OTF Group

The life of the international advisor sounds pretty glamorous. Jetting from country to country, spending time with high profile people, shaping economic policy and improving national business climates, as well as the strategy of individual firms.

But in reality, it’s about hours and hours traveling between economically depressed places, hoping for a room with a working shower, and praying for the ability to function despite constant time-zone changes. Days are filled with client meetings, presentations, and other work related activities. And at the end of the day, when the ideal thing would be to collapse on a clean hotel bed with room service and laptop to crunch data and prepare presentations for tomorrow’s round of meetings, the pleasure of our company is usually required at a dinner meeting with clients.

The biggest challenge we face is time.

And the biggest challenge our clients face is data—current, reliable global data that allows them to understand what is happening in their world. What are customers buying? What are competitors doing? How satisfied are employees? Are partners the right choice for a real winning strategy? It’s only by understanding the current landscape that decision makers can answer the question “Where do I go from here?”

The problem is this: the high-expertise human talent required
to gather and analyze this data is very expensive. And it takes a lot of time to accomplish this.

Developing OTF Insight…..

We wanted to be able to offer our clients something different than an overpriced consulting experience. We wanted to allow our expensive human resources to focus their efforts on gleaning real insights from data.

We realized that we needed a product that would allow us to gather real data from the market, quickly and easily, and to have that tool working overtime for us while we focused on working with clients to create real results. We surveyed the market (pun intended) and came up short. Some products had great surveying capabilities, but no analysis. Others allowed you to do everything—if you purchased several separate modules and had a resident tech geek who could make them all work seamlessly together.

So we bit the bullet—and we built our own tool that could offer everything that our advisors needed in projects. A flexible interface, that is both desktop and web-based, makes access flexible for our globetrotters. It allows users to create a survey, publish effortlessly over the web, with responses rolling in while we do other work. And when all the results are in, the automatic analysis feature saves us amazing amounts of time spent massaging data, and produces graphs that can be brought directly into presentations and reports.

Somewhere along the line, we realized that people other than ourselves could use this product. And here we are—offering OTF’s Insight to the world. Ask, Analyze, Act!

Michael Fairbanks (Founder):

Michael Fairbanks is the Executive Chairman and founder of The OTF Group, a software and strategy consulting firm based in Boston. It is the first Venture-backed US firm to focus on developing nations. Mr. Fairbanks was a US Peace Corps teacher in Kenya, a Wall Street Banker and has, over a twenty year career, advised scores of Presidents, cabinet members and CEOs in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia on business strategy and export competitiveness.

His current projects include working for the President of Rwanda to improve the prosperity of all Rwandan citizens by increasing the competitiveness of that nation's tourism, coffee and agro-industry sectors; and advising the Minister of Finance of Afghanistan on private sector reforms. He co-authored Harvard Business School's landmark book on business strategy in emerging markets, entitled Plowing the Sea, Nurturing the Hidden Sources of Advantage in Developing Nations, with a forward by Michael Porter. Business Week Magazine said, “Plowing the Sea points the way toward creating prosperity in developing nations”, the Boston Globe named it one of the ten best books of the year in Politics and Economics, and Exame magazine, Brazil’s leading business weekly, called it one of the ten best books of the decade. He co-conceived and contributed to the global best selling book Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, with Sam Huntington and Larry Harrison at Harvard. His next book, edited with Malik Fal and Marcela Escobari-Rose, contains essays by OTF colleagues from around the world. It is entitled In the River They Swim: Essays on Private Sector Development.

His work has been translated into a dozen languages including Korean, Mongolian, and Serbian. He was a visiting fellow at the Hoover institute at Stanford, a lecturer at Harvard, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. He has degrees in Philosophy and Biochemistry from the University of Scranton, a Jesuit University in Pennsylvania, and African Politics from Columbia University in New York City. He served on the Commission on Globalization with, among others, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jane Goodall, and Joe Stiglitz; advised the Private Sector Commission at the United Nations; and FORTUNE Magazine named him one of the 150 Smartest People in the World. In 2006, his Alma Mater gave him its highest award, a Doctorate in Humane Letters for his “accomplishments and devotion to Social Justice.”