The Value-Creating Consultant: How to Build and Sustain Lasting Client Relationships

Rating:
Summary: Required Reading for the New Year!
Review: After reading this book over the holiday's, I felt more hopeful about heading back to the trenches this week, and ready to tackle some of the challenging client issues waiting for me with renewed enthusiasm. This is book provides useful answers and practical help for dealing with the complex human relationship issues that can so easily get in the way of consultants and clients showing up to the task at hand. Carucci and Tetenbaum offer a unique depth of insight and perspective, sharing success and failures from their own personal experience. This book will no doubt push the buttons of experienced consultants and executives. It's always hardest to look at our own behavior and motivations in any process, but the tools offered here are clearly directed at the bottom line "building strong relationships". You just can't argue with this books message. If you can, you need to re-read it !

Rating:
Summary: Required reading for the New Year !
Review: After reading this book over the holidays, I felt more hopeful about heading back to the trenches this week, and ready to tackle some of the challenging client issues waiting for me with renewed enthusiasm. This is book provides useful answers and practical help for dealing with the complex human relationship issues that can so easily get in the way of consultants and clients showing up to the task at hand. Carucci and Tetenbaum offer a unique depth of insight and perspective, sharing success and failures from their own personal experience. This book will no doubt push some buttons with experienced consultants and executives. It's always hardest to look at our own behavior and motivations in any process, but the tools offered here are clearly directed at the bottom line "building strong relationships". You just can't argue with this books message or delivery. If you do, you need to re-read it.

Rating:
Summary: Nourishing Values to Create Value
Review: Caruci & Tetenbaum really do provide a comprehensive explanation of how to "build and sustain lasting client relationships." What impressed me is the fact that almost every suggestion they offer to consultants is also relevant to almost everyone else who works for an organization which retains consultants. That is to say, the authors explain with both eloquence and precision the necessity (not merely the desirability) of creating value with every effort...in every collaborative relationship.

Think about it. Businesses of various kinds now spend (annually) $80-100 BILLION on consulting services. Are they receiving full (or at least satisfactory) value for such expenditures? Probably not. However, blame must be shared. Heaven knows, there are dishonest or incompetent consultants, be they independent or associated with a firm. There are also clients who are so confused and/or so corrupt, who create so many problems, clients who are so unrealistic in terms of their expectations, that even Peter Drucker in collaboration with Sun Tzu, Plato & Aristotle, Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Tom Peters could not possibly provide the services for which they have been retained.

This book is divided into four Parts: Bad Habits and The Challenge of Differentiation (examines "three consistent patterns perpetuating the negative trends"), Becoming a Value-Creating Consultant (examines "those behaviors and characteristics of consultants that win [clients'] loyalty and respect"), The Partners and the Partnership (examines "the behaviors that make for a good client and the role of the consultant in helping to develop those behaviors in the client"), and Conquering the Engagement from Hell (presents a "simulation that serves as a culminating activity for readers to reflect on their learning and to practice their skills"). The authors seem to share my own passion for consulting at the very highest level at which superior (measurable) performance is rewarded fairly and (yes) punctually. Unfortunately, as the authors point out, "the consulting profession is on a trajectory. A negative one. All someone has to do is mention the word lawyer [in italics] and instant disdain, distrust, frustration, and skepticism are conjured up. Without change, the word consultant [in italics] will soon produce the same reactions."

In my opinion, that of an independent management consultant, this book makes a major contribution to understanding what must be done to establish a positive "trajectory" for the consulting profession. Who should read this book? Those who are now thinking about becoming consultants. Also, those who are now consultants and dissatisfied with their client relationships. Also, those who are about to work with consultants for the first time. Finally, those who are now working with consultants and are eager to maximize the value of that relationship. As previously suggested, I think the material which Caruci & Tetenbaum provide has relevance far beyond both sides of a consulting relationship. Many of those involved in any kind of a relationship (be it personal or professional) want to add value to it. Caruci & Tetenbaum explain HOW. They may have written this book with the business world in mind but I think what they have achieved is also of great value to the other "worlds" to which all of us proceed when our business day is done.

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money
Review: Reading this book is an endurance contest. As an experienced marketing consultant looking to take my consulting practice to the next level I kept reading, waiting for the 'Aha!' that never came. The authors' basic premise is that clients pay good money for consulting services and it isn't nice to not give them a return on their investment. Really. That's it. About half of the book is devoted to scolding those bad, bad consultants who are so arrogant that they think they know everything and/or who make projects take longer than necessary or create unnecessary work just to eke out a few extra bucks. The second half of the book describes good consultants. They're the ones who aren't afraid to tactfully tell clients they have made a royal mess of the business and they need to consider a new approach. Good consultants are supposed to teach their clients everything they know so the client can get along without the consultant.

What is most puzzling about this perspective is that it clearly contradicts the title of the book, which suggests that consultants should build long-term relationships with clients based on giving them true value. Yet, in the text the authors assert that it is a sign of a true professional to make the client self-sufficient so the client doesn't need the consultant any more.

It seems to me that this book is too advanced for those just entering the consulting field, yet it is too simple for those who have any experience. It does not have a clear audience.

To sum it up, the authors of this book have a talent for overstating the obvious. In my opinion, they do not have a talent for providing insights that will help today's consultants grow their practices.

Rating:
Summary: Insightful!
Review: Should we care about management consultants? And do they care about us enough to change the way they do business? For answers, turn to this well-researched, opinionated book by Ron A. Carucci and Toby J. Tetenbaum. The authors combine extensive survey data with their personal viewpoints to prove that management consulting needs serious repair. They present their model of the value-creating consultant as the solution. While some consultants may roll their eyes at the goal of forming an equal partnership with their clients, the book is on point about what is right and wrong with the profession. The authors explain the ways any consultant can use a value-creating model to improve client relationships. We at getAbstract recommend this excellent book to management consultants or anyone who needs to hire a management consultant. Executives, students and business owners will also find it thought-provoking, particularly if you think consulting is in your future.

Rating:
Summary: A value-creating book!
Review: Written in an easily-ready, somewhat breezy style, The Value-Creating Consultant ruthlessly zeros in on the essential reasons for success or failure in the Consultant-Client relationship: the attitude and emotional perspective of the consultant.

The authors successfully present the case that a failed or successful consultation is less dependent on specific business expertise, and more dependent on the consultant's individual character traits. They illustrate this with three archtypes for each case: The Messiah, The Dependency-Builder, The Colluder; and The Partner, The Capability Builder, and The Truth-Teller.

The book tackles these concepts with a varied and balanced blend of specific examples, candor, humor, and in-depth analysis, that prevents it from being just another light-weight (and unreadable) business guru how-to tome. For refreshing and thoughtful insights into what being a successful consultant requires, we highly recommend it for both the beginning consultant and the seasoned professional.