High Value Consulting

Consultancy is both too important and too expensive to allow it to fail. Look where you will in the world, consultancy brings great benefits or it creates great mischief. It seldom follows a middle road, but if client and consultant learn to work together effectively, massive addede value will come about almost as a matter of course. This book is, if you will, a manual for working together.

As I hope this book will make plain, the benefits which can come from effective use of consultants, either from outside or within your organization, can be immense. The right consultant, properly managed, can make your firm many times what you spend on their services, And in a rapidly changing business environment you will almost certainly need to hire a consultant at some time - if you don't get it right first time, you may not be around to try again.

The only way to be confident of tapping into the enormous added value which is available is to manage selection and control. To do this managers must be able to read between the lines of consultant speak. This is only possible if you know the business and even then it is sometimes difficult without a resource or a remainder.

Like any commodity or service, consultancy should be bought on the basis of value rather than price. A consultancy intervention should be a unique growth opportunity for all involved. When a consultant leaves the client premises for the last time the client and the management team should be more capable of dealing with future uncertainties well as today's emerging needs.

I hope this book will be read, and more importantly used by clients and consultants alike but we are, increasingly, not the only game in town. A growing number of organizations ranging from computer companies to the Royal Air Force have learned the value of internal consultancy teams. I have helped clients create and develop such teams and the experience has shown me that the ideal is to use internal and external resources in tandem for greatest economy, autonomy and growth.

• Part I: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Consulting
1. The growth of consultancy
2. External and internal consultants
3. Different kinds of consultants
• Part II: What's our Problem?
4. Why do you need a consultant?
5. What are the alternatives?
6. Selecting the best — avoiding the worst
7. Anatomy of a consulting disaster
• Part III: Managing the Consulting Process
8. Finding the right person
9. Referees, referralsand repeat business
10. Fees and contracts
11. The consulting process
12. Maximizing the benefit
13. Making training work
    

Pretty useless, and that is to put a pretty face on it. This books is only marginally better than Lamberts previous trial in this area. It tries to cover less ground, skips some of the anecdotes (and now plagiate from others) and tries to give one impression on the book cover (a book for buyers) that doesn't match the internals (which are totally consultant oriented).

Hopefully, Lambert manages to get some customers out of this, as he obviously earns money from the sales of the book, when idiots like myself buys it!

In short, pure crap.