ALL CHAPTERS
| How We Got Started 1 |
| What it Takes to Succeed 2 |
| Rating the Clients 3 |
| Dealing With Clients 4 |
| Presentations & Meetings 5 |
| The Matter of Ethics 6 |
| On the Road Again: Travel 7 |
| International Business 8 |
| The Home Front 9 |
| Story Tellers |
Chapter Two
What It Takes to Succeed in Consulting
“A high level of intelligence”
- Michael LaPorta
Consulting is a demanding business, one that requires a unique blend of intelligence and people skills. It also requires a variety of personal attributes that may seem contradictory at times – analytical abilities, confidence, competitive spirit, creative thinking, objectivity, attention to detail, big-picture thinking, and personalities that thrive on change, or at least are highly adaptable. Did we mention that it’s a demanding business?
The most successful consultants are likely to have integrated many of these traits and skills into the mix of what they have to offer their clients, enough so to keep them coming back over the years for more. It’s not a sales trick. The best consultants convey to their clients a strong sense of their own authenticity: they’re nothing less than their own men and women. We suspect also this is what most clients want, if they don’t necessarily always know it – outside expertise that is confident, grounded, and willing to assert itself in its capacity to understand complex organizations, people, and problems.
In this chapter, our contributors describe what it takes to meet these challenges, and how doing it well can translate into a successful career as a management consultant.
Intellectual Firepower
“The consultant is a problem solver”
Number one, the consultant is a problem solver. You have to have that sense of curiosity. You’ve got to be intellectually honest. Over the years I’ve really had very few problems in this area, as far as the people we hire. I believe the selection process has been a good reason for that. The curiosity issue is what keeps them up to date intellectually.
I think people have got to be smart in different ways. It’s not pure IQ. The term we use here is insight. You’ve got to have insight. Ironically, because of this, a person’s background is not a criterion for hiring. Some of our best people have actually come from unusual backgrounds. One fellow no longer with us came from the CIA. My guess is they had a much better job of recruiting and identifying skill sets than we did and he was on their information desk. Stuff would come in to him and he’d sort down the 10 percent that was important, see patterns in it and then pass it upstairs. So working with this ambiguous information environment was a no-brainer for him. He was just very quick.
“Jacks or better intelligence”
First, you have to have Jacks or better intelligence to get in the game. And, by the way, there’s a lot of room above Jacks or better. So Jacks or better isn’t that high a hurdle rate but that’s for openers. Second is just good common sense. I’ve known some brilliant people whose common sense coefficient just wasn’t there. I think we all went to school with someone like that, the kid who was the brightest in the class, who could do just amazing things but who was just out it. That kind of brilliance is not successful. It’s Jacks or better intelligence, street-smart common sense, personality, good listening skills, and the ability to understand what the client perceives they need and want.
“Just because you know certain things doesn’t necessarily mean you can consult”
I worked with a woman on a project in the Ukraine who was a team resources expert, an older, kind of grandmotherly type, and she had spent her whole life thinking about how to make employees happy. She appeared to be an expert but, in fact, she was rather useless as a consultant. Just because you know certain things doesn’t necessarily mean you can consult. You might find a person who seems perfect for a project, based on the body of knowledge they’ve crammed into their brain over 20 or 25 years of work experience. But then they lack the flexibility to parlay that experience into something that’s workable for the client. It’s hard for many people to bridge that gap. Yet that’s what makes for a good consultant. This human resources person was useless in consulting, but she did teach me all about human resources policy.
There was another guy we hired, a Ph.D. economist who was supposed to help us in Ecuador on a project involving restructuring their power sector. Well, he knew the right answers about what best practice was in town. He knew how to deal with transmission tariffs, operation tariffs, replacement generators; all these technical issues that come into play in power generation, particularly when you’re talking about nationwide power. Ecuador is not that big but there were all kinds of technical, structural, and economic issues, in terms of the way that you can price electricity. This guy knew all this, with a Ph.D. in the field.
And the clients hated him. They hated him because he insisted on pushing the particular vision that he had. He wasn’t flexible to developing structure, which intellectually he was perfectly capable of doing, which would have suited what they wanted. This was someone who should have been exactly the right person for the work but was not.
“Consultants are really just great appropriators”
I believe consultants are really just great appropriators. What we do is appropriate a framework from another industry or client situation, from work we’ve done elsewhere. We take that framework and say, “How can I use this somewhere else?” For example, one of the most useful life skills I have is my keyboard skills. I took typing in high school and I’ve been fluent ever since. At one point I began doing strategic planning work using a laptop connected to a LCD panel laid on an overhead projector. This enabled me to put words on the wall for the benefit of a planning group, as I took them through an outline and a discussion. In the middle of the session, I could at any time also print out hard copy. For several years now this has been an extremely useful tool for me.
Well, the idea for this actually started with something I saw in a movie. It involved a scene in which some speechwriters were rewriting a politician’s speech, projecting words onto a screen as they viewed a film of the politician. They brainstormed and rewrote the material right on the screen. I thought to myself, I could use that. And that’s how it works. Good consultants are always looking for things they can appropriate to their work.
“The very best are intellectual entrepreneurs”
I think generally today consultants are at the far end of the curve intellectually, analytically, and conceptually. They enjoy solving intellectual problems and puzzles. In fact, they’d rather try to solve an intellectual puzzle than run something.
I don’t think many consultants go into it with the notion of a career, but rather see it as an opportunity to learn more and apply what they’ve learned conceptually and theoretically in business school to real world problems. And in doing the work they gain the extra benefit of exposure, of added possibilities for networking. So you’re talking about people who initially don’t have a tightly targeted career direction, so they’re very open to the expansiveness of the consulting profession. At the margin the very best are intellectual entrepreneurs.
“A high level of talent”
I think managing consultants is easy. Some people would say it's hard, but I think it's easy . If you really think about how complex the service is we render, it’s remarkable how little we have to direct what to do. What we actually do is set a goal for the consultants on a team and it becomes up to them to figure out how to solve the specific problems. It is not as if we have to explain to every consultant on a team exactly what they must do, or what questions they have to ask. The reason that we can do this is that we hire people with very high levels of talent.
What would I consider a high level of talent? It’s the usual things like creativity, diagnostic skills, being a quick study, a self-starter, mental agility, communication skills, presence, integrity, and teamwork. In our firm, no matter what skills you’ve acquired, you will not survive if you're not highly talented. Our firm takes the view that you can't improve someone's talent. Of course, you can always develop further skills in the talented. You can even develop skills in the untalented. But you can never increase the inherent talent level. That doesn't happen.
People Skills
“The ability to tune in”
A good consultant, first of all, must know something about more than the specific project or subject at hand. Without knowledge and some experience you can't do the job. But I think being able to listen to your clients is probably the most important thing. It’s a talent. The ability to tune in, be creative in your thinking, do some lateral thinking. You have to be convinced that your contribution adds something, that the client will be better after you have been there. That’s something that’s in the best of us.
“Sensitivity is an aspect of being a true leader”
To be a true consultant, you're not just going in as a know-it-all. Obviously, you do need to know a lot. Your knowledge is a very important part of what you offer to the marketplace. But there are an awful lot of other things that are important, too.
It's about relationships. It's about listening skills. It's about bringing an understanding of what it means to change an environment. It means technical competency. It means people development and how you bring them along. It means sensitivity to people. You are really the catalyst for change in many situations and change does have an effect on people in one way, shape, or form, whether their jobs change or are redesigned or even eliminated.
I remember when we were all going through re-engineering and major downsizing in the late 80's and early 90's. I'm only speaking for myself, but I know that there was a lot of sensitivity required. You had to recognize that at the end of the day, your work was having a material consequence on people's lives. The situations we were in spoke to a different aspect of who you were, or I should say, who you had to be. You had to be more than the cold-hearted consultant who comes in, announcing, “We’re running these mathematical formulas and as a result of the benchmarking, as a result of best practices, we have concluded that you should be able to do this function with X-percent fewer people.” We had to recognize full well that the results of those conclusions would lead to people being relieved from their employment.
This sensitivity is an aspect of being a true leader in the consulting business. We have to be people who come in with more than just technical knowledge or documented best practices.
“Listening skills are number one”
Something the consulting industry has been criticized for is having these 27-year-olds with MBA’s, who’ve never really been on the other side. I mean, how can these guys consult? Well, I’ve been one of them. I believe even when you’re just starting out you can still be a very good consultant. But you either need to have supervision from somebody who has had that experience or you have to develop that understanding by really talking to and listening to the clients. I don’t think necessarily they have to have lived the life of the CEO. Very few people experience the life of a CEO of a Fortune 500 client. But you need to have the ability to listen well enough and read the signals enough to understand what kinds of issues you’re dealing with. And so I think listening skills are number one. A lot of people say you have to be a good speaker and presenter to be a good consultant. But actually I think the more senior you get, the more important being a good listener becomes.
“The secret to success comes from within”
My advice is to be your own person. In this business, you’re going to get all kinds of advice, and the advice is often going to be conflicting . People are also going to ask you to do way too many things. To succeed you just have to be confident in your capabilities. That doesn’t mean overestimating your capabilities, it just means being comfortable with yourself.
Consulting is about your capacity to engage the client, to be interesting and to bring energy into a situation in a comfortable way . Not to be buzzing around, irritating people. It’s about the right level of self-confidence. You can’t be afraid to ask questions or admit you don’t know something. In the end consulting is just about whether the people in the room like you.
You also have to be willing to invest in yourself. You have to want to learn something about the arena you’re in. You have to develop yourself. If you’re in this for a career, you should be thinking about how you’re going to grow each year. Give some thought to your professional and personal goals. I believe the secret to success really does come from within . I don’t want to call it a Zen thing because I don’t know what Zen means. It’s just some kind of inner focus that you have to have.
Personal Attributes
“That competitive drive to achieve and excel”
The type of person most attracted to consulting is the competitive person. There’s that competitive drive to achieve and to excel. If you don’t have that, you don’t last long in consulting, because you’re always going to be faced with the challenge to deliver.
Another characteristic is to be thorough, to pay attention to the details. There’s the data and the importance of making sure you have the data; making sure that you’ve analyzed it and looked for trends before you make any recommendations. Of course, we’re talking about not only data issues but in some cases the politics, too. Whatever recommendations you make have to be based on the full facts of the situation.
Basically, you’ve got to be thorough. You don’t want to shoot from the hip. That’s the bottom line.
If you find yourself going native, you're in trouble”
I think a good consultant has to maintain his or her objectivity. If you find yourself going native, you're in trouble. Objectivity is critical . I work exclusively in the insurance industry and my clients have anywhere from 6,000 to 100,000 employees. They don't really need one more person who knows about the insurance industry. They've got thousands of people that know about the insurance industry. What they do need are people that can be objective without fearing that their job is in jeopardy.
“Keep the clients at the top of your organization chart”
The skills I see as inherent to success in our business are essentially project management skills. You’ve got to be able to handle five, ten, fifteen assignments simultaneously. Most likely they’re going to be fifteen divergent clients, too, with divergent needs and personalities. Relationship management is a part of this and it’s critical. So you’ve really got to be part psychoanalyst, too. If you don’t keep the clients at the top of your organization chart, you have no organization. To be able to meet new, prospective clients, gain their trust and confidence, and have them give you that first chance to deliver on a critical assignment, that’s relationship management.
Unfortunately, what we deliver is not like a hard building or a system. It’s a service. I think one of the unique aspects of our growth, why we’ve grown so significantly is we have the ability to keep the client at the top of the organization. Plus the person that sells the engagement owns the engagement. He or she is the project manager accountable to the client’s success. We reduce that to writing in our contracts. We guarantee to work with our client until they deem the engagement a success. So that puts us over the barrel of accountability. As a result, about 83 percent of our work is repeat work from past, satisfied clients.
When I left Peat Marwick, I wanted to go with an organization that had the same kind of process controls in place, one that really wanted the clients as opposed to the revenues. I’ve found you can ascertain very quickly where a firm is at when you’re being interviewed and they ask, first, what are your billings? And, second, who are your clients? You know then where the emphasis is going to be. That’s what you see with a lot of firms. As opposed to talking about the importance of managing clients, about cultivating clients for ten, fifteen, or twenty years, trying to limit the number of assignments to a level you can physically handle, and keeping the reputation up.
Consulting is all about managing expectations, and communication skills are critical. I think some people in our business do this pretty well. But there are also those that are just deplorable. It’s the old don’t-shoot-the-messenger issue that comes up. The client may have this element of expectation about their needs, and then there’s the real world that you find on your consulting engagement. So it’s up to us to continually educate and update the client so that the gap between what they think they need and what we may be actually finding doesn’t widen. If it does start to fester, I submit it’s more important to be in front of the clients when that gap widens than when it lessens.
It’s human nature to say, oh, this is getting out of hand, it’s going to be an ugly meeting and they’re going to yell. But if you manage the process in weekly increments, you can never be that far apart because you’re giving them your work in vitamin pill bits. But if you go for three months and the gap is widening and they’re still expecting you to deliver, that’s when all bets are off and it can get real ugly. Some consultants don’t handle this well.
“You want to be the alpha dog”
So what does it take to be a good consultant? I think a healthy ego and the ability to be forceful and express your opinions. No one pays a consultant to be wishy-washy about stuff.
Oddly enough, I’ve noticed there’s some sort of perverse pride consultants take in killing themselves. It’s not so much a perverse camaraderie, I would say, as it is more of a culture of one-upsmanship. You want to be the alpha dog. That’s actually why partnerships work so strangely, because you have a bunch of alpha dogs trying to make things work.
“Good consultants have a high fear of failure”
I believe most consultants who do good work have a high fear of failure. They are insecure and this drives them to work very hard on behalf of their clients. The mind-set that will ruin a client relationship is when a consultant forgets to be fearful of failing, when they boilerplate the thinking, believing they can package what they do and get away with it.
This work when it’s done right is never repetitive, never boring, if you look for the unique characteristics in each and every situation. Every individual client you deal with is different. As human beings they are always different. Every business situation is different. If you look for those distinctive factors and try to understand them, the work will always be fascinating. But the moment you treat it as Betty Crocker Consulting, that’s when it becomes boring.
I suspect consultants who are in this business for the long haul are easily bored. They require that constant sense of stimulation, that feeling of engagement. Maybe we’re all a little sick with attention deficit disorder. If a client relationship doesn’t offer that stimulation, that is when the relationship is going to be a truncated one. Because we no longer have our brains engaged.
“Confidence, trust and listening”
I’d say there are three things that are important in my experience. One is a clear sense of confidence. I’m sure there are consultants who have maybe gotten by with just bullshit. But I think you need confidence because you need to have a combination of depth and width. Clients want you to be a mile wide and a mile deep, and you know you can’t be both. And to me that’s where the confidence comes in.
The second thing is trust—the ability to trust, to generate trust, and to keep trust. It goes to the reputation you build through your honesty with clients, and through your willingness to tell them when you can help and when you can’t help. One potential client called once about a job in Italy that they needed handled in a very specific way. I had been trying to get to them for years, and they finally called with a job for us. But they wanted someone fluent in Italian who knew executive compensation factors. I called them back about two days later and said, “I’ve done a lot of digging, and I found your man. He’s fluent in Italian, he knows compensation, and he’s done work for a lot of competitors of yours in the industry. He knows the industry. The bad news is he works for our competitor, Towers [Perrin].”
“Why are you saying they’re better?” she asked.
I had to say to her, “Because there’s nobody in our firm that can meet your requirements. We do have somebody who does compensation, but he doesn’t speak Italian.”
So they hired Towers for that assignment, but they started hiring us for a lot of other jobs. Because, as they told us, “If you’re going to send work to one of your arch-competitors because it would help us, then you do believe you can take something on, you must be able to do it.” It took a while but our relationship with that client took off. So that’s trust.
The third thing is listening. There are a number of consultants who talk much more than they listen, and I think they miss the mark.
“Short span of attention”
In some ways being a good consultant requires having a short attention span. By that I mean you need to have the kind of focus that thrives on constant change, constant turnover of people and challenges. Obviously, you don’t always have a lot of time to do what you have to do, and you need to be ready to move onto the next thing. When I've been involved in long-term assignments, I have often found it emotionally hard to walk away because I’ve gotten to be such a part of the situation. And that’s probably not healthy in the long-run scheme of things.
So if you're a person who thrives on change, then you're a good candidate for consulting. But I turn it around and call it a job where it pays to have a short attention span.
“It’s about life-long learning”
As far as I’m concerned, you cannot be a management consultant if you’re not open to life-long learning. I mean there are others that will say, I’m just consulting because I have this natural ability to do X, Y, and Z. That’s fine. For me what it’s about is life-long learning. What I’ve learned didn’t come out of Rutgers or MIT.
Consultants are also people who like to teach. That’s a very important thing. Consulting has people who like to impart knowledge to other people and feel good about it.
I have my own database of 30,000 people worldwide that I started when I was a dean at Princeton. It includes engineers and scientists from all over the world. So I don’t know everything and I don’t have to know everything. I just need to know who knows it.
Being a successful consultant requires personal integrity. You’ve got to like yourself.
My husband and my son call me an elitist, but I do think you need a high educational level. I’m not saying there aren’t successful consultants who aren’t highly educated. There are. But in the technology age we’re in more and more education will be required.
I also see a need for strong people skills. By that I mean knowing how to interface well with all kinds of people. Having that global perspective. A successful consultant should also be someone who by nature is less biased. I don’t mean less biased just in terms of race, but less biased in terms of being able to look beyond certain things about people. Like their education level or the part of town they live in, the clothes they wear or how much they weigh. The consultant who can do that is going to be a better consultant.
“You’ll forget the paycheck after you’re there two weeks”
If you don't really enjoy the work, there's no way you're going to want to put up with the sacrifices you have to make as a consultant. Having to run your social life around your job. It's impossible to be a consultant and organize your job around your social life. There are real sacrifices. You have to enjoy the challenge of achieving things and getting things done. That's what we look for.
I often hear people say, “Oh, I want to be a consultant because it pays good money.” That's bullshit because you’ll forget the paycheck after you're there two weeks. What starts to really come home is what you're doing, the work content. That's the nature of the beast.
“You measure yourself by the success of people who work for you”
I think you measure yourself in consulting in two ways. Over the short term, you measure yourself by the success of individual assignments, and collectively by the success of clients you worked with. Over the long haul, however, I think you measure yourself by the success of the people who work for you. As I look back, I think more in terms of the people who worked for me and what they are doing now. The high points are when people who worked for me go on to have major business success. Whether it’s been in consulting or in a corporation. I’d like to think that I’ve made some contribution to their development and growth. Conversely, the low points obviously are the people who you thought had great potential but who flamed out and did not grow.
I’m real pleased that some of the people who used to work for me are now CEOs of companies. That feels good. I mean, you’d like to believe that you had some contribution, whether it was in coaching or just exposing them to opportunities for self-development. But then you think back on some people you thought had high potential and for one reason or another they never really achieved that potential. You wonder if you could have done a better job with them.
“Basically, a consultant needs to know how to stand tall”
Sometimes the client engages you to provide a prescription, other times to assist them in developing an answer. The latter is much more process-driven although you hardly ever want to label it as that. The former is much more brain surgery-driven, so to speak. This is the answer; this is what you must do. This is our prescription. Interestingly, the clients will pay almost as much for the “this is what you must do” answer as they will for the “process answer,” even though the former takes a lot less effort on our part.
Of course, it also helps to be right, and in order to be right it helps to have a few years of experience. It’s hard for younger or newer consultants to hand out prescriptions and be believable in that role. To some extent, you can coach credibility. You can talk about the importance of projecting confidence, how to do that. If I flinch when you challenge me on something, or get angry easily when you push back, well, these are things that can erode my credibility. To some extent you can coach people on things like this.
Of course, people also are who they are. Basically, a consultant needs to know how to stand tall. You have to be willing to be challenged, and almost enjoy the ideological combat. You also have to just be able to hold their attention.
“They remain a bunch of mavericks”
The consulting life really gets into your blood. It takes a special kind of person to be a consultant. They’re entrepreneurial personalities, people who are generally very sharp. They’re their own people and are not impressed with Harvard MBAs or bluebloods or what have you. It’s more an issue of what kind of person are you, and what can you do? They definitely have an independent streak and I think that they are just fun people. You have a lot of laughs. Everybody has a lot of stories. I would think perhaps more so than in more staid professions like the legal, medical, or accounting professions. Consultants run loose. Even in big organizations, they run loose. They remain a bunch of mavericks.
That’s one of the key things about the consulting field—people are paid a lot of money for their hard work and services, as opposed to being paid for pure brainpower or pure intellect. As opposed to being paid as an investment banker by your luck in the market. Consultants make money off their hard work, their tenacity, and their commitment to a client 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Clients unfortunately take precedence over so many other things such as family and personal life. That’s different from many other professions.
In the end, you obviously need problem solving skills. But perhaps personality traits are more important than anything else. Intellect is very important, but not necessarily intelligence as measured by an MBA or CPA or advanced degree in engineering or anything like that. Obviously you need common sense and strong people skills, a sensitivity to your environment and the politics around you. That’s absolutely critical.
It also helps to have tenacity and physical stamina and a very understanding family.
And If All Else Fails, There’s Always Luck
“Be in the right place at the right time”
There was a guy named Sonny who had started a new limousine service in Washington. He started out with one car and some clients that he had been serving from a previous job and he built the limo service up. By the time of the story his little business was growing—he was up to eight or ten cars. One day as he took me out to Dulles Airport, Sonny said, “I’m really excited because I’m picking up Andy Grove, the founder of Intel. I’m going to try to pump him for information on how I can do better.”
On his front seat he had a copy of Grove’s book, he had magazines with Grove’s picture on the cover, he knew how much Grove was worth and that Grove was the fourth richest man in the world. Sonny kept citing all these statistics to me – kind of like he was practicing for when he’d finally meet Grove.
Finally, he dropped me off at the airport and I wished him good luck. Four or five days later when I returned Sonny picked me up. Of course, I asked him, “Sonny, how was the ride with Mr. Grove?”
“Oh, he was a fine gentleman, just a wonderful guy,” Sonny replied. “But it was somewhat disappointing.”
“In what way?”
“Well, after the small talk I finally got to what I really wanted to ask Mr. Grove. I said, ‘Mr. Grove, what I’d really like for you to tell me is how I can be more successful in my business. With all of your vast experience and success you must have some advice that would be helpful to somebody like me, just starting out with this small business.’ Mr. Grove sat in the back seat for a minute just thinking. And then looked at me and said, ‘Be in the right place at the right time.’”
I thought that was an interesting comment. People who are successful often have this sense of their timing. If they’re right about it and they probably are, then success is just so much luck. Because three feet over to the left and the other guy gets the break and you don’t. It’s fairly capricious out there. You just have to be at the right place at the right time.
STORIES FROM READERS
Do you have a story about how you got started in consulting? We would love to hear it. Please send your best to the email address below. Top submissions may be included on this site or in future editions of Lore of Wizards. Submissions will be reviewed and contributors will be contacted prior to publication.