Weinberg Gerald M. - The Secrets of Consulting

The Secrets of Consulting

by

Gerald M. Weinberg

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Gerald M. Weinberg on Smashwords

The Secrets of Consulting

Copyright 2010 by Gerald M. Weinberg

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Contents

Preface

If you are a consultant, or if you ever usea consultant, this book is for you. That's a wide scope, becausenowadays, nearly everyone is some kind of a consultant. There arehardware consultants and software consultants, social workers andpsychiatrists, management consultants and worker consultants,energy consultants and information consultants, safety consultantsand accident consultants, beauty consultants and septic tankconsultants, consulting physicians and consulting attorneys,wedding consultants, decorators, genetic consultants, familytherapists, economic consultants, bankruptcy consultants,retirement consultants, funeral consultants, and psychicconsultants.

And those are only the professionals. You'reusing a consultant when you ask your neighbor what he uses toremove crabgrass from his lawn. You're being a consultant when yourdaughter asks you what college she ought to attend. In the UnitedStates, at least, you don't have to have a license to advisesomeone on what car to buy, or to help another nd the quickestroute to Arkadelphia.

With such diversity, what do all theseconsultants have in common? What would make them all want to readthis book? My denition of consulting is the art of inuencingpeople at their request. People want some sort of changeorfear some sort of changeso they seek consulting, in one form oranother.

Many people inuence other people without arequest. A judge can sentence you to thirty years of hard labor.Your teacher can assign you thirty pages of hard reading. Your bosscan give you thirty days of hard traveling. Your priest canapportion you thirty Hail Marys. Judges and teachers and bosses andpriests can act as consultants. But they're not consultants inthese cases, because these forms of inuence are enforced by someauthority system, not necessarily by the willing participation ofthe person inuenced.

Other inuencers have no authority, but arenot consultants because they lack the request. Car dealers andother salespeople come to mind in this category. Again, they mayact as consultants, but they're not consultants when they're tryingto sell you something you didn't ask for.

Being called a consultant doesn't make you aconsultant, either. Many people are called consultants as a way ofglorifying their dull jobs. Some "software consultants," forinstance, are retained strictly as supplementary programming labor.The last thing their "clients" want is in be inuenced. All theywant is grunt work turning out computer code, but by calling theirtemporary workers "consultants," they can get then for a fewdollars less than if they called them something more mundane.

Conversely, you may be a consultant even ifyou don't have the label. Anyone with a staff job is acting as aconsultant to the line management. When they hired you, they wererequesting your influence (why else would someone hire a staffperson?). After you've bets on the payroll for a while, however,they may forget that you were hired to help. Sometimes, even youforget, so your task is a bit different from that of the outsidercalled in to work on a specic problem.

This is not a book about how to become aconsultant. That part easy. Most likely, you already are aconsultant, because you become a consultant whenever you acceptsomeone's request for inuence. It's after you accept the requestthat you start needing help. When I became a full-time consultant,I soon discovered that few people request inuence when their worldis behaving rationally. As a result, consultants tend to see morethan their fair share of irrationality. You may have noticed, forinstance, how frequently someone who asks you for advice will thenattack you angrily because of the requested advice. Suchirrationality drives consultants crazy, but if they can cope withit, it can also drive them rich.

There were times, though, when I couldn'tcope with it, so I turned to writing books to restore my sanity.Anyone who is irrational enough to buy one of my books may berequesting inuence, but at least I don't have to give the adviceface-to-face. That's why my books are cheaper than my consultingfees.

Most of the time, though, I enjoyed thedirect interaction with my clients, if I could stand theirrationality. If I wanted to stay in the business, it seemed to meI had two choices:

1. Remain rational, and go crazy.

2. Become irrational, and be calledcrazy.

For many years, I oscillated between thesepoles of misery, until I hit upon a third approach:

3. Become rational about irrationality.

This book relates some of my discoveriesabout the rationality of seemingly irrational behavior thatsurrounds requests for inuence, These are the secrets ofconsulting. The title suggests this is a book for consultants, butthe book is actually for anyone who is confused by our irrationalworld and would like to do something about it. That's an almostlimitless audience.

Even if you're so confused that nobody callsupon you for consulting, perhaps you need a consultant yourself.You might just save the cost of a consultant by reading this book.Or get more mileage out of the fees you pay your consultants.

But if you're not contused, youdenitely don't need this book. You need a psychiatrist. Anyone whonot confused in today's world has to be out of touch withreality.

What will reading the book do for you? Manypeople have read the manuscript, and some of them claim to havebeen inuenced in positive ways. One constant says she applied oneof the laws, called The Orange Juice Test, and obtained a fatcontract she would probably have otherwise lost. Another said henegotiated a larger fee by applying The Principle of Least Regret.A third lost a fat contract by applying the same Principle, but hedidn't mind very much, which is why it's called The Principle ofLeast Regret. One manager told me that as soon as he nishedreading the manuscript, he red a consultant who had been costinghim three thousand dollars a month. He didn't say whether theconsultant had any regrets

Not all of the inuence has been directlynancial. Several readers say that they enjoy their consultingmore, now that they understand a bit more about what's going on.One staff product director told me he applied his new knowledge ofbuffalo and dogs to get a higher percentage of his recommendationsimplemented by his marketing manager. Another staffer could give nospecific examples except to say that her boss complimented her for"thinking better."

One old-time consultant told me along-winded story about how he used to spend a lot of time worryingabout the fact that he didn't have a Ph.D. (I think he was gettinghis revenge for some of my long-winded stories in the book-) He hadtaken several years out of his life to go back to school for hisdoctorate. only to discover that his clients weren't interested indegrees. "Reading the book was like going for my Ph.D. I didn'treally need to read it, but if I hadn't read it, I would havethought I needed to read it" As you'll learn in the very rstchapter, that's the best result any consultant can hope toachieve.