Steve Shu – Page 6 – Stephen Shu, PhD

April 9, 2009May 30, 2015

Crash Course Consulting Reading List

Readers of this post may be interested in The Consulting Apprenticeship (update May 30, 2015).

Situation: You are stuck on a desert island with no lifeline access. What are the essential books and tools you need for management consulting?

Well, I can’t say that I have a complete list compiled, but here is a crash course consulting reading list (PDF doc) that I have provided in the past to new consultants (including experienced professionals new to consultative methods) as bread-and-butter references and knowledge areas. May provide ~80% coverage of a core foundation for general management consulting. Perhaps it is of use to new consultants and/or those looking to develop their consulting practices. I know that this list could probably use expansion and updating – I tried to create a list that was based on pre-packaged, ready-to-go stuff, and there are some limitations with that method.

Please feel free to post in the comments section any other sources you think others may find useful.

Update (8/3/09): Updated the reading list a little. For example, I included some blogs from traditional management consultants that shed light on the practice and industry.

Update (8/21/09): Updated the list to include some strategy books and other books recommended by consultants.

Update (9/1/09): Updated the list to include the latest versions of two of the best professional services sales books ever (by Ford Harding). If you are a professional services or consulting organization and could use help and/or an introduction to Ford, feel free to let me know, and I can broker a connection.

Update (2/3/2010): Got some great feedback from Florian Hollender at Killer Consultant. Based on his feedback and some other things on my mind, I updated the consulting reading list. Includes more updated blog and book references to Michael McLaughlin‘s material, some links on client facilitation, and books on negotiations and innovation. The reading list also includes some more consulting blogs.

April 9, 2009

How A Consulting-Style CV Differs From A Traditional Resume

Management consultants often create CVs that are included in firm directories or as addendums to proposals to clients. The structure of these CVs often differ significantly from that of traditional, chronological resumes used to apply for jobs – namely "consulting-style CVs" are used to highlight project experience and either functional skills or focus areas. This is in line with a consultant's desire to land projects and fill temporary skill gaps in a client organization as opposed to landing a permanent position within an organization. It is also in line with sales processes for consultants – a big part of the purchase evaluation process by clients is whether a consultant has "done it before" as opposed to getting a comprehensive chronology of employment.

Consulting CVs often cover the following areas:

Brief background (e.g., position or role in firm, industry background)
Functional expertise and skill areas
Sample consulting engagements
Education background and/or prior employer background

A consulting CV can vary depending on many things such as:

whether a named consultant is to be presented (e.g., versus representative consultant)
confidentiality requirements
where one is at in terms of the marketing, sales, or contracting process
the desired project that one is trying to sell into (e.g., CV may try to focus more narrowly as opposed to being broad)
how the consultant is to be positioned relative to other consultants on the project and the engagement workstreams
culture of consulting firm
culture of client
treatment of publications
treatment of consulting practice areas
years of consulting experience (e.g., positioning new consultants versus more experienced ones)

Here's a link to my consulting CV (PDF file), and it is provided as an example only since I have found few public examples or references in consulting books on the consulting-style CV. I do not claim that this CV is best in class, primarily because a CV should be tailored for context and impact. For example, some resume folks would argue that one use more situation-, task-, action-, result-type characterizations in the project descriptions and use more active voice. I totally agree with those characterizations and strategies at a block-and-tackle level. The purpose of this post is to highlight the macro-level difference of a typical, consulting-style CV that I have seen used in different firms. A core difference is on the emphasis on projects rather than chronology or functions.

Edit (4/9/09): I am not an expert on resumes. For those that want information on writing better resumes and getting permanent consulting jobs, a great site to visit is Management Consulted.

March 25, 2009

If I Was A Brand (Marketing Collage)

When one is thinking about developing a brand identity from a marketing perspective, it is best to think broadly so that a cohesive system and set of principles are built to support the underlying cause. Dr. David Aaker (e.g., in his book "Building Strong Brands") puts forth a system that challenges practitioners to decompose the way they think about brand identity (both core and extended) along several dimensions, including "Brand as a Product", "Brand as an Organization", "Brand as a Person", and "Brand as a Symbol".

Although I leave the terms above undefined here (because they are defined more rigorously in Dr. Aaker's book), it is a useful exercise in some marketing and brand management classes to have students build a collage as if "they were a brand" by clipping pictures from magazines. The visual imagery is intended to connote some aspects of your core brand identity (some of your "essence") along multiple dimensions (e.g., quality, personality, attributes, skills).

Here's an example that I pieced together for myself (note: first draft, essentially unreviewed). What do you see? What does it tell you about how I see myself? If you know me, does it fit with what you know about me? What consistencies or inconsistencies do you see?

March 18, 2009

Corporations Are Learning About Social Media Faster

A lot of people in Twitter circles characterize that twittering feels like the days of early majority blogging, for me circa 2004ish with an even less mature toolset (I am being generous). With respect to business use, it seems like everyone needed more help back then, as not everyone came out of the gate running. Here Dave Sify summarized the state of the corporate blogosphere in 2004. How few the companies were. Later at the beginning of 2006 and indicative of a forthcoming early majority, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel were motivated to publish their book, "Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk With Customers. Well, it's 2009 now, and we're in a large recession. But it seems like businesses are smarter this time around in the use of social media like Twitter. I recently ran across an article on Corporate Twitter Accounts worth following. Seems like we skipped the whole convincing phase this time around. Much less of the skeptical talk time this time around.

Kudos to those companies that are able to build brand, improve customer service, and potentially lower costs (latter less widely known) using Twitter. How often is it that companies are able to get marketing and customer service to sync up, let alone talk? It seems that we are making progress, even if it means we'll all have to learn the best practices of communicating in 140 characters or less.

Update (3/20/09): Not business-centric, but here's an article that indicate social networks more popular than email (see CNET article regarding Nielsen Online study)? Not sure how this was measured, but I don't think it is intuitively true for me, even though I consider myself a moderate blogger.

Update (3/23/09): Steve Rubel has a good post entitled, "Customer Service is the New PR". I like his post because it ties together some of the concrete stuff going on in the social media space (along with references to some of the more esoteric, forward-looking items).

March 16, 2009

A Damning Exhibit Concerning MBAs and Business Schools

Nail in the coffin. Perhaps not, but I'd have to agree it's a bad case. The New York Times portrays a tough canvas of MBAs and their responsibilty in the economic crises in the article entitled, "Is It Time to Retrain Business Schools?". The article starts off:

JOHN Thain has one. So do Richard Fuld, Stanley O’Neal and Vikram Pandit. For that matter, so does John Paulson, the hedge fund kingpin.

Yes, all five have fat bank accounts, even now, and all have made their share of headlines. But these current and former giants of finance also are all card-carrying M.B.A.’s.

Couple of interesting points which I had not seen before and probably should be thought out further:

The notion of professionalization and stewardship
The emphasis on shareholder value as an underpinning to finance, entrepreneurship, etc. instruction

But I also have some off-the-cuff thoughts (* indicates based on the Organizational Behavior 4th Edition text [2008] by Dr. Steven McShane and Dr. Mary Ann Von Glinow):

Which investors or Boards reward something other than shareholder value? Are these groups in a minority?
Although socially responsible companies have been brought to light over the past decade or so, do they get widely-known, superior returns? Do youth and business people value them? Do kids (or adults) worship Bill Gates as part of Microsoft or as part of the Gates Foundation more? Where is the balance?
In most surveys, when asked about the most important characteristic employees look for in a leader, most say honesty and ethics (*). What does that say about our ability to hire qualified managers and executives then?
95% of the Fortune 500 companies in the US have codes of ethics (*). Enron also had a well-developed code (*).
Is it that business school students are neither trained in risk management nor tragedy of the commons systems structures? Or is it that personal performance plans and reward structures do not align? Other?

If the problems stem from business-, company-, or world-cultures, then how will we get educated and make amends?

March 15, 2009

An Example of Consulting Engagement Workstreams

The term "workstream" is often used in consulting, but offhand I cannot think about where it is defined for new consultants to reference. A workstream is not a fancy concept, yet it is an important construct that often has ties to consulting proposals, engagement management and division of labor, and processes used with the client. Note that not all consulting firms will characterize workstreams the same way that I describe them here, but I have found similar structures used in a number of consulting organizations that I have worked with.

What is a workstream, and where does it fit in the context of a consulting engagement? Let's start with the latter question first.

A consulting engagement is often framed around solving a specific problem statement for a client. In a prior post on articulating problems statements, I hinted that a consulting problem statement usually must be decomposed into smaller problems statements.

To answer these problems statements, the consultants usually need to put together a set of engagement activities that provide the frame for answering the overaching problem statement and subproblem statements. Engagement activities are often grouped together in coarse groupings often running in parallel. These coarse groupings are called "workstreams", and each workstream often has prime consultant and prime client point. The structure is pretty much in line with standard project management practices, but key adds from a consulting perspective are the problem statement and consultant-client touch points. See the figure below which has four workstreams covering strategy, technology, finance, and business plan development.

As additional context, the problem statement for the above engagement was to help the client develop a business strategy and plan for entering the market as a new entrant in the wireless network and applications provider space. So as an example, the first (top) workstream is geared towards helping the client determine what business model and applications should be investigated in more detail by brainstorming on services and looking at the competitive envionment for plausible and defensible openings.

To close off this post, I think that it's important to note that the cadence and regular review structure with the client (e.g., see milestones at bottom of figure above relative to workstreams) are important processes. See my prior post illustrating why in consulting the process is an essential part of the deliverable. Readers may also want to refer to an earlier post I had on engagement managers (who own the entire set of workstream above) and the essence of management consulting.

March 12, 2009

100 Best Blogs for MBA Students

Kelly points me to a list of blogs for MBAs. There's a mixture of new ones and older ones in the list (looks like this blog just made it on the page at #100). I'll have to check out the list (and add a few to my newsreader) as my involvement with various business school communities has been increasing as of late.