ADVEN T U RE S I N C O NS U LT I NG
As you become more senior, you’ll
want to hire other people to do more and
more things you do well. You may still
be better at it, but your time is becoming
more valuable. It’s advantageous to pay
someone who can do it half as well as
you at one-third the price. And your price
is the opportunity cost, that is, the value
of whatever you could be doing instead.
Both in the marketplace and internally,
you should be spending an ever-increasing proportion of your time doing things
no one else can do – and for which,
therefore, a high price is justified.
Of course you have to keep selling to
stay in business, and you need to focus
on selling what you want to do and profit
from. So keep in mind:
8. Your expertise isn’t the most important thing you’re selling. Your most
critical asset is trustworthiness. This includes being right when you offer a technical solution or suggestion, but your
client won’t even receive and process
your technical input – in fact, probably
won’t even engage you – until you’ve established that you know the client’s language, understand the client’s problem
and point of view, and care about meeting the client’s needs. Perhaps you’ve
been trained that you have an obligation
to give the client your best technical solution. Wrong! You have an obligation to
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give the client the best solution they can
and will implement. Among other things,
this means that every single decision
variable in a model of a system has to
be something the client can control, and
every single data element your model
uses has to be available to the client at
the time a decision is to be made. Also
keep in mind:
9. Most senior executives are not
nearly as knowledgeable or as confident as they appear. Management is
mostly quick decisions with incomplete
information under intense scrutiny, where
the first slip can be a career-breaker.
Managers above the first-line supervisors
generally have little or no contact with
where and how tasks are actually done.
They know they can’t rescue bad situations by themselves. They value people
they can trust and depend on who know
certain subject areas better than they do.
On the other hand, if untrustworthy people seem to know something the manager doesn’t, the manager may perceive
them as threats rather than assets.
Most companies aren’t as badly managed as they appear. They’re worse – the
managers know more than you do about
where they messed up. But they have
survived – respect that! The key is to
avoid messing up on the relatively few requirements for which failure can totally kill
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