn’t work. There’s no reason for you to come to this same realization the hard way.

I’ve been solving business (and government) management problems for over 20 years, as an in-house manager, a consultant, and a small business owner. You can read all about the various roles and engagements I have had over the past three decades via my profile on Linked-In.

You’ll see that I have all the traditional experiences and I have numerous professional certifications.  That means I know what best practices are in many areas, and I’m professionally obligated to endorse and follow them. I’ve come to realize that there is a footnote: “in the right way, at the right time”.

Over the past decades, I’ve been hired numerous times to help organizations recover from failed efforts to institute industry best practices . Sure, some of that as the normal resistance to change, and I developed methods of dealing with the perfectly normal frictions of bringing about change, but as these experiences kept coming I realized something else was going on: it wasn’t entirely that these organizations would not change: they could not. They didn’t have a firm enough foundation to build from. They weren’t able to handle real best practices.

Over time, as I helped several organizations struggle through their challenges, I developed an approach from bridging the gap between “no practices” and “enough practices to start thinking about best practices”. After a while I started consciously re-using ideas that worked before, and eventually it occurred to me that the patterns were repeating themselves and this was an actual system. That when I wrote the book on it: “Let It Simmer”.

Very few organizations rare in a position to get real benefit from expensive company-wide “transformation” initiatives. If they’re not ready, those efforts will make things worse, not better. Often, managers need to get things operating at a tolerable level before trying for “world class”. They know something needs to be done. They may even know what it is. The problem is getting it done.

That’s where I come in. I help you jump-start specific solutions to very specific problems that everyone agrees are holding performance down. Other than my guidance and facilitation, you solve your critical problems using the people, data and tools that you already have in place.  You get the critical problems under control, and you get your operation running at an acceptable level.  Only then do you need to worry about best practices.

To find out about getting Paramedic Treatment instead of yet another failed practice implementation, go to the How We Help page.

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