The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully (Consulting Secrets Book 1)

When you're not terribly smart, it helps to be a good listener.

Improvement is easier than perfection, and as the Chinese say, the best is the enemy of the good.

The Corporal's dedication to his recipe may have been irrational in origin, but its effect made perfect sense. Prescott's Pickle Principle works both ways. The unswerving dedication to the Corporal's formula acted like a brine in which the entire company was immersed, preserving the quality of its product in the face of a thousand attempts to make

that would indicate resistance, I still catch many contradictions. Two of the most common verbal clues to resistance don't require your listening to the words at all. Sometimes, there will be a long silence at a point that would naturally call for a response. Sometimes, just the opposite will occur: a long, meaningless babble. But perhaps the most

Attaching an emotionally charged label to direct attention away from one aspect of a situation is called The Misdirection Method. Labeling the situation as an overrun assumes that the budget was correct. Labeling it as underfunding assumes that the work was done as efficiently as possible. Each label tends to steer people away from examining one as

If you as a consultant find a relatively even distribution of problems, you may hypothesize that your clients are not seeing one major problem, but it is more likely that they have been keeping up with their problems without letting any one problem get out of control.

According to legend, Henry Ford was once interviewed by Congress on the question of how to prevent river pollution caused by industrial plants. Ford pooh-poohed all the complex legislation that Congress was considering, proposing instead a single law that would "end river pollution once and for all." Congress didn't pass the law, but its

more like living systems. For instance, many wild animals cannot breed or even be kept alive under laboratory conditions. The first radar systems were a bit like wild animals: They would work under combat conditions, but not in the sterile laboratory environment. Before World War II, no artificial system was sufficiently complex to display this dep

Let's do a very rough calculation. If you allot one-quarter of your time to marketing and one-quarter to slack, your billable time is only half your actual time. Continuing with the calculation, figure that you'll spend about half of what you earn on administrative expenses, and that you'll need an additional twenty percent as a contingency reserve