As a Consultant, Know When You’re Giving Away Too Much

By Carter McNamara on October 15, 2011

Free Advice Too Often Backfires On You During a recession when potential clients are more reluctant to pay consultants for services, it can be very enticing for consultants to do almost anything to win contracts, even to do a lot of free consulting — to give away what the consultants otherwise would be paid for. […]

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Challenging Our Own Mental Models Our Growth as Consultants (Part 3 of 3)

By Jim Smith on March 19, 2011

(See Part 2 of 3) Warren Bennis taught me to ask three questions: What’s So? So What? What Now?” How we handle uncertainty and how we deal with it personally is critical in how we manage change.  Given the uncertainty and complexity in our organizations, dealing with ambiguity is a critical skill for consultants.  This […]

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Challenging Our Own Mental Models and Our Growth as Consultants (Part 2 of 3)

By Jim Smith on February 25, 2011

(See part 1 of 3.) The personal development lessons come from putting myself into what Richard Leider called “The Land Of I Don’t Know. “  Putting myself into a total situation where I literally do not know how to survive on my own or I literally do not know what is going on half the […]

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Challenging Our Own Mental Models and Our Growth as Consultants (Part 1 of 3)

By Jim Smith on February 16, 2011

(Part 1 of 3) I have been in Africa for the past month.  I am still in re-entry.  About once ever 12-18 months my partner and I take teams of people into developing nations to work in villages to build clinics, or schools, or other projects to assist the local community as a whole.  We […]

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A First Set of Questions to Ask Your Potential Client

By Carter McNamara on January 21, 2011

Consulting books often suggest a sequence of steps or phases that a consulting project goes through.  The nature of the sequence depends on the perspectives of the authors of the books.  The initial phase has been referred to by a variety of names, for example, Start-Up and/or Entry.  (Some books even mention these two terms […]

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Links to Build a Consulting Practice

By Carter McNamara on January 7, 2011

Our firm gets 4-5 calls/month from people wanting to know how to start or grow a consulting practice.  Obviously, there’s no standardized procedure for that.  It depends on the nature of the service you’d offer as a consultant.  If you’re selling services to develop job descriptions for rural electric co-ops in Kansas, well your service […]

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Organizational Character and Leadership Development

By Jim Smith on December 16, 2010

The news is filled with the exploits of more than a few examples of dishonesty and greed, leaders who purposefully worked in their own behalf, rather than from a sense of responsibility for institutional integrity. We know the list and it keeps getting bigger. For the last 50 years it has not been fashionable to […]

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How Much Should the Client Be Involved in Consulting Projects?

By Carter McNamara on December 10, 2010

Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting, asserts that, as a consultant, you should not be contributing more than 50% of the effort in a consulting project.  Your client should work the remainder.  You should never be doing what your client can do in a project. This is especially true for external consultants.  Internal consultants might […]

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Linking Innovation and Operations

By Carter McNamara on November 24, 2010

Development is hard pressed to interface with operations. Yet it is extremely important that this interface be workable because developments are not relevant until they find their way into operations. This is the “reason for being” of development; to have new systems and adaptive processes and structures integrated, in the long run, to foster organizational […]

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Foundations of Consulting — Part 4: Types of Consultants

By Carter McNamara on November 15, 2010

Part 1 of this series is What Do Consultants Do?, which defines a consultant (as Peter Block puts it) as someone who is trying to change another person, process or organization, but who has no direct control over what they are trying to change.  That post also listed numerous roles that a consultant might play.  […]

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