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This book looks at the enormous benefits to companies and independent consultants of the booming "free-agent" marketplace. It clarifies the dynamics of the transaction, including how companies can leverage this highly experienced breed of professionals on a project or interim basis, and how consultants can better position themselves for success. It gives plenty of case studies and practical advice, and explains how this new brand of workers can help solve vital business problems, now more than ever.

Chris Argyris, professor emeritus of education and organizational behavior at Harvard University, argues that most business advice given to managers by experts is impossible to execute. By becoming better judges of the limitations and value in business advice, managers can get more value from it. This book is not easy reading, but is well worth the effort.

A must read for any consultant or more importantly any one who works with or hires consultants. Perhaps most importantly from a financial perspective, Romaine lays out a new conflict within the nexus of contracts: the shareholder vs. the consultant. While not necessarily against each other, the consultant has a much shorter time frame and hence differing incentives and we know that incentive matter so this is worthy of future academic research. For instance, a part of book deals with conflicts between Andersen (yes that Andersen) and employees at the firm. While written about Nations Bank (Bank of America), it would be interesting to see if the same thing happened at Enron etc.) (As a final point if the size of the book intimidates you, get the book for the bulleted chapter summaries, you will more than get your money's worth just form them!) [FinanceProfessor.com Annotation]

Editor's Note: the book has a website - Book's website: http://www.sof500.com

Jay Conrad Levinson's Guerrilla Marketing revolutionized the way marketers do business by defying the conventional wisdom that effective marketing means spending big bucks. He devised highly successful marketing strategies that rely on creativity, imagination, and energy-instead of money-to get the job done. Now, Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants applies the power of guerrilla marketing to the hypercompetitive business of consulting.

Editor's Note: take a look at the book's website at:
http://www.guerrillaconsulting.com.
The site includes a page of "free stuff" such as a sample chapter and a Guide to Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

The second edition of Peter Block's Flawless Consulting gracefully updates what many consider the best resource of its kind. New chapters on implementation, "whole-system" strategies, and ethics are included, but in general it simply fine-tunes Block's proven advice to match the transformations that business and society have undergone since initial publication two decades ago. "The days of long studies and expert-driven answers are passing," the author proclaims in his new preface. "The task of the consultant is increasingly to build the capacity of clients to make their own assessments and answer their own questions." He then subtly modifies his established recommendations accordingly for every step, from the initial client meeting and problem diagnosis through data collection and the execution of solutions. In the section on "Conducting a Group Feedback Meeting," for example, he advises: "Treat the group as a collection of individuals.... Ask each person what he or she wants from the meeting. This will surface differences and force the group to take responsibility for some of the difficulties that may arise." --Howard Rothman

With sharp wit, consultant Kihn tears down myths surrounding the highly profitable and revered management-consulting industry. Presenting stories from his own career in a large management-consulting firm, this tell-all book sketches a picture of a consulting firm with teams of brilliant professionals who are hired by companies that pay millions of dollars in fees for an analysis of their organization and its processes. The author contends that consultants merely provide information the client already knows, and he offers insight into the effect consultants have on the company's employees and their culture. Language plays an enormous role in dealings both within and outside the firm, and the inclusion of a dictionary of important words for management consultants is revealing and entertaining. No activity avoids Kihn's scathing pen, including his highly critical analysis of business books. This will be popular among those engaged in consulting as well as clients who pay dearly for their advice. Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association.

This expose is sure to incite envy and lust for the power and influence consulting entails, while simultaneously inciting dismay at the underhanded tactics consultants apparently use as a matter of course. Pinault, an international player in a number of major consulting organizations, narrates the story of his life as a participant in a number of corporate takeovers, reengineerings and project startups. The book is heavily dependent on dialogue, which lends an air of freshness and reality to business subjects often bound in stilted, academic prose. The story begins with Pinault's background: he tells how, having hoped for a career in space technology, he detoured into the study of Japanese and began his career working for a Japanese shipbuilding firm. This was followed quickly by his immersion into the international Boston Consulting Group. With the exception of a few detailed descriptions of actual consulting projects--the manufacture of disposable diapers is one--most of this account describes Pinault's rise up the consulting ladder, his struggles with the demands and stress of the job and the machinations of various consulting firms competing intensely on several continents. Pinault's work was sometimes skullduggerish, and he gleefully relates tales of his "benchmarking"--i.e., covertly, duplicitously discovering other companies' trade secrets--and low-bidding competitors' clients. Interspersed throughout are pithy guidelines that condense consulting into simple lessons: e.g., "Cases that begin to show obsession with large quantities of data... run a high danger of fractured expectations." This is two books in one, the narrative refreshing and illuminating, the guidelines terse and educational. At times, both serve to highlight the shady, sometimes questionable activities that seemingly permeate this professional culture.

The second edition of Peter Block's Flawless Consulting gracefully updates what many consider the best resource of its kind. New chapters on implementation, "whole-system" strategies, and ethics are included, but in general it simply fine-tunes Block's proven advice to match the transformations that business and society have undergone since initial publication two decades ago. "The days of long studies and expert-driven answers are passing," the author proclaims in his new preface. "The task of the consultant is increasingly to build the capacity of clients to make their own assessments and answer their own questions." He then subtly modifies his established recommendations accordingly for every step, from the initial client meeting and problem diagnosis through data collection and the execution of solutions. In the section on "Conducting a Group Feedback Meeting," for example, he advises: "Treat the group as a collection of individuals.... Ask each person what he or she wants from the meeting. This will surface differences and force the group to take responsibility for some of the difficulties that may arise." --Howard Rothman

Following on the heels of the best-selling Flawless Consulting comes The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion. Whether you work as a consultant or you work with consultants, this relentlessly practical guide will be your best friend as you discover how consulting influences your business- and real life-decisions and those of others.

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion is packed with:
* Sample scenarios
* Case studies
* Client-consultant dialogues
* Hands-on tools
* Action plans
* Implementation checklists

In what amounts to a vigorous defense of management consultants, Kiechel explains how business became an intellectual endeavor over the last half century, maturing from commonsense practice to theory-driven discipline, and how ideas now underpin the way corporations function today. “What companies didn’t have before the strategy revolution,” he writes, “was a way of systematically putting together all the elements that determined their corporate fate.”

In the same way that Peter Drucker “invented” management in the 1940s, consultants invented corporate strategy as “the first comprehensive paradigm that pulled together all the elements most vital for a company to take into account if it is to compete, win, and survive.” Kiechel offers a history of the ideas that coalesced into “strategy” and of the people and organizations that struggled to put them into practice; helpfully, he puts particular scholars and theorists in context—for instance, Henry Mintzberg’s organizational learning versus Michael Porter’s positioning.

Kiechel, a veteran of Fortune and Harvard Business Publishing, writes clearly and brightly, but The Lords of Strategy isn’t all that easy a read, perhaps due to the author’s broad scope and extensive information-gathering—for each concept and case study, he brings together its history, practitioners, applications, and importance, in prose driven by personalities, dialogue, and anecdotes. The book’s structure feels looser than perhaps intended, and readers hoping to skim may find themselves occasionally at sea while negotiating market segmentation, the experience curve, the growth-share matrix, reengineering, core competencies, and the five-forces framework. But Kiechel has done a real service—and not only for McKinsey and BCG—in bringing his subject to life. The book serves as a primer as well as a history, and as such almost any executive or B-school student would do well to pick it up. —Matthew Budman [The Conference Board Review]