The Executive’s Guide to Consultants: How to Find, Hire and Get Great Results from Outside Experts
The Executive’s Guide to Consultants: How to Find, Hire and Get Great Results from Outside Experts

Author: David Fields

Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Published: 2012-11-23

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0071801936

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Maximize Your Return on Expertise Research shows a high proportion of consultants fail to deliver results on time, on budget, and on target. Rare is the project that exceeds your expectations. But help is here. The Executive's Guide to Consultants explains how to ensure that every project delivers measurable benefits every time. This book will help you find experts, invest wisely, accelerate change, and achieve your most important goals by tapping into the genius of others. The Executive's Guide to Consultants contains breakthrough ideas covered by no other book, including: Sophisticated new contract structures that maximize your ROI Essential methods for reducing project risk Cutting-edge techniques for making change stick after the consultant leaves You will also learn to: Spot "chameleons" and other low-quality consultants who peddle tired ideas and deliver disappointing outcomes Get better results faster, while lowering fees Find the ideal consultant, coach, agency, or advisor for your precise situation Enforce accountability with outside experts and your own internal team Imagine if you could collect the wisdom of dozens of the country's top CEOs, combine it with the experience of a hall-of-fame consultant, and add a bucketful of unconventional thinking. You'd have The Executive's Guide to Consultants. Easy to read and packed with examples, checklists, templates, and guidelines, this book is the ultimate toolkit for maximizing your ROI from outside experts. Get extraordinary results from every consultant you hire "An extraordinary book. Clear, comprehensive, and eminently readable, it is THE book on how you can extract true business value from outside experts." -- Scott Cotherman, Chairman, TBWA\WorldHealth, subsidiary of Omnicom Group, Inc. "This is the Master Class for those who are smart, innovative, ahead of the pack, and who intend to stay that way. If you're not yet in that league, you should read this book twice." -- Alan Weiss, author, Million Dollar Consulting and The Consulting Bible "A terrific guidebook, with much of the advice equally applicable in managing your organization's internal talent. It's an easy, engaging read with a wealth of insights and detailed action steps--I highly recommend it." -- Brian Walker, President and CEO, Herman Miller, Inc. "A powerful antidote to the strained relationship between consultants and clients." -- Garry Ridge, CEO, WD-40 Company "This book shows you how to make your consultants' work stick. No more major investments in experts or programs that evaporate after only a few months or years." -- De Lyle Bloomquist, President, Tata Global Chemicals "Fields's messages are delivered in the way that all executives would like our outside resources to do it: capably, with straight talk and incredible insight." -- Ralph Scozzafava, Chairman and CEO, Furniture Brands

The Contract and Fee-Setting Guide for Consultants and Professionals
The Contract and Fee-Setting Guide for Consultants and Professionals

Author: Howard L. Shenson

Publisher: Wiley

Published: 1990-01-16

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780471515388

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Expert advice on how to strike a fair deal and command a fair price. The Contract and Fee-Setting Guide for Consultants & Professionals No matter how knowledgeable you are in your field..No matter how great your track record..No matter how expert your advice or impressive your credentials . you jeopardize your client base if you do not instill every phase of your practice with a consummate professionalism. And for sharp clients, the first clear signs of such a savvy professionalism are the ability to set fees at a fair market price and offer neat, straightforward contracts with clearly delineated terms. This book teaches you, in a few days, what it traditionally took people half a lifetime to learn through trial and error. In writing it, the author drew on his more than twenty years as a business consultant, lecturer, and author to offer you tips on how to ask for and get the fees you deserve and to establish contract terms that are in the best interests of you and your clients. Throughout he shares his insider's expertise on: * Determining market value for your services * Establishing per diem or per-project rates and calculating overhead * Advantages and disadvantages of various systems of fee-setting and billing * Six major goals of every contract * Negotiating the contract and avoiding legal pitfalls

The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients
The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients

Author: David A. Fields

Publisher: Morgan James Publishing

Published: 2017-03-21

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1683501659

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This deeply insightful guide to understanding what clients really want is “an indispensable resource for consultants” (Keith Ferrazzi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Never Eat Alone). Independent consulting is a potentially lucrative enterprise—but the reality seldom matches the dream. Most solo consultants and boutique consulting firms are perpetually within six months of bankruptcy due to the sputtering unreliability of their new business engines. The problem, according to international consulting expert David A. Fields, is twofold: 1) lack of a consistent, proven plan, and 2) fundamental misunderstanding about what clients want in a consultant. Fields, who has helped hundreds of consultants and boutique firms worldwide build profitable, sustainable practices, replaces the typical consultant’s mindset of emphasizing expertise and differentiated processes with a focus on building relationships, engendering trust, and solving clients’ existing problems. In The Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients, Fields synthesizes his decades of experience into a step-by-step approach to winning more projects from more clients at higher fees. From nuts-and-bolts business advice and tactics to a deeply insightful breakdown of the human side of a very human profession, Fields, named one of Advertising Age magazine’s “Marketing Top 100,” delivers a comprehensive guidebook that is at once highly approachable and satisfyingly detailed. “If I could have just one book on client strategy, this book would be it.” —Marshall Goldsmith, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Triggers

Board Members and Management Consultants
Board Members and Management Consultants

Author: Pierre-Yves Gomez

Publisher: IAP

Published: 2009-03-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1607521822

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Boards and Management Consultants, the eighth volume in the Research in Management Consulting series, explores the growing complexity associated with the growing demands on boards of directors and the challenges raised by evolving expectations of what constitutes "good" governance. As a way of better understanding the ramifications for management consulting, particular—and timely—emphasis is placed on the evolution of expectations and needs in relation to boards and their operation. The chapter authors, as noted above a truly international group of experts, more than succeed in raising the reader’s awareness of the consequences that the evolving nature of corporate boards are having on the function of directors, how this function is being redefined by the players themselves—and what all of this change means for consultants and the realm of management consulting. Significant questions are raised and explored throughout the volume, from the extent to which these changes will lead to new social, moral, ethical, and professional challenges and opportunities, to how the relationships between consultants and their traditional clients—managers, administrators and employees—might evolve. As management consultants become more actively involved in governance issues, their role will clearly change, but will such changes enhance or constrain the role they have traditionally played in organizations?

Wrong
Wrong

Author: David H. Freedman

Publisher:

Published: 2014-06-05

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 9780316165310

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Explains why experts often give wrong information, the reasons that bad advice gets the most attention, and how it has adversely affected society, and offers suggestions to eliminate this destructive cycle.