DRAFT

Consulting Bootcamp
By Will Bachman will.bachman@bachmangroup.net

Consulting Bootcamp by Will Bachman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.innovationbootcamp.net.

Contents y y y y y y y y y y y y y What is a management consultant? Case: Pedraza Pellet Company Defining and structuring the problem Data request Interviewing Surveys Focus groups Analysis skills and tools Running effective meetings Creating effective presentations Influencing for impact Business development for consultants Recommended reading

About The Bachman Group, LLC: The Bachman Group, LLC, is an operations and strategy consulting firm founded by Will Bachman in 2008. It has served over 12 clients on 4 continents, ranging in size from $10 million to $50 billion in revenue. Read more about Will Bachman on his LinkedIn profile here:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/willbachman

Will Bachman posts daily on his blog. Topics covered include managing your career, how to expand your own creativity, technology tips, observations on the built environment, book reviews, ideas on opportunities for businesses, and more. Visit:
http://www.innovationbootcamp.net/

This is a work in progress. Download the latest version at:

http://www.innovationbootcamp.net/p/consulting-bootcamp.html 1

What is a consultant? The statement Im a consultant tells you as much about someone does as the statement Im an employee. The term consultant can mean many things to many people. In this manifesto, Im using the term to refer primarily to management consultants, that is, advisors to managers. Some characteristics: + Consultants serve clients. If they work in a firm, consultants may also have managers and subordinates. But if there are no clients, you dont have a consultant. + Consultants are outsiders. There is the special class of internal consultants: roving, internal problem solvers. In most cases, though, the term implies someone not employed by the client + Consultants create impact through influence techniques other than positional authority. In some cases, a consultant may be placed in a role with positional authority. Usually, though, the consultant achieves impact not through giving orders, but through some other influence technique. + Consultants pollinate. One of the greatest advantages of the consultant is pattern recognition: she has seen a similar situation at another client. A regular employee probably works at least two years at a company, and so might see the insides of five companies in a decade. A consultant might see the insides of thirty or more. The consultant can bring a fresh perspective not because she is smarter than the employee, but simply because she has seen a lot more in the same timeframe. + Consultants go deep. Managers get pulled in a dozen different directions every day. Consultants often have the luxury of escaping the fire of the day to focus on a particular problem, and go deep on that. + Consultants arent constrained by organizational hierarchy. They can talk to the folks on the shop floor, or the CEO. They can talk to folks in Marketing, or Accounts Payable, or IT. Nothing really stops regular employees from reaching out across the organization to talk to the right person, but somehow, it is just easier for consultants to do it. This is a huge advantage that consultants have.

Case: Pedraza Pellet Company As a case example to use throughout this guide, well introduce the case of the Pedraza Pellet Company. Alejandra Ema, the executive currently in charge of the company, has been introduced to your consulting group by Margarita, a mutual friend who highly recommends you. Youve had a brief discussion with Alejandra on the phone, in which she explained some of the challenges at Pedraza, and you agreed to invest a few days of your time on a quick diagnostic. Alejandra has followed up with this email:
May 5, 2011 From: Alejandra Ema <alejandra.ema@sotosupplies.com> To: Will Bachman <will@BootcampConsultingGroup.com> Subj: Looking forward to your thoughts on the Pedraza Pellet Company Will, I m looking forward to meeting in person and hearing the results of your initial diagnostic on the Pedraza Pellet Company. I ve already let the folks there know that you ll be coming in, and I ve asked them to cooperate with all your requests. When we spoke this morning, the connection wasn t great, so I wanted to just lay out the facts in case you missed anything. The Pedraza Pellet Company was acquired in October 2009 by Soto Supplies. Soto Supplies is a conglomerate of B2B businesses that supply industrial manufacturing companies across the globe. We ve been doing an aggressive series of acquisitions over the past several years as we had significant reserves of cash and multiples were very favorable after the market was depressed in 2008. Given the rapid spate of acquisitions, we haven t yet integrated the acquired companies, and they ve been left to operate independently. We generally prefer to acquire niche businesses that aren t subject to significant competition and have a large market share with comfortable margins. The Pedraza Pellet Company fit this profile very well. They produce abrasive pellets that are used in a variety of industrial processes. They have four major product lines, which I don t have the details on, but the department heads can fill you in there. The former owner and President, Juan Pedraza, stayed on to provide continuity per the acquisition agreement, and he left in March of this year after that period expired. In order to activate the full acquisition price, Juan had to achieve a 15% growth in sales in 2010, and he hit that target. Sales in 2009 were $14.3 million, and sales in 2010 were $17.0 million. Soto Supplies has top line growth targets of 15% per year, so we need to keep hitting that number.

Unfortunately, the overall profitability of the Pedraza Pellet Company, now the Pedraza Pellet Business Unit, has gone down. Cost of goods sold has gone from $7.5 million to $10.6 million, and SG&A has gone from $2.9 to $3.4 million. So EBIT has dropped from $3.9 to $3.0 million. The acquisition thesis depended on EBIT also growing at 15% per year, so this is a major setback. Since Juan left, the 4 department heads (Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Operations) have been reporting directly to me while we search for a General Manager for the business unit. I haven t had a ton of time to get into the details, but what I ve heard from Juan is that the cost of raw materials has gone up, and there isn t much they can do about that. Maybe we need to think about developing some new products where we could charge higher margins, or would perhaps use less expensive materials. I m really not an expert in the industrial abrasives area, so I d be interested in your thoughts on whether there is a gap in the market we could fill. I m afraid I ll be totally out of pocket until our meeting I ll be at an executive team off-site this week and completely tied up. So please use your best judgment to proceed with the diagnostic as you think best. Our mutual friend Margarita highly recommended your group, and so I have full confidence that you ll come up with an actionable set of recommendations. Your point of contact is Ricardo Palma, head of Finance. You can reach him at ricardo@pedrazapellet.com. Best, Alejandra

Defining and structuring the problem The best-written guide on a management consultants approach to problem solving is McKinsey Staff Paper #66, The McKinsey Way of Problem Solving. McKinsey doesnt publish the paper on its own website (they should), but you can find it posted elsewhere with Google. Ive read this paper a dozen times, and I continue to re-read it annually as a personal refresher. I also highly recommend The Minto Pyramid Principle, by Barbara Minto, for guidance on both problem solving and how to communicate your findings. In the late 1960s, Minto created the method that McKinsey still uses to structure problems and communicate results. The ideas presented in this section are just a very brief introduction to the concepts in these two classics. Define the problem. If you havent defined a problem, you wont know when youve solved it. It is often helpful if the problem definition is phrased in the form of a question. A good question attracts solutions with the force of gravity. Instead of: Sales have increased at Pedraza but profit has gone down. Try: How can Pedraza continue to grow sales while also growing profits? Or even better: How can Pedraza continue to grow sales at 15% per year while also growing profits at 15% or more annually? If possible, include some specific numerical targets in your problem definition. Having a specific number to shoot for provides an aspiration for the team working on the problem. It drives you to estimate the impact of your ideas, and if the impact isnt sufficient, to keep working. Not bad: How can we increase throughput on Line D? Better: How can we increase throughput on Line D by 25%? You wont always have such a specific numerical target, and if you dont, dont sweat it. The problem definition will focus your work and it will also constrain the universe of potential solutions. For example, in the Pedraza Pellet Company case, lets say that you take the cue from Alejandras email and define the problem as How can Pedraza develop new products with higher profit margins that will appeal to customers? This problem definition would lead to activities such as identifying unsatisfied customer needs, surveying the competitive products on the market, developing formulations for new products, and so on. Youd be guided away from investigating sales force effectiveness, opportunities to reduce the cost of purchased raw materials, manufacturing performance improvement, etc. If you are building a team, the way you
5

staff your team could be affected. Instead of seeking out lean manufacturing experts, purchasing experts, or sales force effectiveness experts, you might build your team with a product development expert. Advanced problem definition: (Optional). Depending on the situation, you may want to further specify other constraints such as what specific solutions are off the table, what resources are available, within what timeframe the problem needs to be solved, etc. Structure the problem: Once youve defined the problem, start breaking it down into smaller pieces. One way to do this is to draw an issue tree. Start with your problem definition on the left hand side, break it into 2 or 3 or 4 pieces in a column to the right. Then break down each one of those issues into smaller issues. Keep going until you have specific issues that you can go and research or test. There is no one right answer, and it is worth trying several approaches to see what feels right for the situation. For example, with the Pedraza Pellet Company, we might consider the first-level set of issues as 1) Increase profits of existing products, and 2) Increase profits with new product introductions. At the next level we could consider price increases, volume increases, and changes in product mix. Or we could take the first level issues by department 1) Operations department actions to improve profits, 2) Finance department actions to improve profits, etc. Here is an issue tree in-process:
STRUCTURE THE PROBLEM
Increase volume

Existing products

Shift mix to higher margin products Increase margin Raise prices

How can Pedraza improve profitability to achieve the target of 15% year -on-year profit growth?

Reduce costs

Reduce cost of raw materials

Reduce labor cost

Reduce facility cost New products Reduce sales cost

MECE. (Pronounced mee sea) As much as possible, you want your issue trees to be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. In other words, your issues dont overlap, and youve covered all your bases. Determine analyses required. Now that youve got your issue tree done, you have a whole host of ideas on how you might solve the problem. Now youve got to test these ideas, to figure out which ones are most likely to work, and which would have the highest impact. Consultants work opposite to how were taught to do a research paper in school. In school I was taught to go do a bunch of research, take lots of notes, and then the night before my paper was due Id come up with a thesis and try to organize all the notes into a paper. Consultants turn this around. Be hypothesis driven. Instead of doing the research first, we start by writing up a summary of the story wed like to tell at the end of the project. Here is an example of how to work from a hypotheses to the analysis needed:
GENERATE HYPOTHESES
Hypothesis Issues Analysis/research required

Pedraza could shift the mix of products to its higher margin products

Assumes that the four product lines actually have different profit margins need to get the profit margin of each product line Get annual sales of each product line over time to see how the mix has shifted Understand reasons that the mix has shifted, and what factors drive the product mix
Pedraza could reduce the unit price on raw materials by negotiating better rates with an RFP process Pedraza could use a lower volume of raw materials by, e.g., reducing waste Pedraza could change the specification and purchase different raw materials

Get the price and cost of each product

Get breakdown of revenue by product line

Interview sales force to understand what drives sales

Pedraza could reduce the cost of purchased raw materials

Determine current state of the purchasing process (RFP conducted?) What percent of raw materials are wasted in the manufacturing process? Could this be reduced? What do we specify today? Could we relax any of the specifications to make it less expensive for our suppliers to comply?

This story will be full of hypotheses. Once weve drafted the story we want to tell, we identify these hypotheses, and then figure out what analyses we can do to prove or disprove the hypotheses. That leads us to know what data we need to collect.

This is somewhat analogous to how scientists work, but it wouldnt be correct to say consultants use the scientific method. The standard of proof in business is far lower than in science, because in business time is at an absolute premium. There is never time to do all the analyses that wed like to be able to do. And unlike the unchanging laws of the physical universe, the business environment is constantly changing. So in consulting, we ask, What would you need to believe? in order to select a course of action. The answer to that question could be a list of hypotheses. Some of them your client will want you to prove. But some other ones the client may be willing to believe, and doesnt want to pay for the time it would take to prove them. So prioritize efforts based on what hypotheses are the most critical and the most uncertain.

Data request Most projects ought to start with a data request to your client. No sense re-creating the wheel. No sense coming up with a recommendation to create a report that they already have. When I create a data request, I always emphasize that I just want whatever they have offthe-shelf. Dont create any fresh reports just for me, at this stage. If it doesnt exist, or isnt readily available, that it itself is interesting. Youll want to tailor your data request depending on the specific project, of course, but here are some standard items that are often worth including in addition to the specific data relevant to the project:
y y y y y y y y y y y y y Organization charts: summary version at the company level to show interfaces with other groups, and as detailed as possible for the department ideally including all employees in the department Employee data: list of all employees in the department with name, title, group, age, start date, salary, supervisor name Management reports regularly created in the department including current targets Department budget for current fiscal year Process: Any standard operating procedures, Systems: list of IT systems involved with a brief description Description of any previous performance improvement initiatives Incentive plans; blank copy of a performance evaluation Training: copy of materials used in training new employees Customer data: who are the customers, revenues by customer, name of assigned sales rep Product/service data: description of products and/or services provides, with revenues and profit margin by SKU Competitors: competitive intelligence Current strategic plan

Interviewing One of the most common ways of gathering information as a consultant is by interviewing someone. Unless you study journalism, anthropology, or one of the other social sciences, you dont get much training in school on how to do an interview, so learning how to interview will be mostly on-the-job. A background as a reporter would be quite helpful for a management consultant, and if you have the chance to write for a paper where youll get good mentorship, take that opportunity. Here are a few tips on conducting interviews. Whom to interview: Whom to interview depends on the nature of the project, of course, but some groups to consider include: the front line workers; internal customers and internal suppliers; external customers; suppliers; competitors; industry experts; executives affected by the project. Front line: On any project related to internal operations of the company, it is essential to interview the front line, who are closest to the action. By the front line, I mean the place where work actually gets done the chemist in the quality control lab, the call center rep taking orders, the salesperson who visits customers, the machine operator who runs the tablet press. One of the greatest assets of the consultant is the ease with which we can move across an organization and get information from those who have it and bring it to those who need it. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult for a senior executive to go have a conversation with someone several layers below them in the organizational hierarchy. The CEO might feel awkward sitting next to the call center rep who is taking inbound sales calls; and that call center rep might be terrified and not give straightforward answers. That sales reps supervisor, the call center manager, and the SVP of sales would all want to be in the loop and get debriefed. While senior executives ought to get more unfiltered information directly from the front lines, it tends not to happen very often. As a consultant, though, it is much easier to move seamlessly up and down and across the organization and talk to anyone you want to. You arent pegged in the hierarchy, and people figure that is what consultants do. Hearing the truth from the front lines and taking that to senior executives packaged in a form they can digest is one of the easiest ways a consultant can add value. An understanding of what is happening at the front line follows an inverse square law based on the number of steps away from the work. So the supervisor of the front line worker (two steps away from the work) knows 1/4th of what is going on. That supervisors manager (three steps away) knows 1/9th of what is going on. The groups director knows 1/16th, etc. Dont discount the wisdom and intelligence of the front line worker because they dont have a fancy degree. They often will have a more realistic understanding of the opportunities and threats facing the company than other people in the company. They live it.
10

Internal customers and internal suppliers: On any kind of operational project, youll probably want their input. Lets say you are working on a project related to improving manufacturing operations. You might want to talk to the maintenance department that supports manufacturing they can give you a perspective on whether manufacturing supports their requests for downtime to do preventive maintenance. Youll want to talk to the sales team, who will probably be full of complaints about how the lead times are too long, or how manufacturing gets the orders wrong. Other groups with a useful perspective could include the IT department, accounting, finance, order scheduling, quality control, marketing. External customers: Interviewing external customers can be a lot more politically sensitive, and youll need to get permission from whoever owns the customer relationship. Depending on the nature of the project, youll want to choose the customers carefully, and discuss the interview guide with the appropriate people. But the input from customers can be worth the administrative hassle required to get to them. It is especially helpful if you can talk to friendly customers those who have a longstanding relationship with your client, those who have a strong bond of trust. They are the most likely to be willing to take the time to do an interview, and theyre also likely to be willing to give tough, honest feedback. If you are planning to do a broad survey of customers or a broad set of interviews, start with this group to test out your questions. Suppliers: It can be helpful to talk to suppliers to understand what it is like to do business with your client. What does it take to respond to their RFPs? How many people need to sign off on purchasing decisions? How hard is it to get paid? When mistakes are made, how long do they take to get resolved? Suppliers may be quite willing to give frank answers to these types of questions. Competitors: Someone in the same industry, facing the same challenges as your client, can offer very useful information. While it seems strange to believe, you can sometimes get competitors in the industry to open up and discuss their perspective on your client. This is particularly true if the companies collaborate in some areas and compete in others, such as defense contractors. Or if the nature of the questions is delving into information that is openly discussed within the industry. For example, you might be able to get an investment banker to give you her perspective on other investment banks in her sector. Everybody knows who is doing what deals, and they sometimes team together. Or if the two competitors are both relatively small compared to the universe of the industry. For example, the manager of one sushi restaurant might provide useful insight on a sushi restaurant across town. In this case, it might not be perfectly correct to label them competitors, since they are competing in different markets.

11

Industry experts: All sorts of experts may be willing to speak with you, such as analysts at investment banks, the staff at industry associations, consultants who serve the industry, and executives in the middle of a job search. If the timing is right, you can consider attending an industry conference. This often isnt feasible given the tight deadlines on a consulting project, but on a few occasions Ive attended a conference during a project and gotten great input by roaming the halls and talking to attendees and exhibitors. You can also find industry experts on LinkedIn. Join an industry group on the topic in question, and then you can scroll through the groups members and check their titles to find relevant expertise. If your client is regularly served by a consulting firm, you could ask to speak to experts within that firm. While it seems odd that they would spend their time helping you, they might do it just as a favor to your mutual client or as a way to find out what is going on at the client in this area of their expertise. Obviously, if you are working within a large consulting firm, you can turn to experts within your own firm. You can use your own personal networks, including alumni networks, to find folks with relevant insight. And there expert broker firms, such as the Gerson Lehrman Group. With these firms, youll need to pay, generally $300/hour and up. If your client has a budget for it, this can be a quick way to find experts. Aside from the expert broker firms, you generally dont need to pay for interviews. Most people rarely get asked questions about their areas of professional expertise, so theyll do it as a favor or as an ego boost. One exception is physicians. They already have huge demands on their time. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies often want to interview them, and physicians are used to getting paid for giving their feedback. Rates can start at $150 per hour and range upwards depending on the type of physician. I suppose lawyers would be the same, but Ive never interviewed one for a project. Choice of location: An interview in person beats a phone interview, and an in-person interview in the interviewees office is the best of all. Always try to do the interview in the persons office if at all possible. By going to the persons office, youll learn a lot about them. What sort of environment do they create for themselves? If there are family photos on their desk, do the photos face outward towards the world, or inwards towards themselves. If outward, they are telling the world about that their family is important to them. If inward, the family could almost be a barrier to the world of work. Do they have certificates from training programs on the walls? Then they might be more susceptible to the opinion of others. Is their office orderly, with every paper carefully filed away? Or are there stacks of papers on every available surface, including the conference table? Do they check their email during the interview? Then they are telling you that they dont think the project that youre working on is that important they have better things to do.
12

Often, youll see something in their office that can help you establish some rapport with the interviewee. Perhaps they have a photo of their kid in a baseball uniform, and you coach your own sons Little League. Or theyve got a photo of themself holding the champion marlin, and you love deep-sea fishing. Or maybe they have a degree on the wall from the university where your spouse went to college. It can be helpful to break the ice with some small talk about something you observe, but avoid being transparently mechanical about it. (Established rapport. Check. OK, now lets move on to content.) Meeting in the persons office is also particularly helpful because the interviewee can immediately pull up a computer file and you can look at it over their shoulder. You can ask them right during the interview to forward you the file. Or they can pull a paper copy right out of their file cabinet. Maybe they even have a project plan pinned to their wall that is relevant to your project. There are some situations where meeting at their office isnt the best location. Perhaps the interviewee doesnt have an office. Or if the person works in a cubicle, and you are going to be asking about sensitive topics that you wouldnt want co-workers to overhear. In cases like this, find a quiet place where you can close the door. Preparing for the interview. Review the hypotheses you are trying to test and write up an interview guide with all the questions you want to ask. The exercise of creating an interview guide is very helpful, but once you conduct the interview, it generally makes sense to set the interview guide aside. Dont send the interview guide to the interviewee ahead of time if you can avoid it. They might instead just want to email you their answers, which will usually not be very helpful. And you want the flexibility in person to adapt the questions in light of how they respond. Do send the person some sense of what the interview is about. Keep it relatively short so as not to bias their assumptions about what you want, and give them a reason to talk to you (other than their boss is ordering them to.) For example, Id like to get your perspective on what roadblocks you face in getting your job done. Who should go to the interview. If you have a partner and can spare the time investment, two interviewers are better than one. One of you can focus on asking questions while the other one takes notes. The note-taker can function as a back-up question-asker, following up on interesting hints that the primary interviewer misses. And the two of you can debrief afterwards. If you are serving the client without another consultant on your team, consider taking a client along with you to the interview. This can be a good way to role model
13

and transfer the interviewing skill, plus a way to get your client to hear the information firsthand. Taking notes. Fairly obvious, but dont take notes on a laptop during an in-person interview. If doing the interview on the phone, I take notes on the laptop, but beware of interviews via Skype where theyll hear you pounding on the keyboard. Take notes by hand, and then immediately afterwards go type up the main points. Youll find that, with practice, if you type up notes of the conversation immediately afterwards, you can capture many quotes nearly verbatim. In college, a writing teacher of mine told me he could transcribe a one-hour interview after the fact, a skill he had built up after much practice. Memory of these quotes rapidly decays, so if at all possible type them up right away. Raw quotes from interviews can be very powerful evidence to influence your client. I dont spend too much energy formatting the notes or organizing into some categorization scheme I find it more efficient to just type them up in Word. If you are doing a massive set of interviews, however, it might be better to capture quotes in Excel so you can categorize them and then do some analysis later on the frequency with which people mention different topics. As a general rule, I suggest avoiding recording interviews. It makes your subjects nervous, and less likely to speak plainly. And you dont want to be spending time later listening to the audio again. If you record phone interviews, you should of course inform your subject and get their consent. Where to sit. Think strategically about seating arrangements. If you are going to the interview with a partner, the two of you sitting across the table from your interviewee makes it seem like us-against-them. If possible, try to sit around a round table, or if it is a rectangular board-room type table, try to have one person sit at the end of the table. If Im doing the interview alone at a rectangular table, rather than sitting across from the interviewee, I try to sit at the end, adjacent to them. That makes it easier to look at a paper together, or to do a quick sketch in my notebook and show the person. It also subtly suggests that we are on the same team instead of opponents across a negotiating table. Keep your introduction short. When you start the interview, it is helpful to give the interviewee a quick overview of the project and why you are there, but keep it short. Give them a chance to speak within the first sixty seconds if you can. Introduce yourself, but dont give them your full bio or try to justify what an expert you are. Also, it is helpful to open the agenda and ask the interviewee if there is anything on her mind that she would like to add to the agenda. Lets say you are working on Project Odyssey. If you dont give the interviewee the opening, she might never tell you, Well, I think we should also discuss Project Iliad that Ive been asked to work on, since there seems to be a lot of overlap between the two.

14

Often, Ill open with something like, Im an external consultant working with John on a performance improvement effort within the __ group. Im glad to give you the context on that, but before I dive into the details, what have you heard about this project already? An opening like that is useful because youll hear what is the word on the street about your project. You might uncover some anxieties or some hostility, which can be helpful to know about. E.g., Ive heard that you guys are looking to increase productivity so you can let some of us go. Or I hear youre collecting all our ideas so you can take credit for them. At this stage, if you encounter hostility, dont try to argue or reason your way out of it. Instead, set your agenda aside and listen for a bit. For example, if you get, I dont know why I should bother talking to you guys. Last time, we told the consultants all the problems we face, and nothing happened. Dont try to counter this with, Oh, well, this time is going to be different. Were really going to drive change this time. [Yeah, right.] Instead, try, Tell me about that last initiative. Why do you think it didnt lead to lasting change? Ask open-ended questions. Dont lead the witness. Monitor yourself and try to avoid asking any yes or no questions during the interview. Also avoid any multiple choice or either/or questions. Just about any question can be reworded to an open-ended question. For example: Instead of, Have you already heard about this project? Try What have you heard about this project? Instead of, Do you agree with the proposals? Try What is your perspective on the proposals? Instead of, Would this recommendation save you time? Try How would this recommendation affect you? Maximize the possibility that youll be surprised by what you hear. Use silence. Get comfortable with silence. Use it to your advantage. People hate silence in a conversation and will fill it. Possibly with useful information. If someone says something interesting, pause for an extra couple beats to see what they might add. Use open-ended prompts. It is a clich, and overused, will make you sound like a robot. But a handy phrase to have in your arsenal is Tell me more about that. The beauty of it is that it gives your interviewee permission to go in the direction they care about. You dont know what
15

you dont know, so let them surprise you. Also good is, Hunh?, Hm?, and repeating the last couple words they said with an interrogative intonation. Test the source of their knowledge. Useful phrases: Why do you believe that to be true? How do you know that is true? How does the company track that? Dont argue. When you are doing an interview, stay within your role as a reporter. Dont try to interview and influence in the same discussion. You can come back later and try to convince them to implement a set of recommendations, but today you are here to listen. Action items. The interviewee might promise do send you stuff during the course of the interview. Theyll probably forget. So keep track of all these promises, and then review them at the end of the discussion so you both agree. Then send them a follow-up email with the list of what they promised to do. Same goes if you promise to send them anything. Be stupid. One of the best parts about being a consultant is that you have permission to admit ignorance. Ask people to explain terms you dont understand. Learn the acronyms. In my days in the nuclear Navy, I wasnt allowed to use any spoken acronyms. While we used all sorts of acronyms in our written logs, we always had to use the full phrase in oral communication, partly to avoid the possibility of confusion during a casualty when you are wearing an air-breathing apparatus and there is the din of fire, flooding, or a steam rupture in the background. Perhaps as a result of my Navy training, I have a particular sensitivity to acronyms. I always want to know what they stand for. At the beginning of every project, I make a table of client- and industry-specific acronyms and what they stand for. Despite the Be stupid rule above, there are limits. You dont want to walk into an interview with a pharmaceutical executive and ask what OTC stands for. So as much as possible, learn the acronyms before the interviews. But if an acronym does come up, ask about it. There is a 50/50 chance your interviewee wont know what it stands for. Dont claim expertise you dont have. If the client says, Youve probably seen this before in other projects in the industrial abrasives industry, it is best to admit (if true), Actually, this is my first exposure to the industrial abrasives industry. State the wrong number to get the right one. Use this tip sparingly, once per interview maximum. If you want to know a fact or number that people might not want to reveal, then instead state it as if it were a fact, and then check their response. Feel free to be way off. For example, I understand the profit margin on this product is about 3%. People like to be smarter than the consultant, so they are likely to correct you with the right number if they know it. Who told you that? That number is way off. The profit margin is much closer to 11%. If you make up a number and they correct you, it tells you they have confidence in their number. But if you ask and they give you a number, they could be guessing.
16

Go and look at it. If the person tells you it takes forever to log into the XYZ system, ask them to log in and show you. If the person tells you the raw materials are hard to access, ask to go to the stock room to take a look. Dont feel constrained by the conventions of sitting across a table. It is your time. Go on a field trip. Getting past objections to understand assumptions. If you hear, This proposal will never succeed, try asking, What would have to be true for this proposal to succeed? Phrases from the same section of the toolkit are: What would you need to believe in order to support What would it take for the company to Assuming the company decided to do ___, what would it need to do What roadblocks would have to be removed in order to Final questions. What question should I have asked you? Final final questions. Consider saving your most politically sensitive question for after the interview is officially over. Youve put away your notebook. Youve shaken hands. Youve stood up. They are walking you to the door. And you say, as if it were an afterthought that just occurred to you, nothing important, just curious, Oh, one final question just occurred to me. What do you think about. The interviewee is disarmed, and it doesnt feel like they are being interviewed any more. In a different context, when being interviewed for a job, one of the best final final questions to ask is, What challenges do you think someone with my background might face in this role? This can help reveal the interviewers concerns about you as a candidate, that you can then later address in a follow-up email. Similarly, your final final question can help uncover what they really believe on the topic related to your consulting project. Follow up, dont thank. Dont be effusive in thanking the person. It just diminishes you. If the person is an employee of your client, it is their job, after all. If the person is external to the company, they had their reasons for granting you the time. Maybe it was a favor to their friend, maybe they hoped to learn what you are up to, maybe theyll want to talk to you some day. It is a two-way street. Try a simple, Thanks, this input will be very helpful in shaping the recommendations. Plus, thanks mean nothing. Instead of thanks, you can pay back the favor of the interview with an appropriate follow-up. If appropriate, you can brief the person on your findings. Or you can email them to let them know a particular recommendation of theirs made it into your report. (I mentioned to the SVP our conversation and your idea on streamlining the onboarding process for new customers.)

17

Keep track of interviews completed. This sounds like common sense. But if you are conducting many interviews over the period of weeks, it is very easy to lose track. Often, executives will want to see a list of whom youve spoken to. So keep track, and plan to include a backup page in your document listing the interviewees. You might also want to include information such as their role, their region, their seniority, etc., so you can show that you can the appropriate mix of viewpoints. Remember this is likely to be the first round in a multi-round interaction. Dont be transactional. Establish a relationship of trust. If you are going to be coming up with recommendations and then responsible for implementing them, at some point youre going to interact with this interviewee again. Even if youre just doing a quick diagnostic and dont expect to be implementing anything, chances are youll interact again. It is a small world. Exercise: Next time you have a chance to conduct an interview and can bring along a teammate to take notes, ask your teammate to provide you feedback afterwards. Here are some questions you might ask. It is best to have someone else observe you, but if you cant arrange that, then answer these questions about your own performance:

18

Conducting surveys. Deciding to do a survey. Dont offer to do a survey lightly. A survey takes a fair bit of time to design and run through multiple levels of approval. People wont care to review your interview guide (usually), but several folks might want to review and approve a survey. A survey can consume a large amount of employee time to fill out. If 100 people fill it out and it takes 30 minutes each, there goes 50 person-hours. If you use that much organizational time, there better be a good payoff. So plan to invest some time in analyzing and drawing conclusions from the results. A survey does have some advantages that makes it a useful tool in your toolkit. Since you can touch more people than you can easily interview, you can have more quantitative results, and you can get them much more quickly. You are more likely to surface issues that only a small fraction of the population faces. Start with interviews. Before designing a survey, try to start with some qualitative interviews. Usually after 3-4 conversations you have at least some sense of the issues, what is worth testing in a survey and what hypotheses can be clearly discarded without one. Choose your survey tool. There are a variety of online tools. Ive used Survey Monkey several times and it works well. Im sure there are others that work about the same. Your client may already have an account with one of the survey tools and want to use that, so ask. For simple surveys with folks that dont necessarily have ready computer access (e.g., assembly line workers, or attendees at a conference), a paper survey can be the most efficient. Include some quantitative questions. The beauty of a survey is it allows something you can quantify. But of course youll need questions that allow that. I try to avoid Rank on a scale of one to five type of questions. Instead, where possible, I like to make a statement such as This functional area responds to my requests in a timely manner, and then as responses have Strongly disagree interact with this group Disagree Agree Strongly Agree Dont

I try to avoid a neutral rating and force either an Agree or Disagree. People usually lean one way or the other, but a neutral rating doesnt say much. Include free text responses. A multiple choice response is much more helpful to you if you allow for free text responses to clarify them. If you do allow free text responses, plan to spend time classifying them.
19

Test the programming logic. In even the simplest surveys, you are likely to find some programming mistakes when you first test it. Perhaps the multiple choice allows more than one answer when you want to force just one, or perhaps you can skip questions when you want to force each one to be answered. Be sure to test several times, testing every possible permutation of what someone might do. If the survey is complicated and includes multiple branches, such as questions that get skipped depending on the answers to other questions, then you can be virtually guaranteed that there will be mistakes. Spend the time to test and debug. Decide on confidentiality rules and let people know. State up-front the confidentiality promise. If answers along with the identify of responders is going to be shared with management, then let people know that. If you are going to sanitize responses and only share summary statistics with management, then say that, but stick to it. Get people to fill it out. Give some thought into how you will get people to actually fill the survey out. Should you be the one to email people a link to the survey? Should it be your primary client? The CEO? The head of the business unit of the target respondents? Controlling the links. With Survey Monkey, you can upload a set of email addresses into the tool, and then the tool send each email a unique link. That is helpful if you want to carefully control who responds and be sure who filled it out. Or you can have Survey Monkey create a generic link that you can email to anyone. That makes it easier for an executive to email the link to her department, but youll then want to ask for the name of respondents, or else youll have no idea who responded.

20

Focus groups Deciding to do a focus group: Your client may suggest that you run a focus group as part of the research. In many cases, this suggestion should be resisted, for several reasons: Dominant personalities in the focus group will affect what others say In a group of X people, each person can, on average, speak only 1/X of the time. So a focus group wastes peoples time since most of the time they will be sitting around, not talking In a group setting, when one person says something interesting, it is tough to release the agenda to follow that topic Focus groups take longer to set up and get on the calendar than a set of one-on-ones

Focus groups are extremely expensive. I served one client that insisted on running a focus group with potential consumers. We used an external firm that specializes in focus groups. I was shocked at how expensive it was. We did three panels lasting 90 minutes each, each one with 5-8 consumers. So we got input from about 20 regular people. The cost was $60,000. We had 20 consumers sitting in the room for 90 minutes each, but we didnt get 30 person-hours of input. We got 4.5 person-hours of input, since during those three 90-minute sessions only one person could talk at a time. That ran to over $10,000 per person-hour of input. You can get a top tier independent consultant to do an awful lot of one-on-one interviews for that kind of money. Focus groups have high administrative overhead. If you are doing an interview, you can knock out an interview guide in twenty minutes. After a couple interviews, youll get a sense for what the big issues are and refine the interview guide so you can then start asking the same questions each time to get quantitative results. But if you are going to run focus groups, you need to design the interview guide very carefully, because you need to anticipate ahead of time exactly what you want to quantify. Plan to spend a couple person-days iterating the focus group guide.

21

Running effective meetings Decide on the purpose. Write down the purpose of the meeting. If you arent doing anything more than a one-way update, would a simple email suffice? What kind of meeting is it? There are basically three types of meetings run by consultants. Understand what type of meeting you are about to have: Working meeting: During the course of the meeting itself, the attendees will create some new content, e.g., a map of the current state of a process Decision meeting: Special case of the working meeting, in which the output is a decision, by either the group or a subset of attendees Update meeting: Status report on your project. Clients often want to have one of these every so often. Try to convert these into a working meeting or a decision meeting. There are at least two additional types of meetings to be aware of: Staff meeting: Try to avoid agreeing to attend these. As a consultant, you are probably focused on a very specific problem, and attending these can be a time-waster. But if you need to present a recommendation to your clients senior staff, it can be useful to get on the agenda of the staff meeting, since they are generally already on everyones calendar, rather than trying to create your own meeting. Daily operational meeting: In any kind of operational environment (e.g., manufacturing facilities, service factories such as hotels or call centers or car rental agencies) there should probably be some type of daily stand-up meeting in which the supervisor reviews metrics from the day before and quickly lays out the game plan for the day ahead. Even if you arent working on an operational matter, see if you can attend one of these to get a flavor of the real work being done at your client. Limit the number of attendees. Now that youve stated the purpose and know what type of meeting you want, invite only those people who have to attend. The fewer attendees, the better. Stand up. A meeting has more energy when at least one person is standing. Stand up and go to the white board with marker in hand. There isnt a white board? Then get one. Or even better, one of those giant Post-It pads that you can tear off and stick on the wall. When you stand up, you can better control the course of the meeting. Be thoughtful about the setup of the room. Get there early and rearrange the furniture. Is there a white board or pad for notes up front? If not, get one. Re-arrange the desks to support the type of interaction you are looking for. For example, if youve got a large meeting space with
22

three dozen chairs set up classroom style, but only a dozen people attending, you might want to put a dozen chairs in a circle and stack the rest at the back of the room. If you are working with other consultants, think about where your team is going to sit. All on one side of the table? Makes it seem like us against them. Consider spreading out, so you can each see each others facial expressions. Test out the conference call number, the video hook-up, your laptop displaying on the overhead, and any other technology. Nothing kills the mood like fiddling with AV. Decide on how to share the document. If you are using a document, will you distribute paper copies, or show it on an overhead projection screen. The projection screen can be effective for large groups when you want to ensure that everyone stays on the same page. But they are more formal and the subtext is We are now presenting the Answer. If you want to do problem solving with a smaller group, paper is usually better. Use fewer pages. However many pages your document is, fewer is probably better. Zero can be the best of all. Ive used exactly zero pages for some of the most productive meetings Ive run. For example, at one client I was asked to lead a day-long kick-off session to surface the issues we wanted to tackle. One approach would have been to lay out in tedious detail the approach we would take to map the current state process, identify bottlenecks, design a future state, etc. Yawn. Instead, we started with a blank sheet of poster-size PostIt paper. For five hours straight, the attendees listed issues facing the organization, and we worked together to organize these issues into several themes. At the end of the session, they owned the solution. Open with a discussion of the agenda for the meeting. Present the agenda of what you want to cover. Then open it up and ask if any other topics need to be covered. If your client really wants to talk about X and your meeting is about Y, then youll be getting only a fraction of her attention. Be prepared to release your agenda. In some cases, you may need to set your agenda aside completely. After youve spent days or weeks getting ready for the big meeting, this takes mindfulness to the emotions and attention levels in the room. Track next steps. On the white board, or one of your big Post-It sheets, track the action items that people agree to. Include the action, the responsibility assigned, and the due date. Every action should have just one owner one throat to choke. If multiple people have to work on the action, fine. But put down just one name the person who is on the hook to get it done. If you cant clearly point your finger at who is responsible, then no one truly is.

23

At the end of the meeting, review the next steps that have been agreed to. Then send out the list to all attendees by email afterwards to confirm. Start your next meeting by reviewing that status of action items from this one. If no action items come from the meeting, then why did you have the meeting? Keep a parking lot for issues. If important issues come up, keep track of them on a parking lot. The issue is important to whoever raised it. If it doesnt rise to the level of releasing your agenda, agree on how youll follow up separately on this item. That way, whoever raised it wont be able to focus on what you want to talk about.

24

Creating effective presentations Tell a story. Your presentation is not a random collection of facts. Think of yourself as a storyteller. One of the most common ways to structure your story is: Situation, Complication, Resolution, e.g.: Situation: Client has seen steady growth and become the industry leader through a strategy of X. Complication: New developments challenge the effectiveness of X, and growth has stalled as competitors offer Y. Resolution: Client can build on its strong foundation and challenge Y by doing Z. Recommended reading. Ill just offer a few tips on presentations in this section. For a grounding in how to create an excellent presentation, I recommend study of the following: The Minto Pyramid Principle, by Barbara Minto. This is the Bible of how to structure thinking, writing, and presentations for consultants. All four books by Edward Tufte. (Envisioning Information, etc.) These books are beautiful objects, and you can get all four of them by attending one of Tuftes day-long seminars, which I highly recommend. Check his website to get the schedule. Drawing on the Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam. Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds. _____________, by Gene Zelazny. Study best-practice charts. To get really good, I suggest Ben Franklins approach. In his autobiography, Franklin discusses how he taught himself to write well. He took notes on a series of slips of paper on essays from The Spectator, and then he set the notes aside for several days. Then he shuffled the notes and tried to re-create the essay, afterwards comparing his work with the original. You can do the same thing with charts. Find charts that you find compelling. The McKinsey Quarterly is a great source. Takes notes on a chart, and then see if you can draw that chart several days later. Youll quickly build up a repertoire that you can draw on. You dont need many. The bar chart, the column chart, the waterfall chart, the two-by-two matrix, the scatter plot, the swim lanes process map these plus a handful of others form the basic grammar that will help you communicate whatever you want to say. Ghost out your document on paper first. Get away from your screen. Get away from email and from the phone. Ghost out your document by hand. You might sketch out 4 or 9 slides
25

per page, or one per page whatever works. Sketch out the pages quickly; draw far more pages than youll every actually produce. Dont let yourself be stopped by that inner voice that says, This page will be too hard, or We dont have the data for that page. Let your intuition run free for an hour. Be prepared to work in a non-linear fashion. As you come up with an idea for the opening slides, you may get an idea for a great chart in the middle. Sketch it out and keep moving. What chart would you create if you had the data? Assume you could get the data. What chart would you draw? Worry about getting the data later. What chart do you need to tell your story? So what? After allowing your creativity free reign, review your pages. Every page should have a so what? One idea per page. Each page should have at least one so what. It should also have exactly one so what. You should be able to summarize that so what in the headline of the slide. More than one major idea per page is too hard to communicate. Your charts should be so powerfully imbued with that one single idea that they reach out and grab our throats. If youve got more than one so what, split it up. Otherwise, your readers will absorb one idea or the other, but probably not both. Put the so what in the headline. The client should be able to get your message if they flip through your presentation and read only the headlines. Bad headline: Sales Results by Salesperson Good headline: Top 20% of Reps Drive 80% of Sales Growth No 3-D graphics for 2-D data. Microsoft Excel lets you tilt and rotate your plain old bar charts. Those 3-D effects just make the chart hard to read. Stick to the plain vanilla charts, and let the data, not the effects, dazzle your audience. Use pictures. Your phone has a camera use it. Photos of the shop floor, photos of the competitors store display, photos of your clients product installed by an actual customer these can all help communicate your story. Avoid pie charts. At least, most of the time. There is usually a better way to communicate information. Pie charts are terrible for comparisons.

26

Influencing for impact Your job as a consultant is not to create a document. The deliverable should not be a presentation to a steering committee. The deliverable ought to be impact something should change as an outcome of your work. In order to make change happen, you need to influence people. Be thoughtful what influence tactics you employ. To influence four department heads, you might need to use four different influence techniques. A technique that convinces one person to adopt your point of view can have the opposite effect on someone else. For example, I tend to be suspicious of experts as well as the wisdom of the crowd. If you tell me that everyone else is supporting the proposal, Im probably less likely to think it is a good idea. If you tell me that the boss wants us to do it, then Im even more suspicious. It is easier to convince me using either logical persuasion, or a consultative approach. For other folks, a logical persuasion approach falls flat, but tell them the CEO wants it done, and they snap to attention. A natural bias is to use on others the influence techniques that work best on you. You can work to reduce this bias by intentionally incorporating new influence techniques in your toolkit and being intentional about which technique you will use. Observe the person you are trying to influence. Do they regularly make arguments based on logic? Then try logical persuasion with them. Or do they mention The CEO wants this, or the boss wants such-and-such. In that case, they may be more likely to be swayed by a legitimizing approach. Here is a starter kit of techniques. Cialdini is a good start for a detailed guide to the subject of influence:
FLU

Strategy

Description

xamp e

Logical persuading Appeal to friendship

Using facts Establishing a friendship and asking for a favor

As you can see with this chart... d really appreciate your support...

Stating Appealing to values

Making a direct state ent of what you want Appealing to shared goals

e both share the sa e goals...

27

Alliance building

Getting consensus a o ng a network of supporters

The other depart ent heads are excited about the proposal...
12

Exchanging

Giving so ething of value in return

Modeling

Leading by exa p le

Lead the VP Ops on a tour of factory floor

n exchange I could help you to...

onsulting

nviting participating in the process asking for suggestions

How do you think we can...

Please instruct your staff to...

Legiti izing

Using authority

The EO has asked us to...

SKILLS

Business development for independent consultants There is no magic bullet. If there is a secret sauce, Im afraid that I dont have the recipe. It helps if you love to solve problems. Otherwise, being a consultant will be a chore. A fancy website isnt required. A fancy website helps provide some legitimacy. It cant hurt, I suppose. But it isnt essential. Clients are probably not going to hire you because they found your website. You are far more likely to get hired because of one of three reasons: 1. The client already knows you and trusts you, or 2. Someone that already knows you and trusts you recommends you to the client 3. Actually, there is no third reason. See #1 and #2 Be willing to give something away for free. I enjoy problem solving, so Im glad to meet with a potential client to do some problem solving for free. Ive done a free, one-week diagnostic on several occasions. Consulting is an experience good a client needs to try it out to see if it works for them. Make it a no-brainer to say yes to a free diagnostic, or to a free one-day problem solving session. Sign up with an agency. There are several firms started within the past several years that act as brokers for top tier management consultants. They dont require exclusivity, and they are a great channel for your services. You cant rely on them to fill your whole pipeline, but they can be a very valuable part of your portfolio of opportunities. Let people know what you are doing, but dont ask for referrals. Dont ask people if they know anyone who needs your help. If the answer is Yes, well, congratulations. But the answer is probably No. And then youve damaged that relationship. Dont network. Instead, build relationships. Dont try to connect with people because you think they could be a source of business. That transactional approach is transparent, and turns people off. Stay in touch. Once a project is over, stay in touch, even (especially) if there is only a small likelihood of any follow-on work. Dont say that you care about impact show it by following up to see what happens once you leave. Serve clients, not companies. My goal as a consultant is to make individual people successful. It isnt very exciting to me to increase the profits of a corporation. But I can get excited about helping an executive increase the profits of her business unit, because that will make her a star. Build a reputation. There are all sorts of ways to raise your profile and build legitimacy, and many of them no longer require the permission of a gatekeeper. Write a blog on the industry.
28

Develop a training seminar and offer it for free to executives in your industry of choice. Publish a podcast. Write white papers. Present at a conference. You could interview executives in the industry of your choice for a white paper, and then offer to brief them on the findings. You could create a round-table discussion forum for executives in the function in which you specialize. You could create a series of videos, and post them free on Youtube. As a non-consultant example, Google Khan Academy. Speak to a club at the business school you attended. Help organize and/or speak at a conference. Approach targeted clients: If you have a specific functional or industry focus, select some target clients. Research their current situation. Tell their executive team how you can help them grow the business / cut costs. My own practice has grown through referrals, not through pro-active business development of this sort. So hats off to consultants who are bold enough to make this strategy work. Dont call it freelancing. Makes it sound like you are writing articles for the local arts weekly. Say that youve started your own consulting firm. If you are going to start your own consulting firm, it will need a name. If I were starting over, I wouldnt include my own name in my firms name. Makes you sound like a one-person shop. Instead, consider picking a name for your firm without your name, and call yourself the Managing Director. People will imagine that there must be Directors, VPs, and Associates running around back at the office. Get a branded email address: If your firm has a name, it should have a branded email address. If you've never registered a domain name before, don't sweat. It costs $11 on www.godaddy.com for a domain and then $50 per year per user to get private-label Gmail via Google Apps. Get some really sharp business cards. The smaller the firm, the thicker the cardstock. Discussing price: Dont talk about price until the client is convinced that they want you. Try, Ive found that it is never helpful to talk about price until were both sure I can add value it is just a distraction. Im sure that well be able to find a price that were both comfortable with. Practice negotiating: It is one thing to sell a widget. Negotiating a price for your own time is uncomfortable for a lot of people (it is for me.) So practice with an advisor.

29

Recommended reading
Problem structuring y The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in writing, thinking, and problem solving, Barbara Minto. For the last four decades, McKinsey has been following Mintos approach. y The McKinsey Approach to Problem Solving, Staff Paper #66. A summary of how top tier consultants solve problems. Business presentations and communications y Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds. Primarily aimed at overhead presentations to large groups. Use more big photos and a lot less text. Be like Steve Jobs. y The Back of the Napkin, Dan Roam. How to solve business problems by drawing pictures, even if you cant draw more than a stick figure. y Say it with Charts: The Executive's Guide to Visual Communication, Gene Zelazny. McKinseys chief chart guru since the 60s shows you how to craft a great chart. Hint: keep it simple, with one message per page. y Say it with Presentations, Gene Zelazny. How to combine your great charts into a compelling presentation. y Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte. The father of statistical graphics. If you can, catch his one-day seminar, a bargain at $400. Check his website for schedules. y The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte. Also check his other two beautiful books. No publisher would match his standards, so he self-published them. y TED Talks. Amazing speakers entertainers, writers, musicians, technology execs, professors youve never heard of, social entrepreneurs, all with an amazing story to tell, in 18 minutes. Available free online streaming or via iTunes. Power and influence y The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene. As a consultant, you get paid for impact, not a document on a shelf. Pay attention to sources of power. y Influence: Science and Practice, Robert Cialdini. A highly readable book by a leading academic on the subject.

Creativity. Consulting is about solving problems that havent been solved before. Good consulting is a fundamentally creative art. And creativity is a skill that you can develop just like any other. Just takes practice. y Outside Lies Magic: Regaining history and awareness in everyday places, John Stilgoe. Stilgoe is a landscape historian at Harvard. Thats right, a landscape historian. His course on the built environment of North America taught me how to see, and it alone was worth my Harvard tuition. Not a day goes by when I dont make an observation influenced by him. This book is essentially about how to take a good walk.

30

y The War of Art. Steven Pressfield. How to overcome the Resistance, stop fearing your own success, and create. y Creativity in Business, Michael Ray y Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, Michael Michalko. A toolkit of techniques you can put in practice to enhance your creativity. y Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques, Michael Michalko. Some overlap with Cracking Creativity, plus a few new tools. y Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A study of the state when you are working on something you care about so deeply that you dont even notice time passing. Whether that something is writing a novel, playing tennis, practicing the piano, or solving business problems, youll find many similar characteristics. y The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, Rosamund and Ben Zander. Observations by a leading conductor who has become a superstar business speaker. As a teacher, Ben Zander gave all his students an A at the beginning of the semester. But first he made them right down why they would deserve that A by the end of the course. A wise book Ive re-read multiple times. y The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, Twyla Tharp. By a leading choreographer. y How to be an Explorer of the World, Keri Smith. A series of fun exercises. Take pictures of paint spots on the sidewalk. Collect objects from the sidewalk and arrange them as if they were a museum exhibit. That sort of thing. y A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future, Daniel Pink. The 21st century is all about storytelling. y Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson. Plenty of practical ways to put yourself in a position to have better ideas. y The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, Lewis Hyde. An artist isnt someone who paints. An artist is someone who creates who gives a gift. Inspired me to create Consulting Bootcamp and write this manifesto.

Leadership y The Feiner Points of Leadership: The 50 basic laws that will make people want to perform better for you, Michael C. Feiner. By one of Columbia Business Schools most popular professors ever. He was the Chief Administrative Officer at Pepsi, responsible for training their executives to be leaders. Ive frequently given this book to clients, and they always appreciate it. y The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A leadership fable, Patrick Lencioni. What can go wrong, and how to fix it. y Power Plays: Shakespeares Lessons in Leadership and Management, John Whitney. Go back and re-read the Bard with a new appreciation for his insights into life at work.

31

Finance and Accounting. y The Analysis and Use of Financial Statements, Gerald White. A good all-around intro accounting text. y Analysis for Financial Management, Robert Higgins. A concise, readable introduction to understanding and analyzing financial statements.

Career advice and professional development y What Color is Your Parachute? Richard Bolles. The best all-around book on finding a job. y Never Wrestle With a Pig and Ninety Other Ideas to Build Your Business and Career, Mark McCormack. Fun insights into life at work. y Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin. Message: its all about putting in the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. y Weapons of Mass Instruction: A schoolteacher's journey through the dark world of compulsory schooling, John Taylor Gatto. Reflections on the school system by a New York State Teacher of the Year who quit in the middle of his tenure. y Negotiating Your Salary: How to make $1000 a minute, Jack Chapman. For once you get the offer. y For Executives Only: Applying business techniques to your job search, Bill Belknap. The subtitle says it all. y Attitudes of gratitude: How to give and receive joy every day of your life, M. J. Ryan. Say thank-you, even (especially) when you wont get anything out of it. y Tribes: We need you to lead us, Seth Godin. Create a forum for like-minded people who want to connect with each other. And read all of Godins other books, too. y Targeting a Great Career, Kate Wendleton. A concise book on how to do the research to figure out what you want to do. y The Dip: A little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick), Seth Godin. y The Hard Truth About Soft Skills: Workplace lessons smart people wish they'd learned sooner, Peggy Klaus. After your first promotion, its all about getting other people to do stuff. y Are You Ready to Succeed?: Unconventional strategies for achieving personal mastery in business and life, Srikumar Rao. Raos course, Creativity and Personal Mastery, is the only business school class with its own alumni club. His former students hold an alumni reunion every year. This book closely follows his course. y The Art of Mingling: Easy, fun, and proven techniques for mastering any room, Jeanne Martinet y The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, Timothy Ferriss. While the emphasis is on creating an Internet retail business, which is what Ferriss did, his principles on controlling your own time, setting amazing goals, and cutting out distractions are widely applicable.

Computer skills. I havent yet been on a project where having a mastery of Excel hasnt been helpful. If you arent an Excel guru, teach yourself. A small investment in Excel skills pays off big dividends in time savings as well as making it possible to do analyses you wouldnt even have thought of. y Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Bill Jelen.

32

Other good business-related books y Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, Dan Ariely. Why free is a much more powerful price than $0.01, and many other insights based on his research. y Purple Cow: Transform your business by being remarkable, Seth Godin. Brown cows dont get noticed. y The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki. Also read his biweekly column in The New Yorker. y Punished by Rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A's, praise, and other bribes, Alfie Kohn. How grades and gold stars end up destroying internal motivation. y The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Will forever change the way you think about risk and probability. And make you highly suspicious of so-called experts. y The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande.

How to live y Walden, Henry David Thoreau. As a consultant, your job is to look at the situation with a fresh eye. No one has done this better than Henry. y The Alchemist, Paulo Coehlo. y The Art of Living by Epictetus: The classic manual on virtue, happiness, and effectiveness y Warrior of the Light: A Manual, Paulo Coehlo. Aphorisms and micro-stories. y Linchpin: Are you indispensable?, Seth Godin. Did I mention to read everything by Seth Godin? This book is about how to become the indispensable person in your organization, no matter what your job title. I liked it so much, Ive read all the books on the recommended reading list.

Mindfulness y Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life, Jon Kabat-Zinn. Whatever your religious beliefs, meditation can be a powerful practice to bring into your life. y The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh. In our distracted culture, if you can pay attention to a problem for 4 hours (8 hours?) without interruption, youll have an incredible advantage.

Positive psychology (the scientific study of happiness) y Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, Martin Seligman. By one of the founders of the new field called positive psychology, that seeks to study happiness in a scientific way, after psychologists focused on depression and neuroses for the first century of the field. y The How of Happiness: A new approach to getting the life you want, Sonja Lyubomirsky. My favorite book on happiness.

33

y Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment, Tal Ben-Shahar. By the professor who taught one of the most popular courses ever at Harvard y Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - How we can learn to fulfill our potential, Carol Dweck.

Consulting y The Trusted Advisor, David Maister. Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-orientation

Biographies y Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson. Blogs: Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ Chris Guillebeau: The Art of Non-Conformity: http://chrisguillebeau.com/3x5/

34