Consulting Philosophy

A woman named “Mary Leo” has been writing me for two weeks trying to order 200 copies of Million Dollar Consulting. She used no signature file, poor English, and didn’t respond to rudimentary requests from me. I told her that

We are inculcated from our youth to engage in destructive testing. That is, we strive to prove why something won’t work and why it’s a bad idea. A succession of overworked parents, uninterested teachers, aloof professors, and insecure bosses forms

I believe people are free to believe in God or not believe in God in myriad ways. What confounds me is the religious zealotry of some of the athiests, however, which I find just a tad hypocritical. (I refer you

As consultants, we should be observing the environment for best and worst practices, right? If you’re in this profession long enough, some ineluctable trends begin to emerge. We have to put the dead rat on the table (as my friends

RFPs (Requests for Proposals) are among the dumbest mechanisms (amidst the general stupidity of bureaucracies) for procuring consulting services. Designed to “safeguard” an objective process, they instead use the lowest common denominators, overwhelmingly focus on price and not value, and

A participant in the most recent Million Dollar Consulting™ College asked me what I have seen most often in my OD consulting work. This was in response to my statement that I had reduced that work because I was getting

Consulting is about simplicity, not complexity. Whenever a client says to me, “But that’s just common sense!” I feel exhilarated. Most clients, in essence, say, “It hurts when I do this.” I tell them, “Stop doing that. That will be $35,000.”

I’ve worked with a handful of terrific human resources executives over the years, and they are remarkable in their scarcity. All of the outstanding ones sought me out—to my good fortune—because HR is not a place I go softly into

I always loved reading the legendary Peter Drucker, because he used opinion and fact interchangeably, never seeing reason to discriminate between the two. My kind of guy! Consulting is about a single issue: Improving the client's condition. The physician's admonishment to