Trading in platitudes
In order to become successful today, you need very little – for example, start selling banalities, wrapping them in beautiful, imported packaging. The most amazing thing is that the simpletons who are ready to pay several thousand to a “business coach”, or, as they now say, “coach”, in order to become truly “successful”, as it turns out, are “through the roof.” The “buy yourself a little happiness” business, as it turns out, has not gone away even in the age of the Internet and high technology. Moreover, the vigorous activity of the army of coaches (such as Elena Blinovskaya, Ayaz Shabudtinov, and … Anastasia Zykova), despite their dubious methods, does not subside at all.
The army of proliferating “gurus” is not embarrassed by the sad experience of the “marathon runner” Elena Blinovskayawhich first shocked the respectable public with unattainable incomes, and then naturally got into criminal charges for tax evasion… The harsh hand of the law also grabbed the one who traded in “business coaching” Ayaza Shabudtinova, maybe not so charismatic, but no less impudent… But what makes real adventurers so remarkable is that their restless followers are not at all embarrassed by the news of their epic failures. Easy money turns off the minds of even the most sensible businessmen, depriving them of the ability to analyze other people’s mistakes.
Digital Lady Star
On the topic of coaching, we were interested in the activities of a “new star” named Anastasia Zykova. It was not difficult to find out that in the recent past Anastasia Zykova was the wife and mother of children of a famous Russian lawyer Anatoly Kuchereny. They got married when she was 28 years old. At some point, the Arkhangelsk native apparently felt that she was quite capable of building her own happiness by filing for divorce. Heartbreaking details of the story of this faded love can be found on the Internet. At first glance, the dramatic divorce of another provincial woman from an eminent lawyer, about whom many secular publications wrote news, has nothing to do with the successes of the newly minted business coach Anastasia Zykova-Kucherena, but it depends on how you look at it. Still, a well-known surname could help start a new business, even though the family happiness was short-lived.
Anastasia Zykova graduated from the Kutafin Moscow State Law Academy with honors, combined study and work, gaining her first professional experience at the age of 19. While still studying at the university, she decided to focus on private practice. In addition, her background includes the Skolkovo business school, as well as training at Ernst & Young, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov and in the ANO “Scientific and Methodological Center for Mediation and Law”.
In 2016, Anastasia Zykova registered her main project – the company “Business. Solutions. Partnership”, which later became Key Consulting Group (KCG). She assembled a team of lawyers, whose photographs can be seen on the company’s website. Zykova herself acts as the managing partner and general director of the organization. KCG’s profile is comprehensive business support in such areas as tax practice, criminal defense of entrepreneurs, bankruptcy; dispute resolution, corporate practice. In addition, Zykova speaks at various forums and conferences, where she teaches various business wisdom, for example, negotiating.
Unanswered Questions
We sent her an editorial request, asking if she was active in the field of entrepreneurship? Which litigation cases does she consider to be the most successful in her legal portfolio? Also in our request, we asked to send to the editorial office any positive feedback from business entities about its activities in this field, we asked which of those who were trained using its methods had achieved any success thanks to them, what benefits, equipment and materials used in its educational activities? And most importantly, we tried to find out what caused such a high price for her services?
Alas, we did not receive a prompt response from Anastasia Zykova, and therefore we decided to study the video ourselves, a trainer for businessmen and top managers. Unfortunately, not many practical conclusions were born, rather more personal impressions – about them in order.
It is likely that the big name of her ex-husband played a significant role in the early stages: at least, Anastasia Vyacheslavovna’s business grew literally before our eyes, like a bamboo grove after the rain.
Back on January 20 of this year, she was presented as a “professional mediator and professional negotiator,” and already on February 20, she was a “master dealmaker and business lawyer,” and on March 4, a new leap was made – “a business lawyer and expert with extensive experience in supporting litigation.” September 3 Anastasia Zykova – “moderator of strategic sessions for companies.” It should be noted that the latest stage in the evolution of our “digital lady’s” business looks as impressive as it is mysterious: all our attempts to find on the Internet any information about her participation in these sessions led to nothing. Moreover, the very concept of a “strategic session,” as we found out, looks, at least for now, so vague and mysterious that “moderating” it, as it seems to us, is not so tricky: it’s like standing at a pedestrian intersection and inform pedestrians that they should go when the light is green and stand when it is red. At least, even such giants as Gazprom, judging by reviews on the Internet, do not see much sense in such events, and even top managers consider them empty chatter: after all, the “strategic goal” of any business company is clear and understandable: to sell make their products more expensive, while spending as little as possible on their production.
Anastasia Zykova gives her “protégés” advice of approximately the same kind – apparently hoping that they did not bother to read the works of Adam Smith, and even more so, the old Marx at universities. Can such information be considered exclusive and worth so much? This raises big questions.
The fact that her business advice is a storehouse of banalities and nonsense can be easily learned from the Internet: fortunately, many videos with her participation have been uploaded to YouTube. Here is one of them, it is called “9 mistakes of a novice manager.” In the preface, Anastasia Zykova (then Kucherena) explains what mistakes should be avoided in order to “immediately become an effective leader” and does this, in our opinion, quite simply.
In general, “leader” is a rather complex and vague concept. This requires a whole set of special qualities. Some people have the gift of leadership from birth, others are not given the opportunity to become one, even if they complete a hundred courses. But let’s not quibble – you can’t get enough of natural leaders for every company: of course, you need to learn a few things, since you’ve been put in charge of a team. A lot comes with experience. But listen! If you have already been put in charge of a small department: let it be five to seven people… So, do you have some kind of life experience? Well, you can’t humiliate yourself like that by listening to “advice” from “strategic company moderator” Anastasia Zykova to novice managers!
So, in her opinion, “the first mistake is to open the door with your foot and think that the leader is above someone, and not with someone.”
Opinion for a million
In other words, if you have been appointed “in charge” here, do not consider the rest to be cattle and “untermensch”, about whom you are now allowed to wipe your feet. The advice, to be honest, is so-so – any normal, educated person understands this perfectly well. The wish “not to open the door with your foot” when entering a room where your subordinates are sitting is generally pure banality, bordering on vulgarity. How many bosses have you seen, among whom, alas, there are complete boors and tyrants who kick the doors in their own office?
After recommending not to show off too much in front of your subordinates, the managing partner of KCG Consulting says that familiarity also does not lead to good, which, in our opinion, is also obvious to any reasonable person. A leader is a leader because he stands above his subordinates and is by no means obliged to be friendly with them – on occasion, he can strictly ask, or even punish. At the same time, he, of course, should not ignore their ideas, needs and interests. What’s new here?
The manager’s second mistake, according to Ms. Zykova, is “not taking into account the team’s previous experience.” Hmm… Perhaps there are fools who do this, but, in our opinion, it is at least indecent to advise such a decent person who has occupied a leadership position. Here, Ms. Zykova, it seems to us, is not just banging on an open door – she insults her listeners, considering them complete intellectual nonentities.
The designation of the third mistake: “ignoring the “one to one conversation” with employees, necessary in order to update the tasks facing the company,” makes the novice manager finally become convinced of his backwardness. Such a cleverly formulated thesis simply means a conversation with subordinates “face to face”, which the boss, according to Anastasia Zykova, should not neglect. Here, most likely, the logic is simple: apparently, our “business coach,” sensing that his client, having reached the third point, might feel that he was being scammed like the last “sucker,” decided to let in foreign words. As a result, a person who does not speak English, and there are quite a few of them, will feel his intellectual inferiority and will continue to look the “coach” in the mouth, waiting for the next valuable advice.
You can, of course, “embed” something in response, for example, in Italian: “No, non sono un fan delle conversazione facia a facia. Preferco le riunioni di gruppo” (“No, I’m not a fan of face-to-face conversations. I prefer group meetings”). Or you can even speak in some gibberish language and take a theatrical pause, enjoying the effect produced. But a well-mannered person, of course, would not do that. He will listen to the next good wish of the “coach”, such as that the boss, in order to gain the respect of his subordinates, must come to work in polished shoes and pay wages on time.
It is worth noting that Anastasia Zykova, like Pushkin’s Tatyana, seems to “speak with difficulty in her native language,” suggesting, for example, that a manager ask an employee “if he is in the resource.” Actually, in Russian this idea is expressed differently: does the employee have the resources necessary to achieve the goal? At the same time, in all her resumes, Zykova often emphasizes that she was an excellent student, which, unfortunately, can only indicate that our education system has been very much degraded over the past decades. At the school where we studied, such a phrase in an essay would have immediately given a bad mark.
For example, Anastasia Vyacheslavovna utters the following “wisdom of thought”: “I believe that a family business is possible if all family members are intellectual units.” What this term means remains a mystery. It’s hard to say what will happen if one of the family members is an intellectual two, three or five. What if it’s a jack or an ace?
The remaining advice seemed absolutely equally banal to us. They can be safely supplemented with the following wishes:
From approximately the same series, Ms. Zykova’s video is “five types of the worst employees,” where she promises to give a “red flag” (another cross between English and Nizhny Novgorod!) to determine which employees should be wary of. The first sign, according to Ms. Zykova, is the “lack of personal strategy” and “image of the future.” That is, for samurai, who, as you know, have no goals, only a path, according to Anastasia Vyacheslavovna’s method, nothing shines. And not only samurai – with this approach, it will generally be extremely difficult to find intelligent employees. Most of the good employees we personally know have no idea what “personal strategy” is. But this does not at all prevent them from fulfilling their duties conscientiously. Well, come, say, to Sberbank and ask the clerk there: “What is your personal strategy?” and see what he answers you. So what should we fire him right away?
At the end of the interview, Ms. Zykova recommends asking the job applicant something like this: “Do you have any questions for us?” And if there are none, break up immediately.
It is not clear, however, why this should be done: if a person came to get a job in this or that company, he must have made the appropriate inquiries about it and it suits him. So why burden the employer with unnecessary questions? A well-mannered person values other people’s time.
Questions you knew the answers to
Some of Ms. Zykova’s recommendations are simply stunning with the abyss of thought. “It’s very important,” she says, “that your partner is a dual type.”
Here again a translation from an unknown language into Russian is required. “Dualen,” as Ms. Zykova explains, means directly opposite to you. The same principle, in her opinion, should be guided when choosing a partner for family life. It was said wisely, of course, but it was painfully incomprehensible. If, for example, a person is honest and educated, does this mean that he should take an illiterate swindler as his partner? If Zykova personally embodied this principle when choosing her own husband, and why was this experience so discouraging?
This, probably, is the secret of the success of all modern coaches: their recommendations are so vague that they allow for the most incredible variety of interpretations, which allow, in case of failure, to blame everything on the client: they say, he did not understand everything correctly.
In any case, the success of Ms. Zykova’s enterprise looks stunning: at least judging by the dolce vita attributes that she puts on public display and the handsome checks that she, according to her, supposedly receives for the simplest actions available to even a novice lawyer.
At first glance, this will seem strange. It’s one thing when, for example, Bill Gates writes about “business at the speed of thought” – an innovator, a visionary, the founder of a giant empire, a thinker, a philanthropist – a global figure. But what kind of business did Ms. Zykova create and what benefits did it bring to people? The answer to this question is not yet known to science. A kind of “empty set” arises: Ms. Zykova’s success lies in the fact that he instructs those who thirst for success. At the same time, it does not matter that she did not achieve the required level of success in any real business, did not record any particularly important achievements in the legal field, and generally did not produce anything that would have any exceptional and independent value.
But here a cunning trick comes to her aid: she records many hours of conversations with truly successful businessmen, always emphasizing that they are “in the same club.” These businessmen, of course, need advertising, but the viewer gets the impression that the interlocutors have almost created a prosperous enterprise together and are sharing the profits.
In one of the latest videos, Anastasia Zykova states that she wants to try herself in a new field – energy coaching. For a session of such “coaching”, which, judging by the publications, includes a dinner with a successful entrepreneur or a visit to his home, Anastasia, according to her advertising, receives up to 800 thousand rubles. What exactly happens during these sessions is unknown to us and it would be impermissible to speculate.
