This is a book about gaining influence and becoming a key trusted advisor. It is for everyone who advises leaders and senior managers (accounting, finance, human resources, IT, law, marketing, public relations, security, and strategic planning) and for outside consultants in these functional staff areas. It's also for operations people yearning to finally be heard and heeded by their boss.

Dieses Buch entwickelt Bausteine einer erfolgreichen Zusammenarbeit zwischen Unternehmensberatern und ihren Klienten. Namhafte Autoren aus Unternehmen und Managementberatungen sowie Marktbeobachter schildern die Grundvoraussetzungen einer erfolgsorientierten Partnerschaft zwischen Beratern und Beratenen. Handlungsrichtlinien fur alle Phasen von Beratungsprojekten werden erlautert und best-practice anhand von Praxisfallen dargestellt. Beratern gibt das Buch einen Einblick in die Philosophie ihrer Kollegen und die Restriktionen ihrer Kunden. Auftraggeber erhalten wertvolle Hinweise uber den Umgang mit Beratern. Marktbeobachter finden Insiderinformationen uber die Beratungsansatze unterschiedlicher Anbieter und die Entwicklung der Branche. Allen genannten Gruppen ist das Buch zu empfehlen, da es erstmalig in diesem Umfang interessante Einblicke in die Denkweisen und Anspruche aller im Beratungsumfeld beteiligten Parteien und den erfolgsfordernden Umgang miteinander bietet. "

A classic revised and updated for the twenty-first-century consultant
Revised and updated for consulting in the twenty-first century, this new edition is for anyone who wants to know what consulting is really like as a career, as a living, and as a life. Geoffrey Bellman reveals how to make the job rewarding both financially and personally as he examines the practical issues of managing time, clients, and money as well as such broader concerns as how to balance work with family life. At once practical and personal, this book is for all types of consultants, all those who work with consultants, and all those who dream of being consultants.
Geoffrey M. Bellman (Seattle, WA) has consulted to organizations of all sizes, from the inside and outside, including numerous Fortune 500 companies. He is the author of several well-received books, including Getting Things Done When You’re Not in Charge the bestselling book that has sold more than 80,000 copies.

The purpose of this book is to investigate the innovative process in engineering of consulting firms as a knowledge-intensive service sector. Extant literature in a resource-based view of the firm calls for empirical studies to illustrate the process of how human resource systems provide organisations with a competitive advantage. The key issue is on how the different elements of human resource systems interact. The evidence unveiled in this book does just that. Likewise, it has been suggested that resource systems as a source of a competitive edge should not be viewed as a static phenomenon. Sustained competitiveness requires an organisation to constantly adjust itself according to the evolving market conditions. Such dynamic capability has been illustrated in cases within this book. On the other hand, literature on innovative studies indicates that new analytical approaches applicable to both manufacturing and service industries can be beneficial to future research in this field. The tactic adopted in this book can serve as a prelude to such an attempt.

Electronic Business, Knowledge Management, IT-Einf hrung: F r die Realisierung neuer Gesch ftsstrategien wird Beratungswissen immer wichtiger. Damit steigen zugleich die Anforderungen an Consultants. Dies betrifft alle Bereiche von der Strategieberatung bis hin zur Prozess- und IT-Beratung. Hierzu werden dem Leser Vorgehensweisen f r die Unternehmensanalyse und Probleml sung vermittelt. Einen weiteren Schwerpunkt des Buches bilden die Soft-Skills: Lernen Sie, wie durch effektive Kommunikation bessere Projektergebnisse erzielt werden k nnen. Berater internationaler Consultingunternehmen zeigen den Anwendungsbezug der einzelnen Qualifikationen auf. Praktikern sowie Berufseinsteigern bietet das Buch umfassendes Orientierungswissen sowie konkrete Hilfestellung f r das Erbringen professioneller Beratungsleistungen. Die zweite Auflage enth lt neben Erweiterungen ein neues Kapitel und eine Fallstudie.

At a time when divisiveness and racism are on the rise, the need and demand for diversity training and trainers has never been greater. The authors - with more than 25 years of combined experience in diversity and social justice work - conceived this book in response to constant requests for advice on how to get started in, and develop a career as, diversity consultants. This succinct cookbook - with the additional wisdom of fourteen well-known and respected practitioners who offer the lessons they have learned - provides the guidance to get you going and succeed. The cookbook metaphor reflects the delicate nature of diversity consulting where the little things can make a significant difference in the final outcome. As with cooking where a dash of seasoning, the choice of temperature, or cooking time, impact the final dish, so the wrong balance in creating an environment that is welcoming and constructive while addressing issues that may be disorienting for the audience can ruin a presentation before it gets started. Like a cookbook, this book is set out in small chunks. It covers the need to need to audit and enhance your skills and knowledge, establish your brand and what you distinctively bring to the table, develop your outreach and contacts, and learn to listen to clients to determine what interventions will achieve their long-term goals. It addresses the need to develop your strategic plan with a clear sense of mission, vision, and values; moves on to topics such as financial planning, pricing, contracts, scheduling, and considerations about presentation styles and handouts; and gets down to the specifics of marketing, with ideas on business cards, websites, networking, and even how to dress. For anyone contemplating embarking on a career as a diversity consultant - either part-time while holding an existing position or as a full-time endeavor, this is an invaluable guide for getting started, and for keeping at your side as you develop your practice.

"The consulting industry is one of the fastest growing business sectors worldwide with new opportunities emerging continually in hundreds of different fields. Whatever your area of expertise--engineering or employee relations, computers or customer service--there's likely to be a demand for your consulting abilities." --Gregory Kishel and Patricia Kishel from the Preface
Who needs consultants? The answer is simple: everyone does Consultants are no longer viewed as a luxury. They've become a necessity in today's constantly evolving business environment. And, for millions of career changers, recent graduates, retirees, and former government employees, consulting is an excellent way to turn knowledge and experience into a profitable business.
Now, two highly successful consultants provide you with a proven plan for entering and growing in this lucrative field. You'll get practical advice on what it takes to succeed as a consultant, where the real opportunities are, and the types of situations you are most likely to encounter. You'll learn all of the aspects of becoming an independent consultant, including how to choose a specific field and set up business, how to determine fees and market your services, how to get referrals and maintain good client relations, how to write winning proposals, what kinds of insurance you should have, how to win government contracts, how to enter foreign markets, and much, much more.
Packed with step-by-step guidelines, forms, and checklists, this valuable guide is must reading for both working consultants and anyone interested in starting a consulting business.
Written for anyone with ideas, information, or skills to sell, this valuable guide shows you how to make the most of your talents, putting them to work for yourself and your clients. Drawing on their own experiences as management consultants, Gregory Kishel and Patricia Kishel offer down-to-earth advice on what it takes to succeed as a consultant, where the opportunities are, and the types of situations you are likely to encounter. Step by step, you will learn all of the aspects of becoming an independent consultant, including:
* How to choose a specific field and set up a business
* How to determine fees and market your services
* How to get referrals and maintain good client relations
* What kinds of insurance you should have
* How to win government contracts, enter foreign markets, and much more

Whatever your area of specialization, this indispensable book will give you the information you need to build and maintain a profitable consulting business.

Management consultancy practice is particularly concerned with helping clients implement strategic organisational change. But what exactly are organisations, and management consultancy interventions in them? Management consulting is said to be a knowledge-intensive industry. But what kind of knowledge do management consultants possess, and how far can we rely on it? Management consultants are often criticised for unethical exploitation of their clients. But how ought management consultants to behave in order to meet acceptable ethical standards? These are questions about the philosophical topics of ontology, epistemology and ethics. The ancient Greek philosophers thought deeply about these topics, and their ideas remain fresh and relevant even to so modern a subject matter as management consulting. Writing between the end of the sixth and the end of the fourth century BCE, these philosophers were drawing upon an intellectual tradition that was very different from our own, and were responding to social and economic conditions that were wholly unlike ours. Approaching these philosophical questions from a perspective that is radically different from our own, their work provides a rich resource for novel thinking about management consulting. From the speculations of the Presocratic philosophers Heraclitus, Parmenides, Leucippus and Democritus about the nature of the universe to the thought of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle about the nature of human beings, this book uses the work of these great thinkers as a lens through which to study major philosophical questions about management consulting. Examined in this way, many established assumptions and principles of management consultancy practice seem questionable, and new ways of thinking possible.

This open access book offers four ways to enrich traditional research methods in business ethics. By looking at critical jokes and cartoons on management consultants, their business practice and their clients' demands, many ethical transgressions in business get addressed. By illustrating and criticizing such transgression, jokes can serve as an example in a theoretical argument, as a prompt to reflect on in an open interview, as a statement to assess in an enquiry or as basis for qualitative content analysis. By adding jokes to the conversation on ethical transgressions in business much depth and honesty can be added, resulting in better research data. Jokes can help to surpass social desirability bias included in answers given in traditional interview settings or enquiries. This book is of interest to consultants, researchers, educators and students in business ethics and management. The book showcases what kind of practical and ethical wisdom is embedded in business jokes and how this knowledge can be made productive in the context of business ethics.