High-Impact Consulting

"Management consultants must be more than experts in their field."

"Any number of obstacles may need to be overcome in order to change an organization effectively."

"In most conventional firms, however, enough projects are affected by enough of the flaws that many clients receive no significant benefit."

"The conventional consulting paradigm is not designed to mobilize organizational change."

"The more an undertaking is characterized by these zest factors, the more a group will mobilize its energies, overturn barriers, and set aside low-value-added activities."

"Effective consulting requires a blend of content consulting, with a strong added emphasis on achieving results."

"Making measurable results the primary, immediate goal of a consulting project is the first and most radical shift traditional consultants and their clients must make in adopting a high-impact, results-focused strategy."

"As soon as a bottom-line result is promised, the consultant's success depends on the client's behavior. This can be very uncomfortable for consultants."

"Focusing a consulting project on specific, measurable results produces a very healthy shift in the behavior of both the consultant and the client."

"The first step is for both client and consultant to make a commitment to designing their project in terms of assessed readiness."

"One element of readiness testing is the identification of all the people whose approval or cooperation will be essential for success."

"Rather than design an overall solution at once, the aim is to carve off a series of rapid-cycle attacks to create some measurable results for the client in the shortest possible time."

"When the clients are focused on large-scale, long-term goals, carve off an achievable step toward those goals."

"The project has to be seen as a joint undertaking to produce a joint product."

"While most managers and consultants would probably agree that consulting projects offer important opportunities for client learning, few appreciate the fact that there is much that consultants can learn on the job as well."

"Consultants who want to shift to a more highly leveraged approach will have to welcome and get comfortable with the participation of clients in the design and execution of their projects."

"The fundamental consideration in creating a contract should be how well the client and consulting team can work together to accomplish results, not how competent the consultants are in any given technical area."

"An important contribution clients should expect from their consultants is help in expanding their own ability to make demands."

"Getting people to fully commit to performance targets requires toughness, resiliency, faith, and perseverance."

"Anxiety can be exacerbated by the fact that the very act of engaging a consultant?even an internal consultant?can be perceived by fellow managers as a sign of weakness. "

"Consultants are not nearly as comfortable "thinking out loud" in the presence of clients as they are doing their homework in private and then making well-rehearsed presentations to management."

"In order to produce the most valuable results form their collaboration, clients and consultants need to gradually shift from the structured roles and formalized mechanics of conventional consulting."

"Subprojects can evolve into large scale strategic change processes, in every kind of business and public and nonprofit agency."