How to procure and buy Consulting services

I got a call today from a market research firm who were doing some research on the consulting industry for their Oil and Gas industry client.

Their client wanted to know as to how they could make decisions on when and how to ask for consulting services.

That's a tough one. And I guess for organizations the decisions are getting to be tougher and tougher to make on what to sell and what not to give to consulting organizations.

So here's a small bit on how consulting firms bill you:

1. Time : This is typically the most common way consulting firms (as well as other professional services) invoice. Less charitable references also call this the taxi way of billing. So long as the meter is down you get charged - regardless of the fact whether you travel or not. If you are negotiating with a consulting firm on a time charge basis ensure that you know really how much has been achieved in those hours. Can be very difficult to audit long distance - so if two consultants are travelling to your warehouse and meeting your people ask them for a timelog and detailed breakup of what each consultant did.
2. Time and Results: This is typically a hybrid model when you pay a consultant a minimum amount for a period of engagement and a larger portion of the fees is tied up to a goals achievement. In this case you need to keep a track of what is the goal. The consultant and you need to mutually agree on the goals. Is it drawing up a process/policy/strategy is it about educating people also about it or both ?
   
3. Results: This is typically seen in consulting businesses like contingent recruiters. The consultant gets paid only once their candidate gets selected.

Higher value perceived consultants figure in point 1. As the service offerings get more commoditised and buyers of consulting services get more demanding then the points 2 and 3 start to get more applicable.

Are you a consultant or a buyer of consulting services? What are the other billing models you have seen?

HR consultants in Top 25 Consultants

Interestingly there are quite a few HR consultants in Consulting Magazine's list of top 25 Consultants for 2008:

There's Peter Cheese of Accenture:

Cheese spends most of his time trying to convince clients that talent management, and the HR function in general, needs to be more of a strategic player.

"This whole debate needs to be put on strategic footing. We haven't invested nearly enough in HR," Cheese says. "The nature of the debate has become so much more strategic, and that's really the basis of how we've built the human performance practice at Accenture. This is a top issue for clients, and they still need a lot of help in this area."

"It's a fascinating time. We have a social revolution going on in terms of how people collaborate, communicate, connect and share knowledge," Cheese says. "And it's not only happening in broader society, it's happening in the corporate world." It also presents the opportunity to see how companies are going to adapt and apply new thinking to some pretty old theories of management practice.

For sure, some companies have had trouble adjusting, like the one that decided to ban Facebook for all of its employees. "Is that your long-term strategy?" Cheese says he asked the company's leadership. "Because it can't be. That's got to be a short-term reaction to something you don't understand. New and emerging technologies, such as collaboration tools, wikis and social networking sites, will revolutionize how we work, how we learn and how we connect."

And then there is Michaelf Fucci of Deloitte Consulting:

His human capital practice team's turnover has consistently been below 10 percent, and he has taken revenues from $120 million to nearly $600 million since he accepted the position in 2003.

That message incorporates Deloitte's philosophy of building human resource capabilities from within, as opposed to outsourcing them, as well as bringing all parts of the C-suite together—not just the HR department—to solve human capital challenges.

Indian to be first CEO of Booz & Co.

It's been a long time since Rajat Gupta left his role as Managing Partner of McKinsey & Co.

Now Indians in the high-brow world of strategy consulting have cause to celebrate - another Indian Shumeet Banerji is set to become the first ever CEO of new strategy consulting firm Booz & Company.

The Consulting Magazine reports:

He started with the firm's Chicago office in 1992 after leaving academia as a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. With a PhD in micro-economics and game theory, Banerji says he reached a point in his academic career where he had to make a choice about what he was going to do. "What I did as a professor was research and teach, and [much] of this business is data and persuasion. It's not all that different," he says. Banerji then moved to Asia in the late 1990s to help establish BAH practices in Singapore and Bombay. In 2000, he moved to London, which is where he still is based today.

Other Indian's in the list of Top 25 Consultants are Raj Joshi of Infosys Consulting, Raju Lal of Ernst & Young's India practice (this has to be a first too!). Too cool!

Padma Ravichander to head Mercer in India

This news item has to be filed under the "Can't understand the logic" category.

One of India's rare successful IT women leaders, Padma Ravichander who earlier was with HP, Oracle and recently was heading Perot Systems' India operations would now be leading Investment and Consulting firm Mercer in India.

And no, it does not seem to indicate that Mercer would be augmenting its outsourcing or IT offerings, since her statement shows how much Mercer is aligned with HR consulting in India.

"At Mercer, we address the entire gamut of transformational human resource challenges that Indian companies increasingly face today. A clear priority for me is to evaluate potential synergies in our different lines of business, and develop ways to partner with customers in driving their overall strategic imperatives in terms of talent acquisition and management," said Ms. Ravichander.

Hmm, so I wonder how many of her peers would see this as an attempt by Mercer to build the skill of talking to CEOs and business leaders and not just HR heads - Mercer HR consulting still being seen more as a compensation survey provider and not really into the top-line HR meets business alignment.

We shall keep an eye out for this one and how this develops. Remember, Mercer had taken Infy's ex-HR head Hema Ravichander on board too three years ago.

The Father of Management Consulting

I know, elsewhere on this blog we've called Marvin Bower that. However Peter Drucker's PhD student in this article says that Drucker was not only the father of modern management but the father of management consulting too.

He said that his experience with management consulting started just prior to the U.S. entry into World War II. With a doctoral degree, he was mobilized for the war effort in a civilian capacity and ordered to report to a certain army colonel. Peter was told that he was to serve as a "management consultant." Drucker told us that he had no idea what a management consultant was. He checked a dictionary, but the term couldn't be found. He said he went to the library and the bookstore. "Today," he told us, "you will find shelves of titles about management. In those days, there was almost nothing. The few books available didn't include the term, much less explain it." He asked several friends but had no better luck. They didn't know what a management consultant was either.

On the appointed time and date Drucker proceeded to the colonel's office, wondering all the way exactly what he was getting in to. A receptionist asked him to wait and an unsmiling sergeant came to escort him to the colonel. This must have been a little intimidating for a young immigrant who not too many years earlier had fled from the military dictatorship of Nazi Germany with almost all party members in one sort of uniform or another. 

Peter was led into the office by yet another stern-faced assistant. The colonel glanced at Peter's orders and invited him to be seated. He asked Peter to tell him about himself. He questioned Drucker at some length about his background and education. But though they seemed to talk on and on, Drucker did not learn what the colonel's office was responsible for, nor was he given any understanding as to what he would be doing for the colonel as a "management consultant." It seemed as if they were talking round and round to no purpose.

Drucker was more than a little uncomfortable in dealing with the colonel. He hoped that he would soon get to the point and explain exactly what kind of work he would be involved in for the war effort. He was growing increasingly frustrated. Finally, Drucker could stand it no longer. "Please sir, can you tell me what a management consultant does?" he asked respectfully.

Drucker told the class that the colonel glared at him for what seemed like a long time and then responded: "Young man, don't be impertinent." "By which," Drucker told us, "I knew that he didn't know what a management consultant did either." 

Drucker knew that someone who did know what was expected of a management consultant had made this assignment. Having lived in England and read Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Drucker knew what a "consulting detective" did. With that knowledge and the insight that the colonel did not know anything about management consulting, Drucker asked direct questions about the colonel's responsibilities and problems. Peter then laid out some options about what should be done and the work, he, Drucker should do. The colonel was interested and clearly relieved. He accepted Peter's proposals in their entirety. This proved to be Drucker's first successful consulting engagement.

So, Peter Drucker was not only "the father of modern management;" one could make a case for him being the father of modern management consulting as well. Of course, the Harvard Business School awards this title to HBS graduate Marvin Bower, famed director of McKinsey & Company from 1950 to 1967 and a partner of the firm until 1992. Interestingly, the cubicle right next to Marvin Bower's when Bower worked for the government during World War II was occupied by ... Peter Drucker.

Hmm. So the real inspiration for consultants happens to be a fictional character - Sherlock Holmes? 

The List of Small and Medium Management Consulting firms in India

People keep asking me if I know which are the small HR Consulting firms that they can turn to in a particular city in India. And the names that I tell them are usually those that I know, or which have been started by friends, or where I know someone.So, I tell myself today "Self, wouldn't it be great if there was a list of small and medium sized management consulting firms of India somewhere on the internet?"And then it occured to me "Hey, why don't I build one?"So here it is folks!If you know of one which should be in the list, leave a comment below and I shall check it out. Feel free to update me about the new locations etc where it operates in.The definition of 'small and medium' is a subjective one.
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Strategy and OD Consulting Firms
Vnvision - Located in Hyderabad - Website
Excalibre - Located in Noida - Blog
Avalon Consulting - Located in Mumbai - Website
Universal Consulting - Located in Mumbai - Website
Technology Network (India) Pvt Ltd - Located in Pune - Website
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HR Consulting Firms

Cocoon Consulting - Located in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi - Website

Vyaktitva - Located in Delhi - Website

Tvarita Consulting - Located in Hyderabad and Chennai - Website and Blog

The HR Practice - Located in Bangalore - Website

HR Solutions - Located in Pune - Linkedin Profile of Founder

HuSys Consulting - Located in Hyderabad - Website

Vistas Consulting - Located in Bangalore - Website

Valulead Consulting - Located in Bangalore - Linkedin Profile of Founder

HR Footprints - Located in Hyderabad - Website

Potentia - Located in Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata - Website

Noam Management Consulting - Located in Delhi - Website

GrayMatters - Located in Kolkata - Website

Business Fundamental Consulting - Located in Bangalore - Website

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Training and Facilitation Firms

Eternale Learning - Located in Pune - Website

Pegasus Institute for Excellence - Located in Bangalore - Website

Pragati Learning - Located in Pune -

iDiscoveri - Located in Delhi and Bangalore - Website

Whittlesticks - Website

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General Management Consulting Firms

Positron Services - Located in Delhi and Mumbai - Website

Saita Consulting - Located in Delhi - Website

Renoir Consulting - Website

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Marketing Consulting Firms

[Suggestions Wanted]

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Financial Consulting Firms

[Suggestions Wanted]

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Innovation Consulting Firms

Erehwon Innovation Consulting - Located in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi - Website

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CSR Consulting Firms

Aditya Vidyasagar - Located in Lucknow - Email

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Operations Management Consulting Firms

Alvis Industries Pvt Ltd - Located in Chennai - Email

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Quality Consulting Firms

Parag Kumar - Located in NCR Region - Email

Suggest other categories either by email or by leaving a comment below

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What are Consulting Skills?

Lot of people ask me "Hey I am great at HR/Finance/IT. I love solving problems, and I like working with people. would that be enough to make me a consultant?"

Er, you already are a consultant - even when you think you are not!

Goes specially for internal support functions. If you are not earning the moolah in a business then you are seeking to use indirect influence on how someone brings in the moolah - ergo, consultant.

So what are the prime skills of being a consultant or an internal service provider.

Most important - Contracting. Knowing the scope of your work and what your client expects is the biggest skill you can build. It means being truthful about your abilities and also how it makes sense for the client. People don't want scope creep to happen. Contracting needs patience, communication and assertiveness skills. It might also mean walking away from a lucrative deal - so it also needs courage. The failure of most sunk consulting projects can be traced back to this phase of the consulting engagement.

Discovery - Diagnosis calls for a skill where you play detective. Not to make your own conclusions after listening to everyone's point of view (including your own!) is a skill that tough to master. But discovery is a key skill to keep a conultant objective and not to jump to 'obvious' conclusions.

Implementation - For different kinds of consultants, implementation looks different. However the key skill in implementation is making the implementation survive your own departure. How you do that either as an external consultant or as an internal one is key. It most of the time means building skills in the client organization that might impact your recall for the same project but will add a lot of value to you.

I learnt these skills in the Designed learning program I participated some years ago. I like to keep going back to them to refresh them, and this post was triggered by Wench's post.

Blogging for Consultants

Looks like there is some sort of Consulting and Blogging meme going around. Guerilla Consultant has a well thought out argument what kind of consultant should be looking at blogging:

Blogging is the perfect Guerrilla Marketing tactic. You can reach a large audience quickly, and repeatedly. The cost of blogging is low, and the technology is simple to use. It's an excellent way to stay in touch with your existing clients and help prospective clients get to know you. 

With all that going for it as a marketing tool, shouldn't every consultant be blogging?

The marketing tools that work best are those that you can execute most effectively. If you get tongue-tied in front of an audience, it doesn't make sense for public speaking to be the centerpiece of your marketing program. That just leads to foot dragging, and the results aren't likely to be stellar either. 

The same point applies to blogs. Do you like to write--a lot? If you don't enjoy writing regularly, or you aren't very good at it, you may want to hold off on that blog. 

The technical aspects of blogging may be a no-brainer, but content drives the success of a blog. Can you feed your blog with content that your clients really want to read? Finding relevant content takes time. Even if you have plenty to say, you still have to draft, edit, and publish, all of which are time-consuming. 

You often hear bloggers say that blogs invite informal writing, and that typos and grammatical errors just come with the territory. Maybe that's okay for Max the Golden Retriever, but it's the kiss of death if you are marketing a high-end professional services business. Be sure you have the skills, time, and patience to write valuable stuff on a regular basis.

That's right folks. If the buyer of your services is out there searching on the internet (and who's not?) having a blog, specially if you like writing is great. But GC didn't get it fully right. For consultants who look great on camera, and those who can speak well have options too. Embedding videos and podcasting.

Blogs are just a tool. Embrace the tool to suit your strength. Build links with other consultants and pagerank will follow. Once PageRank comes, authority follows. 

However if you think your clients don't search for services that you offer on the internet you can possibly hold of from blogging.

Can you be sure that your client's junior who has been asked to compile a list of potential consultants does not, however?

Alan Weiss on Consulting and Social Media

Dr. Alan Weiss is of the opinion that blogs are of not much use if you are trying to leverage them to build a consulting brand.

Here are some of the interesting observations:

1. Blogs are only effective if you already have a brand. People come here, or go read Seth Godin, or Marshall Goldsmith, or Jeffrey Gitomer, or David Meister, because we’re all well known in our areas of expertise. That is, a blog follows a brand, not the other way around. You can’t create a brand just with a blog, unless you’re ridiculously lucky, and business can’t be based on luck.
3. You can use up all your time following blogs. Buyers of consulting services don’t visit blogs as a rule, and certainly not to make buying decisions. They may visit a blog AFTER they have a relationship with the consultant, which just proves my point.
4. Twitter is pretty nonsensical. Watching someone wash their hair or walk to their car is irrelevant to marketing consulting services. It is idiosyncratic. I think it’s fine if people want to do this as a hobby, but for solo practitioners and entrepreneurs, it can drain your life away. It is to marketing what text messaging is to writing a novel.
5. YouTube I find useful in that you can access some outstanding resources there, such as the lectures given at TED. But you also find all the schlock in the universe, and there must be a law that, to post comments, you have to have flunked both basic English and civility in primary school, because the proportion of dolts and louts who post things is frightening. It’s like being at a hockey game, but you can’t get a hot dog.
6. Facebook, linked-in, and all the rest of the social crawl space is fine for trying to get a full time job, or finding out who’s divorced, or sharing your latest hairstyle, or flirting. I abhor the linked-in automated messages about “good friends” who have asked me to join their network whom I can’t even recall, and I find it reprehensible to dump your entire contact list into this morass and annoy everyone who’s ever written you an email or sent you an overdue notice. I find linked-in to be the worst kind of spam.

Provocative? Maybe.

Dr Weiss does make some points. Don't make blogs/social media the "only" source for building your consulting brand. Speak at seminars. Network at industry events. Write for journals. Maybe, even publish a book.

Unless you wish you consult only about social media.

I'm kind of ambivalent about his observation that business can't be based on luck. Innovative business, alas is about a lot of luck. How do you ensure that you beat the chance factor. You increase your variety and spread. That's one of the rules of 11 1/2 weird rules of Innovation according to Dr. Bob Sutton. And sometimes you count on luck, to explore:

When you know that you need to head in a new direction, but you don't know which road to take, sometimes the best thing is to do whatever is most ridiculous or random. Thinking up the dumbest and most impractical things that you can do is a powerful way to explore your assumptions about the world. When you get people talking about products, services, and business practices that they believe are misguided, dumb, or even destructive, it can help bring the beliefs of the group into broad relief and crystallize what the company should be doing.

So if Alan does not believe that blogging can help in bringing in consulting business, why the blog after all? The About page does not give any reasons why.

Maybe he just doesn't want to be left behind by other consultants who are blogging. Like, Tom Peters.

ROI of Blogging and Twitter

I'm going to share some stuff without going into details. You heard about how blogging can be a source for business? I don't mean stuff like professional blogging, stuff that people like Amit do. To solely live off advertising via the blog would mean I increase my readership 10x. Erm, isn't going to happen in a hurry.

So what is the ROI of blogging and Twitter that I am talking about?

Am going to share with you two instances that happened in the recent past:

Sometime in Feb I got an email from a person whom I had never contacted me. He introduced himself as the head of Talent Development of a manufacturing concern in India and said that he had read my posts and wanted to explore if my firm could help in their competency development efforts. I said sure, and over the next couple of months we communicated via email and phone with the firm's Talent Development team and we have the deal now. We're going to help them in implementing competency development interventions over this year for a significant part of their leadership and management levels.

Oh, and did I tell you that we've never interacted face to face?

The business came in purely because of this blog.

Story No. 2

There's a blogger I've interacted with earlier via both our blogs. Recently when we both started Twittering (find it much easier than saying "micro-blogging") he twittered that he had got an internal transfer into the HR group of his firm and was having trouble with thinking through a HR intervention.

I twittered that if he could pay me enough I could help him with him. I was only half-joking.

He messaged me directly on Twitter that I could call him and his boss on a certain day. The conversation started, we sent a sort of proposal. Then we didn't hear something for a couple of weeks and he messaged me that they were busy with something else.

So a couple of months passed and last week he Twittered me again. Could we restart the conversation, he asked?

So the story hasn't yet ended and yet both these examples offer a glimpse into what could be a ROI for using blogging and Twitter for business purposes.

Yes there are caveats.

One: Both you and your prospective client would need to be on that social media platform.

That is why, as a prospective rainmaker, I need to be visible across various social media. So, I take care to have a profile every imaginable place. From blogging here, to having pages on Google Pages, the newly launched Google Sites, to trying out Linkedin ( I was amongst the first 20,000 people to sign on), having a profile on Orkut, a page on Facebook (Go ahead, check it out, and become a fan if you want to), Twittering, starting a community on MyBlogLog and now linking my lifestreams on FriendFeed. I also follow tonnes of Business, HR and Recruiting related blogs.

Oh, and did I forget to mention, that building networks virtually is something I have been doing from a long time? From HR and KM related groups to now HR groups on Ning ?

Yes, Blogging and Twittering are just tools. One probably needs to have a mindset to utilise them?

About Ram Charan and his consulting advice

Regular readers would know I am a big Ram Charan fan, so I loved this article about him on the CNN site. Some interesting vignettes:

Charan's weird and wonderful life is an unintended byproduct of dedication, he insists. Dedication to learning and teaching and service, to the whole set of Hindu virtues embodied by one of Charan's favorite phrases, "Purpose before self." "People used to ask me, What is your ambition?" says Charan, who turned 67 this past Christmas. "I say I have none. My dedication is going to take me where I'm going to be."

"A leader who does not produce leaders is not a great leader," he says. "If you agree, I'd like to put that in." (Gomber nods.) Charan is trying to help Emaar construct a document that will help its managers discern in others what he calls "natural talents," or "God's gifts." "Each of us has to be the best calibrator of natural talent of the people who work with us," he says. "What are the three to five most crucial natural-talent items that each person has? It has to be specific" - he taps the whiteboard for emphasis - "and very clear" - tap - "and repeatable" -tap!

He remembers when he was 7 years old in 1947, watching from the roof of his home as flames destroyed the cloth shop belonging to his father and uncle. After the fire the brothers started over with a shoe shop. Charan was in the shop every morning before school to help open and every afternoon after school until closing. He counted the rupees in the till at the end of the day, inspiring a lifelong appreciation for the "blood" of business. ("Any company I go to, the first thing I check is cash. How's your cash? Where's your cash flow? No blood, you got a problem right away.")

Charan never excelled at the academic research that leads to tenure at a top-tier school. He was interested more in cause and effect than statistical correlation. His aims were practical: How can I solve this problem? How can I help this person? This company? He began taking on more and more consulting gigs. Most B-school professors consult on the side; in Charan's case, it was his calling.

What defines his career, even more than the quality of his client roster, is its stability. This is his 37th year working for GE, his 33rd for DuPont. He worked with John Snow for 15 years before Snow left

His method is no method. He is wary of abstraction and belongs to no school of management theory. "Converting highfalutin ideas to the specifics of the company and the leader - that's the trick," he once confided to me in an elevator. "The other part is working backward to define what the need is, and then searching for what helps. Then you bring it to common sense, and common sense is very uncommon."

Charan brings observation, curiosity, and care. He lets his clients decide how to use him. Sometimes all he does is ask the right question. "I remember the first time he came to see me," says Caperton. "We were driving to the airport in Charleston, W.Va., and he said to me, 'Why are you trying to grow this thing so fast?' I was sort of shocked by the question. Three weeks later my financial guy came to me and said, 'We don't have money to meet payroll.' Charan realized we were growing too fast, that's why he asked me that question. That was a much better way to teach me, wasn't it?"

"Charan really pushed me on the whole business-partnership piece," Conaty recalls, meaning no more HR initiatives for HR's sake, "and the function as a result is much more credible and visible in GE today than it was."

"I knew what I wanted to do," says Reed, "but I wasn't 100% sure how to get it done. That's a big distinction if you're in business. A lot of consultants come in to tell you what you should be doing. This was not that. This was a question of how best to get it done."

Reed says, "Ram is a catalyst in the real sense of that word. He facilitates things happening but doesn't take part in them himself. And he is an immense source of energy. When you're trying to get large organizations to do things, energy is extremely important. He forces you to tell him what it is you want to do, and he forces you to really be clear in your own mind what those things are and what steps have to be taken. Often it's getting the wrong guy out of a job. But the point is, he starts out by basically forcing you to think with him and be very clear. Then, okay, you notice that he isn't doing anything, he's just forcing you to do it. Then once you've agreed on everything you want to do, he calls you up every ten minutes and asks why haven't you done it yet."

"I'm a lucky man!" Charan likes to say. "I am allowed to do what I love to do!" While I still don't really understand him, I am beginning to believe him. Surely there are many ways to live fully and be happy on this earth; probably, he has found his own.

Reliance ADAG starts a HR Consulting and Outsourcing firm

This is interesting !

Reliance HR Services (RHRS), a human resources company formed by the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG), will recruit half a million people for the group in the next four years.  These recruits will be deputed to Reliance Communications, Reliance Webstores, Reliance Capital, Reliance Consumer Finance, Reliance Money, Reliance Life Insurance and Reliance Energy.  About 90 per cent of these employees will be on sales functions, while the rest will be on the back-end and customer service functions. 

Amitava Ghosh, CEO, RHRS, said, “Currently, about 20,000 employees are on RHRS payroll, serving various ADAG companies.”  RHRS has also formulated a plan for the five forthcoming financial years to become a global HR outsourcing and consultancy organisation. 

“By 2013, RHRS will evolve into an end-to-end HR outsourcing provider and an HR consultant,” Ghosh said. By 2009, RHRS plans to offer HR outsourcing services.  “We can offer HR outsourcing services to companies that operate in sectors such as retail, IT BPO, among others,” Ghosh said.  RHRS also plans to offer consultancy services, including compensation surveys and feedback reports.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Koffee with Karan, not!

OK, it was not Koffee with Karan but with Google employee and blogger Sundar where he decided to do an e-interview with me on topics covering blogging, consulting and looking back with regret (heh!)

So go ahead and read it.

Too bad I didn't win any koffee hamper or get any coffee mugs to sign for the coffee wall :-)

But overall it was a fun experience, my first virtual interview :-)

Ironic news item of the week

From news item

Britain's Management Consulting Group Plc (MCG) said its chairman, chief executive and finance director had all resigned following pressure from investors, boosting the company's shares on Wednesday.

MCG will seek to name a new CEO "in a matter of weeks, not months," Giles added.

The company added in a statement that Chairman Rolf Stomberg and Finance Director Craig Smith had also resigned.

"We are hoping for a more effective management," Gartmore's Media and Public Relations Head Kimberley Robinson said earlier.

Starting off in consulting

Interesting stories by veterans of the consulting industry on how they started off in consulting

Might be of interest to folks who are either looking to start off in consulting or for folks who are already into the management consulting industry :-)

As one reads the stories, it strikes me as how the reasons are so human, the need to move to a particular location to be near (or away from) a significant other, to earn more money as family was increasing, the need to solve problems, to show other consultants that they could do better and so on

Hat tip to David Maister

Going from Industry to HR Consulting

Interesting Q&A at WSJ.com:

Q: I've spent seven years in telecom human resources and labor relations and now want to get into management consulting. There seem to be many requirements for entry, including previous consulting experience. How can I make this transition?

A: You face an uphill battle. Consulting is a different animal than industry and most firms aren't interested in corporate candidates unless they have worked in consulting-type roles or are stars in their fields, says Gary Smith, managing partner with Smith, Scott&Associates, a Colorado Springs, Co., recruiting firm that fills consulting openings.

"It's exceedingly difficult for a person with only corporate experience to make the transition to consulting unless they are exceptionally good at what they do or have real stature in their field," says Mr. Smith.

The reason is that experience limited to just one company or industry isn't useful to firms that seek to solve problems for multiple clients across many industries. Less than 5% of industry professionals he interviews are hired as consultants, Mr. Smith adds.

Many consulting firms seek specialists with narrow expertise. In the HR arena, this might be sales or executive compensation or organizational development. If you feel you have specialized expertise, such as in compensation, "strip away anything on your resume that isn't related to compensation and say what you accomplished and delivered," says Mr. Smith. "Saying that you designed a sales-compensation plan a year ago isn't enough."

The same is true in India. Many HR consulting firms look at corporate HR roles as more akin to consulting roles and tend to not take into consideration years that a HR professional might have spent as a Business partner - because the focus as a consultant is more on design and development than on execution skills for an individual.

I have heard of cases of senior HR people with 10-15 years of experience being equated with 4-5 years of consulting experience based on internal formulas that consulting firms use to calculate 'fitment' for applicants.

Consulting Skills

When someone asks me what are consulting skills, as opposed to technical/functional/industry expertise, I variously try to explain it using Peter Block's Flawless Consulting skills model.

Steve Shu succeeds in putting it into words beautifully, calling it client facilitation skills:

In my mind, client facilitation refers to the processes (and skills) that a consultant uses to get a client organization to critical decision points, deep understanding, and committment to move forward or redirect.

A master of client facilitation is a person that can:

• Master analysis skills of the trade: use top-down logical reasoning, use many analytical frameworks, work analyses from multiple directions
• Communicate well: whether it be via face-to-face conversation, writing, phone, or instant messaging (yikes)
• Teach and frame things properly: because interactions with parties may be varied, quick and because parties may have varying levels of knowledge, one must be able to ramp-up conversation levels quickly and put them in the proper context
• Recognize where the organization is at and how decisions are made: is the marketing department behind in their understanding? who does the CEO look to as his/her right hand? if so, what are the steps to getting the right hand on-board or up-to-speed? how do we get things to tip? can we get there in one step or will it take two steps?
• Lead people *without formal authority*: can you educate people, empathize with the organization, get the organization to trust you, and pave a vision and/or outline a set of tradeoffs with such clarity that motion must happen?

Coaching growing in the UK

From the Times

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), more than three-quarters of organisations now invest in coaching, including performance and personal coaching, for their employees.

At Lloyds TSB, the corporate-banking division in Scotland was one of the first of the bank’s departments to embrace performance coaching. “Many people wrongly assume coaching is about addressing underperformance,” said Manus Fullerton at Lloyds TSB Scotland. “In fact it is of greatest benefit when coaching your best performers. All the top sportsmen and women have coaches to help them improve.

“We are taking the same approach in our business, not just coaching individuals, but training our teams to coach one another. We have witnessed growth in business levels, staff engagement and a real appetite for further coaching.”

Despite the touchy-feely image, Cartwright, a former sports coach and psychologist, agrees that coaching is not for failures – quite the reverse. “Tiger Woods has five different coaches and nobody would say he is a failure,” he said. “But we have this macho British idea that chief executives ought to be able to just get on and do the job. In most businesses, once you reach partnership level your training and development stops.”

With a few more executive coaches there would, he said, “be fewer people quitting, getting the sack or jumping out of windows. It’s lonely at the top – who else can these people talk to?” Cartwright points out that senior executives can’t talk to their peers – because they will be after their job – they can’t talk to their board because that would be seen as a sign of weakness and they certainly can’t confide in their subordinates.

Coaching poor performers may or may not get you results. However coaching a high performer could send out a signal that you are interested in developing them and that he/she has never really 'arrived'.

Consulting stints can aid CEOs

From AESC's search wire

It has been 30 years since Robert Kidder worked at McKinsey & Co., but he still describes that early career experience as "life-defining." His stint as a management consultant taught him a style of logical thinking that proved invaluable in later jobs as chief executive of Duracell and Borden Chemical, he says. Maybe it is time to let go of the jokes portraying consultants as glib, clueless apostles of PowerPoint, who have yet to hold "real" jobs.
Lots of onetime consultants are getting the last laugh, landing posts as CEOs of sizable corporations. Consider John Donahoe, the new CEO at online-auction house eBay, who spent more than 20 years at Bain & Co. Or look at Hubert Joly, a former McKinsey consultant who is about to take the top job at travel-industry titan Carlson. In fact, companies ranging from insurer Aon to gift maker Russ Berrie have picked ex-consultants as their CEOs. Working at a consulting firm has long been regarded as a great way to learn high-level strategy, which could be helpful in all kinds of later jobs.
But offsetting doubts have been plentiful, mostly about consultants' ability to master the ingenuity, tact and persistence needed to get big ideas carried out. Former Honeywell CEO Lawrence Bossidy crystallized that concern in 2002, when he and consultant Ram Charam co-wrote the best-selling management book "Execution." The authors contended that former consultants and other executives without front-line experience can flounder when managing key lieutenants or making delicate pricing decisions. "They have never been tested in mobilizing line people to execute," Messrs. Bossidy and Charam wrote. "They haven't had the experience that develops business instinct." The authors' remedy: move such people into operating jobs gradually, so they have time to build their missing skills.
Reinforcing that point, John Wood, an executive recruiter at Spencer Stuart, says he favors a two-step career progression for ex-consultants. Their first corporate job should be in a familiar area, such as strategy, where they can gradually learn how a big company really functions. Once they have absorbed that lesson, they can be promoted into big operating jobs and do well, he says. Rush a career, and the risk of failure increases.
The past 15 years have produced plenty of examples to support the Bossidy/Wood point of view. The most successful ex-consultants tend to follow career paths similar to that of Louis V. Gerstner Jr., who packed in plenty of operating experience between his early days at McKinsey and his eventual triumph as the CEO of International Business Machines. By the time they ran entire companies, their consulting jobs were just small entries on their résumés.
Longtime consultants who enter corporate careers near the top don't always fare as well. Kevin Rollins spent 12 years at Bain and then joined Dell in 1996 as a senior vice president. He became CEO of the computer company in 2004 and was eased out last year. Dell widened its product line substantially during Mr. Rollins's tenure, but its reputation for customer service suffered, and efforts to diversify didn't pay off as hoped. Both Messrs. Gerstner and Rollins declined to talk about their careers.
These days the constantly changing demands of the CEO's job may play to ex-consultants' strengths. Steve Ellis, world-wide managing partner for Bain, notes that many of Bain's alumni end up as CEOs for companies controlled by private-equity firms. These firms were active acquirers until the market turmoil of recent months. Such CEO placements are a good match, Mr. Ellis says.

Oh yes, and some ex-consultants also try running for elections to the post of the President of the US.

Lucy Kellaway tears into headhunters

Lucy Kellaway, the bête noire of buzzword users, trains her acerbic pen at the headhunting profession:

Modern headhunters spout as much guff as management consultants, but without the excuse. Consultants have to, to hide the fact that it often isn’t clear what they’re selling. Headhunters are selling something pukka so there’s no reason why they can’t come right out and say so.

Korn Ferry describes itself as “The premier provider of human capital solutions” and the other big firms are no better. Heidrick & Struggles boasts that “as innovators we are actively redefining top-level search to encompass complementary services”. Michael Page’s approach goes for bathos: “Our journey starts when we see a difference between where we are today and where we want to be,” it says on its website.

Last week an acquaintance told me he had just employed one of the world’s largest headhunting firms to help him find a new managing director. He received an introductory e-mail from the firm that began: “As a Leading Total Talent Solution Provider we have some special assessment tools to help identify the ‘right’ candidate.”

The only important word here – right – has acquired inverted commas, while the rest seems to have been produced by an automatic buzzword generator. All the above words are dismal, but the word “talent” is the worst. Most people aren’t terribly talented at all. And once you start talking of talent, it’s only a hop, skip and jump to “talent pools”, with the dangerously misleading idea that schools of talent are swimming around, just ready to be fished out by the headhunter.

With the e-mail came attached a “Leadership Advantage Toolkit” containing 66 characteristics that might be desirable in a leader, including “dealing with paradox” and “organisational agility”. These had to be rated according to “mission critical”, “important” and so on.

This is a low trick. It is about making clients think they are buying rigour in the hope this will make them less likely to protest when presented with the inevitably disappointing shortlist of candidates.

In fact headhunting is both simple and difficult. The theory is simple: there are good managers and not-so-good ones. Alas, most are fairly mediocre, as managing isn’t easy. Choosing the good ones has nothing at all to do with 66 carefully weighted competencies: it is more a matter of finding three. The ability to think, the ability to act, and (most important) the ability to get others to act.