Organizations

More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… Your assets as a consultant basically boil down to your knowledge, technical skill, counseling skill, and the depth of your client relationships. Six lessons about your assets as a consultant: Your existing knowledge and skills will depreciate in value The health of your career has less to…

More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… Organize and reward marketing efforts as you do billable time Different activities require different skills, so allocate them to people according to ability and preference Form small teams, each focused on one type of marketing Ask everyone to devote the same minimum time to it Include junior…

More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… Raspberry Jam Rule: the further you spread your marketing tactics, the thinner they get. It’s always better to demonstrate than to assert. In-person, individualized methods are always better than broadcasting. The first team Seminars (small-scale) Speeches at client-industry meetings Articles in client-oriented (trade) press Proprietary research The…

More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… So far How clients choose has been one of the most eye-opening chapters of the book. If were we to apply user-centered design principles to clients, we’d end up with this chapter. From the consultant’s point of view, there are two main stages to getting clients: marketing…

More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… About a third through the book, Maister starts to repeat himself a little, hammering home one of his overarching themes of service. He says you must be client-centered, particularly interesting advice when you’re running a user-centered design firm. This is a balance we’re familiar with, and as…

More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… He points out that the work is only part of the consultant’s service. We are also judged on our responsiveness, attitude, manner, etc. When the quality of the work product is difficult to measure (as with consulting advice), the service aspect is actually more important than the…

More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… He identifies 3 vital categories of practice development (i.e. marketing) activities and what percentage of time to spend on each: Broadcasting (writing papers) – 10% Courting (forming a client relationship) – 25-40% Superpleasing (Going beyond satisfaction to delight) – 10-15% Nurturing (Spending extra, non-billable time to understand…

More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… Rather than focusing on chargability and realization reports, look at profits per partner. For each activity the firm strives to improve (e.g. delagate better, develop higher value services) examine how each contributes to both short-term profitability and long-term health. These activities, in order of importance to health,…

As mentioned last week, I’m reading David H. Maister’s Managing the Professional Service Firm, and it’s very very very good. I’ll post some summaries here, though it’s almost a sin to summarize it as his writing is already clear and concise. Staff falls in 3 basic levels: Partner, Manager, and Consultant. He identifies 3 main…

I spent years in consulting deconstructing how the firms operated and what drove their business decisions. Ironically, the same year I started at a consulting firm (1993) was the same year David H. Maister published Managing the Professional Service Firm which explains it all. He’s a great writer, and has published other great titles since…

Two views on the same idea: Daniel Dennett in How The Mind Works, courtesy of Alex Wright: A flow chart is typically the organizational chart of a committee of homunculi (investigators, librarians, accountants, executives); each box specifies a homunculus by precribing a function without saying how it is accomplished (one says, in effect: put a…

Some terse notes from the free bits of Seth Godin’s Survival Is Not Enough. I find his prose a bit wordy, but I think he’s trying not only to communicate the ideas but also to inspire. Evolution in business is a theme…‘Extinction is part of the process of creation. Failure is the cornerstone of evolution’…

In Group Think, Malcolm Gladwell compares “Saturday Night Live,” the founders of psychoanalysis, and mid-eighteenth century scientists and observes that ‘We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that’s not how it works…in all of known history only three…

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Talent Myth story in the New Yorker is a surface analysis of McKinsey’s philosophy regarding hiring and promotion, but raises the important question whether companies like Enron misinterpreted the potential of individuals: ‘The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around…stability in a…