A new type of consultant is emerging. Unecumbered by a large firm or long term partnerships, the best of the consulting world are now going out on their own and they are starting to do the best work of their lives.
This website, and others like it, are here to support that movement and to encourage the best in every field to break away from the pack and start working with only the best.
A Manifesto
The relationship starts with trust, and ends with trust.
When you engage with a client, you fall in love with them and give them all your trust. If, in the end, they betray this trust, then you must focus on the lessons you have learned, but you always know that you did trust them.
In the beginning the client may be confused a little, but before long they are not the client, they really are your partners. When you get to this place, you can learn more about them, their business and their organization than any “major study of organizational control structures and reporting mechanisms” could ever, in the span of 500,000$ worth of billing, discover.
Emergence and Discovery
We do not have the answers. Truly, I am sorry to report, dear client, but we do not have your answer.
We have methods, tools, ideas even. But you have the answer.
You do. You and those crazy people in your organization that work directly with your customers. You know, those lunatics you never talk to?
No, you can’t pay me to pretend I do.
We do not absorb energy or create energy, we focus energy
Major consulting firms deliver a double whammy to their clients: They often suck every bit of energy out of the employees at the client company through menial and painful work, and they also infuse huge amounts of their own consultants to do work that the client’s employees could be doing themselves
The reason that the client’s employees are not asked to do this work is because rule number 1 was not followed: there is no trust.
Immediately, by using existing resources, our billing will be at least 1/4 that of a major consulting firm, and that is being conservative.
We do this for our own sake really, for each person within an organization that we can work more closely with, we can learn magnitudes more about them, their work, and your organization.
Each person must bring their own value with them
Every consultant that comes into a project must bring a distinct and valuable set of understanding to that work. If you don’t offer something for a particular project, then you do not work on it. Each individual must make this choice for themselves, and never be seen to be riding along on someone else’s work.
The client must feel a direct and real sense of value for your presence, it is part of the overriding trust.
More Emergence
The law of emergence means that those of us who work on a project, and invest heavily in it, must most often step out of the way at the last minute, because by then we have our own ideas, and we have to trust the people involved to come to the truth themselves.
You work for the people, not the brand.
We’ve had them all. Some of the biggest and most famous brands in the world, and the smallest organizations we could imagine. No matter what, we only take work based on one set of criteria: Who is it that is hiring us? I can think of times when we would never have worked for the chairman, but found a way to work for one of his VPs. Or times when we could see that nobody got it, and we would only hit brick walls.
In the end, that person, or team of people, they are the ones who’s careers will move ahead based on your work, and they need to feel a sense of urgency to change. Without them, the culture is doomed to stay where it is, and without understanding the culture of an organization, we can never change it.