Save your blushes - and your margins. Consultancy is changing as client needs change - and as business practices modernize. This report breaks with orthodoxy and shows you the new pathways to consulting success.

1. Breaking Rules
in Consulting

2. Breaking
Rules
Enhancing your decision making...in just
5 minutes
A Futures Coaching initiative
www.futurescoaching.com

3. #1 Avoid perfect

As a naïve consultant, I always use to try
to give clients a 'perfect' solution...
only to see little actioned

In fact, I should have been tailoring the
solution to the client's culture and their
ability to impement

An optimised solution is
a customised solution
An explorer wants a wind up radio,
not digital wizardry

4. #2 Promote youth

As a 22 year old in my first consultancy,
I made a (truly awful) client presentation
after just 3 months:
I learnt from the 'fall' and I got better

Typically, in French consultancies, people
are still 'juniors' at 35 & talent is wasted

Go with youth & let them make mistakes;
your confidence will be repaid

5. #3 Radicalise tendering

Tenders are tempting:
clients at least have a budget

However, they often come with an
incumbent & a commoditising mentality
Unless you want to destroy your

margins and integrity, they only way to
win a tender is to be radically different
from the crowd

6. #4 Shift mental maps

Clients take decisions when they see
the world differently

For me, a key consulting task
is to transform mental maps;
to get to an 'aha' moment

Once an omlette is made, you can
never return to raw eggs

7. #5 Keep it short

Most clients haven't the time, the
energy nor the organisational stability
for long-term processes

Keep steps short, keep processes
containable

Deliverables from one project can
always feed in to the next

8. #6 Go outside
We tell clients to network,

crowdsource, open source – then use
internal consultants for our thinking

Break the rules by using outsiders to
bring new perspectives

And clients love the
agency/experts/clients mix

9. #7 Be humble

My first lesson as a consultant:
clients often used me for reassurance,
for political purposes or because of
resource gaps – but NOT due to a lack
of know-how

Key insight for consultants, be humble;
what you are providing is unlikely to be
über wisdom

PS. Humility also means listening well!

10. #8 Bad clients stay bad

I've been incredibly lucky with
sensational clients

Occasionally a bad client pops up: the
ones who distrust consultants and
'keep them in line' by beating them up

One logic says, hang in there since
over time you can win their trust but
my rule says: once a bad client,
always a bad client

11. #9 Reject reporting

Old style consulting: take brief;
internal work programme (with take out
meals at 11pm and at weekends); reporting;
go down the pub to celebrate

New style: discuss brief; collaborative
process which involves client in
solution; interactive workshop(s) to
leverage the findings into business
decision making

12. #10 Work on what matters

It's easy to produce lots of output; it
feels right to work long hours; it's
rewarding to be creative – but
ultimately what matters is what makes
a difference to the client's
performance

Add value by adding value

And do so in a way which is credible,
reliable and trustworthy

13. Enhance your decision-making
join forces with

14. What is Futures Coaching up to
during May 2012?
Helping reinvent the supermarket proposition
Preparing an international innovations project for a
industrial global brand
Building a Key Note for NGO Fundraisers in Geneva
Pitching to build an international development strategy
for a major European agency
Participating in a brand positioning workshop in Jakarta
Networking in Singapore
Researching banking technology trends
Pitching some new book ideas to Pearson

15. LONDON • PARIS
Website: www.futurescoaching.com
Blog: http://futurescoaching.typepad.com
Email: chris@futurescoaching.com