Secrets of Consulting

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

A book about what is required of consultants. It has a lot of rules on how to engage with your clients and what they want. Consulting is about influencing people who ask for it.

🎨 Impressions

There is always a problem. The laws on pricing and advertising is good. THere is much to learn from just reading this book.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• If you are a consultant, or if you ever use a consultant, this book is for you. That's a wide scope, because nowadays, nearly everyone is some kind of a consultant.

• My definition of consulting is the art of influencing people at their request. People want some sort of change—or fear some sort of change—so they seek consulting, in one form or another.

• *Most of the time, though, I enjoyed the direct interaction with my clients, if I could stand the irrationality. If I wanted to stay in the business, it seemed to me I had two choices:

  1. Remain rational, and go crazy.
  2. Become irrational, and be called crazy. For many years, I oscillated between these poles of misery, until I hit upon a third approach:
  3. Become rational about irrationality.

• The First Law of Consulting: In spite of what your client may tell you, there's always a problem. The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem. The Third Law of Consulting: Never forget they're paying you by the hour, not by the solution.

• A corollary of The First Law of Consulting is The Ten Percent Promise Law: Never promise more than ten percent improvement. Most people can successfully absorb ten percent into their psychological category of "no problem." Anything more, however, would be embarrassing if the consultant succeeded.

• Another corollary is The Ten Percent Solution Law: If you happen to achieve more than ten percent improvement, make sure it isn't noticed.

• A corollary of The Second Law of Consulting is one of Marvin's Laws: Whatever the client is doing, advise something else. At the very least, the people problem is either lack of imagination or lack of perspective. People who are close to a problem tend to keep repeating what didn't work the first time.

• Never Forget They're Paying You by the Hour The Third Law of Consulting could be interpreted to mean that the consultant should milk the client for as much hourly money as possible,but that's not what it's about. Many good consultants have tried to get paid by the solution, but none to my knowledge has ever succeeded.

• The Third Law of Consulting actually reminds the consultant that if the clients had wanted a solution, they would have paid for a solution. Deep down, people want to be able to say to their management, "Look, we realize that there is a problem, and we are working on it. We have retained a consultant."

• In short, managers may not be buying solutions, but alibis to give their management.

• You'll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit. In order for a consultant to get credit, the client would have to admit there had been a solution. To admit there was a solution, the client would have to admit there was a problem, which is unthinkable. As a result, the only consultants who get invited back are those who never seem to accomplish anything.

• When the clients don't show their appreciation, pretend that they're stunned by your performance—but never forget that it's your fantasy, not theirs.

• The same contradiction applies to anyone who calls upon a consultant. Indeed, you could define "consultant" as "someone who helps you solve problems you think you should be able to solve by yourself."

• Therefore, hiring a consultant is always seen as an admission of personal failure. A consultant who fails to solve the problem would thus be interpreted as a personal success for the client—except that the client hired the consultant in the first place, and so the consultant's failure still falls on the client.

• If they didn't hire you, don't solve their problem. The Fourth Law of Consulting says you must never allow yourself to forget that consulting is the art of influencing people at their request. Among consultants, the most prevalent occupational disease is offering unsolicited "help."

• Until recently, I suspected that the entire field of psychology was fifty percent error and fifty percent fake.

• Most of the time, for most of the world, no matter how hard people work at it, nothing of any significance happens.

• Dani and I did eventually publish an entire book on the subject of why Weinbergs' Law prevails. It's called General Principles of Systems Design.

• Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion. As a consultant, I often get so involved in my clients' problems, that I begin to believe I could actually rid them of problems once and for all.

• If you can't accept failure, you'll never succeed as a consultant. This is truly a hard law, yet expressed in inverse form, it offers an atom of hope: Some people do succeed as consultants, so it must be possible to deal with failure. So what keeps successful consultants going, even when they fail?

• Helping myself is even harder than helping others.

• Don't be rational; be reasonable.

• People who think they know everything are easiest to fool. When they do trip, these consultants try to cover themselves with high-sounding rationalizations. They seem to believe that their lack of humor will be interpreted as rationality.

• The business of life is too important to be taken seriously.

• Poisoning, which affected their brains; hence, the expression "mad as a hatter."

• Hatters in the 19th century were subject to mercury poisoning, which affected their brains; hence, the expression "mad as a hatter."

• Many years ago, Sir Ronald Fisher noted that every biological system had to face the problem of present versus future, and that the future was always less certain than the present. To survive, a species had to do well today, but not so well that it didn't allow for possible change tomorrow.

• His Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection said that the more adapted an organism was to present conditions, the less adaptable it tended to be to unknown future conditions. We can apply the theorem to individuals, small groups of people, large organizations, organizations of people and machines, and even complex systems of machinery, and can generalize it as follows: The better adapted you are, the less adaptable you tend to be.

• We can do it—and this is how much it will cost. I use the test every day. Whenever I want a service performed, I tell them what I want, they tell me how much it will cost to get it from them, and I decide whether it's worth it to me.

• In short, the consultant studies history because, as the economist Kenneth Boulding says, Things are the way they are because they got that way. This rule is so important to consultants that I've given it a special name, Boulding's Backward Basis. Any time you're on a new consulting assignment and need to become acquainted with the situation in a hurry, try using Boulding's Backward Basis.

• *If you loudly castigate the people who were responsible for producing the present mess, you may then discover that

  1. There were, at the time, good and sufficient reasons for decisions that seem idiotic today.
  2. The person most responsible is now your client, or your client's manager. For these and other reasons, when you apply Boulding's Backward Basis, you should remember Sparks's Law of Problem Solution: The chances of solving a problem decline the closer you get to finding out who was the cause of the problem.

• My father always warned me: We may run out of energy, or air, or water, or food, but we'll never run out of reasons.

• Nowadays, the primary method I use for reducing the flood of facts is The Five-Minute Rule: Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell the solution in the first five minutes.

• If you can't think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there's something wrong with your thinking.

• What you don't know may not hurt you, but what you don't remember always does.

• *One of the books advised me that the next time I pigged out, I should think the following thoughts:

  1. Remember that a lapse does not have to mean a relapse.
  2. Resist negative thoughts.
  3. Ask yourself what happened; then plan your strategy for next time.
  4. Return to controlled eating immediately.
  5. Talk to someone supportive.
  6. Remember that you are making lifelong changes. You are not on a diet. Look at the progress you've made, and go to it.

• Over the years, I've come to believe that the effectiveness of jiggling is governed by one simple law: Less is more.

• The best way to lose something is to struggle to keep it.

• The biggest and longest lasting changes usually originate in attempts to preserve the very thing that ultimately changes most.

• Winston Churchill once remarked that he was happy he wasn't a radical in his youth, so he wouldn't turn out to be a reactionary in his old age. As people grow older, they learn about how change works, which could easily cause them to be discouraged.

• The Edsel, it turns out, was Ford's way of taking care of all their better ideas in the 1950's. Consultants and other fanatics with new ideas are dangerous to the established order, so why not put them all in one place, out of harm's way. That approach guarantees that even if each of the individual ideas is terrific, the result will be a debacle. As a consultant, I've seen this approach to avoiding change many times since my Edsel days, but never with such refinement. No backup system in the world, no series of defenses, will protect you from failure in the type of situation that produced the Edsel. Only preventive medicine might have helped, so let's honor that noble antique by naming one preventive bit of advice The Edsel Edict: If you must have something new, take one, not two.

• Every consultant complains about resistance, but if you think resistance is bad, consider the alternative: It's frightening to encounter a client who doesn't resist your ideas, because that places the full responsibility on you to be correct at all times.

• Resistance is like fungus. It doesn't thrive in daylight. Therefore, once you suspect that there is resistance, your next step is to get it out in the open, rather than let it fester in the dark.

• "Resistance" is the consultant's label. To the client, it is "safety." People do things because they think they will gain more than they will lose. They resist when they perceive a negative balance. Generally, such a balance is composed of many factors, some of which are gains and some are losses. In searching for the source of resistance, I work with the client to make a complete list of both.

• Clients are more important to you than you can ever be to them.

• Never let a single client have more than one fourth of your business.

• "To be able to say yes to yourself as a consultant, be able to say no to any of your clients."

• The best marketing tool is a satisfied client.

• Spend at least one-fourth of your time doing nothing. By "nothing" I mean that you should not be doing anything that is billable to any client, you should not be out getting exposure, and you should not be doing administrative work at the office. Whatever else you do with that time is your own choice, and is the egg that makes you love my advice.

• A consultant can exist in one of two states: State I (idle) or State B (busy).

• *Here, then, is a review of the first nine laws of marketing:

  1. A consultant can exist in one of two states: State I (idle) or State B (busy).
  2. The best way to get clients is to have clients.
  3. Spend at least one day a week getting exposure.
  4. Clients are more important to you than you can ever be to them.
  5. Never let a single client have more than one-fourth of your business.
  6. The best marketing tool is a satisfied client.
  7. Give away your best ideas. 8. It tastes better when you add your own egg.
  8. Spend at least one-fourth of your time doing nothing.

• Pricing has many functions, only one of which is the exchange of money.

• When I set a fee, there are two possibilities: One is that the client will accept it, I'll do the work, and I'll be paid that fee; the other is that the client will reject it, I won't do the work, and I won't get that fee. The Ninth Law says that I should set the fee so that whatever happens, I'll feel more or less the same.

• *The pricing laws:

  1. Pricing has many functions, only one of which is the exchange of money.
  2. The more they pay you, the more they love you. The less they pay you, the less they respect you.
  3. The money is usually the smallest part of the price.
  4. Pricing is not a zero-sum game.
  5. If you need the money, don't take the job.
  6. If they don't like your work, don't take their money.
  7. Money is more than price.
  8. Price is not a thing; it's a negotiated relationship.
  9. Set the price so you won't regret it either way. If you examine these laws, you'll realize that they don't talk about rationality, but emotionality.
  10. In other words, underlying all the other laws of pricing is The Tenth Law: All prices are ultimately based on feelings, both yours and theirs.

• "Cutting the cards" takes care of the clients' mistakes (or my mistakes in listening), but what if the clients really are lying? What if they are really trying to mislead me? Because I never rely on the ability of a single person to give me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about a complex situation, lying presents no real problem. I routinely check any important fact from several different directions, so unless the entire organization is lying, generally arrive at a true picture in the end. If my final picture seems to contradict what someone told me, I always try to go back to that person and say, "In my notes, I recorded that you said thus-and-so, but from other sources I've found this-and-that. Can you help me reconcile the difference?"

• Fowler once told me that he took a course on contracts in which the professor said there were only three very important rules to remember: First, get it in writing. Second, get it in writing. Third, get it in writing. I believe that every consultant should memorize these rules. Fowler did, but there is more to the matter than Fowler understood.

• Bolton, Robert. People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts.

• Kennedy, Eugene: On Becoming a Counselor.

• Steele, Fritz: Consulting for Organizational Change.