The Consulting Bible. Alan Weiss
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Название: The Consulting Bible

Автор: Alan Weiss

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: О бизнесе популярно

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isbn: 9781119776888

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СКАЧАТЬ the consulting profession, from launch to high growth, from marketing to implementation. We talk a lot about “smarts” and “big data,” but we don't focus enough on knowledge and wisdom.

      I'm hoping to share that knowledge and wisdom that I've been fortunate to gain over my career with you, so that you can share it with others. That's not a job, or career. It's a calling.

      And that's why this is The Consulting Bible.

      —Alan Weiss

      East Greenwich, RI

      March 2021

      The origins, evolution, and basic requirements of successful consulting. Some realities are self-evident and eternal.

      The Role of a Consultant

      One day, somewhere in the mid‐Pleistocene Epoch, after the last glacial period, a man was trying to create a stronger point on his stone spearhead so that he could better hunt and slay the peccaries that fed his clan and protect himself from dire wolves that fed on his clan. He did this in the only way he knew how, which he learned watching his father—he laboriously abraded the sides of the point on a larger rock.

      On this day, however, a stranger happened by who might have been seeking more interesting surroundings, or was exiled from his clan, or, one could readily assume, simply was lost. Observing the work on the spearhead, the stranger demonstrated that the point had to be ground on a harder rock, not a softer one, and indicated how to choose them. Not just any rock would do. And, indeed, his method worked and the hunter fashioned a sharper spearhead more quickly. The stranger was offered thanks, provided with food, and bestowed with a lion's tooth. He then went on his way once again, well fed, and with a talisman.

      Consulting had been born.

      The Gospel

      The role of a consultant is to improve the client's condition.

      Our job is to improve the client's condition. Doctors are consultants, and one of the first things they learn in medical school is primum non nocere (first to do no harm). When we walk away from a client, the client's condition should be better than it was before we arrived, or we've failed. (That “we” may mean both the client and we have failed, but we share in the failure in any case.)

      It's that simple.

      However, we are engaged in management consulting as solo practitioners and small firm principals (or consultants and partners in large firms). And that pursuit did not begin when sloths as large as a tree waddled about the earth. It began and then flourished within some of our lifetimes.

      The first management consulting firm was A.D. Little, founded in 1886 by a professor from MIT. It was mainly a technical research firm at the outset. Booz Allen Hamilton was founded by Edwin G. Booz of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in 1914 and was the first to serve both industrial and governmental clients. (It wasn't until after the Great Depression's onset that these independent consultancies expanded to embrace more professionals and offices.)

Schematic illustration of the Relationship of Skills and Content.

      In the mid‐1930s, New Deal legislation such as the Glass‐Steagall Act prohibited banks from engaging in nonbanking activities, so they could no longer employ and bill out the experts. Yet the banks continued to urge their clients to utilize experts to protect their loans and investments and ensure effective management.

      You can view the relationship in Figure 1.1. A consultant who is strictly a content expert (brake pads, air traffic control, medical malpractice) and has no СКАЧАТЬ