Consulting Career

The second edition of The Consulting Bible remains the most comprehensive and practical guide to the consulting profession, from launch to high growth, from marketing to implementation. Legendary consultant, speaker, and best-selling author Alan Weiss shows you how to create an independent or boutique consulting practice and take it to seven-figure success.

In today's fast-paced networked economy, professionals must work harder than ever to maintain and improve their business skills and knowledge. But technical mastery of one's discipline is not enough, assert professional advisors David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford. The key to professional success, they argue, is the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients. In this 20th anniversary edition, Maister, Green, and Galford enrich our understanding of today's society and illustrate how to be effective communicators in a digital world.

Based on a far-reaching study of thousands of individuals, Finding Flow contends that we often walk through our days unaware of and out of touch with our emotional lives. Our inattention makes us constantly bounce between two extremes: During much of the day, we live filled with the anxiety and pressures of our work and obligations, and during our leisure moments, we tend to live in passive boredom.

Land the deals you want and develop your instincts with million-dollar negotiation techniques. After selling over $3 billion in real estate, including the most expensive one-bedroom house in history, Josh Altman, costar of the hit show Million-Dollar Listing Los Angeles, wants to teach you the real estate sales and negotiation tactics that have made him one of America's top agents. Buying or selling a house, whether for a client or yourself, is one of the most important and stressful deals anyone can make, demanding emotional intelligence and a solid set of negotiating skills.

How Clients Buy is the much-needed guide to selling your services. If you're one of the millions of people whose skills are the "product," you know that you cannot be successful unless you bring in clients. The problem is, you're trained to do your job-not sell it. No matter how great you may be at your actual role, you likely feel a bit lost, hesitant, or "behind" when it comes to courting clients, an unfamiliar territory where you're never quite sure of the line between under- and over-selling. This book comes to the rescue with real, practical advice for selling what you do.

How can you take your skills and expertise and package it to become a successful consultant? There are proven time-tested principles, strategies, tactics, and best practices the most successful consultants use to start, run, and grow their consulting business. Consulting Success teaches you what they are.

McKinsey & Company is the most respected and most secretive consulting firm in the world, and business readers just can't seem to get enough of all things McKinsey. Now, hot on the heels of his acclaimed international best seller The McKinsey Way, Ethan Rasiel brings listeners a powerful new guide to putting McKinsey concepts and skills into action­­: The McKinsey Mind. It explains, step-by-step, how to use McKinsey tools, techniques, and strategies to solve an array of core business problems and to make any business venture more successful.

A behind-the-scenes, revelatory history of McKinsey & Company, America's most influential and controversial business consulting firm, told by one of the nation's leading financial journalists. In The Firm, Duff McDonald uncovers how these high-powered, high-priced business savants have ushered in waves of structural, financial, and technological shifts. With unrivaled access to company documents and current and former employees, McDonald reveals the inner workings of what just might be the most influential private organization in America.

For more than 40 years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside.

Renowned consultant and author Peter Block delivers the latest and fourth edition of his bestselling Flawless Consulting, an intuitive and insightful step-by-step guide to the five phases of effective consulting. The book offers a deep exploration of the skills, tools, and behaviors required to successfully influence others. You'll see exactly what you need to say and do to help others achieve their goals, whether you are an internal or external consultant or anyone in a leadership position who wants to build effective partnerships in business, healthcare, education, or community work.

When it comes to how to succeed as an entrepreneur, we are besotted with advice. According to best-selling author Alan Weiss, success is a combination of opportunism, very disciplined work, luck, timing, and ignoring most advice. In other words, it means striking out on your own original path to success. In Million Dollar Maverick, he explains that entrepreneurs don't take advice; they create value and then monetize it. They do what they love and are great at and find a way to sell it to people.

The ultimate guide to managing your career - at every level, through every transition - The McKinsey Edge culls the best practices of an exclusive group of executives and consultants from McKinsey & Company, the legendary consulting firm that services eighty percent of the world's largest corporations. Drawing on his time as an engagement manager with McKinsey, Hattori presents rigorously selected, battle-tested tips that will give you the edge you need to up your game, raise your profile, and take your career to the next level-using a proven four-step program:

In this hands-on successor to the popular book The Trusted Advisor, you'll find answers to pervasive questions about trust and leadership - such as how to develop business with trust, nurture trust-based relationships, build and run a trustworthy organization, and develop your trust skill set. This pragmatic workbook delivers everyday tools, exercises, resources, and actionable to-do lists for the wide range of situations a trusted advisor inevitably encounters.

In recent years, professional services providers have had to rethink their sales methods and adapt to profound changes in the way clients buy services. In response, Winning the Professional Services Sale argues for fundamental changes in the seller's mindset and sales strategies. Rather than pressing the sale, salespeople must help clients buy - the way that works best for each client. This new approach gives buyers what they now want in a services seller: a consultative problem solver, change agent, and solution integrator, all rolled into one.

This book reveals what it takes for consultants of all types, as well as organizational leaders, to be really helpful in dealing with the complex, systemic, constantly changing organizational problems of today. They need to rapidly create a relationship of trust and openness that enables clients, subordinates, and team members to reveal what is really on their minds and to jointly develop a sense of what is the problem and what kind of adaptive response could best deal with it.

Andrew Sobel offers a proven, 100-day plan for conquering 14 tough client development challenges and growing your client base. He's encapsulated 25 years of unique research, including personal interviews with over 3,000 top executives, into a practical road map for winning more new clients and growing your existing relationships. You'll learn specific strategies to move confidently and predictably from a first meeting to a signed contract, and discover the agenda-setting techniques that create a steady stream of sole-source business.

Before you listen to the book, have an open mind - do not doubt yourself in advance. Remember, the very first thing you need in this field is confidence, then you need some expertise on the subject. But confidence is what can make or break you. Looking back at my own life, I never thought I could be a marketing consultant; I don't have the education nor do I have the skills for it. But he taught me it is not the education that makes you a great consultant.

In a world of rapidly evolving technologies and business paradigms, your consulting business needs to radically adapt its techniques and models. Taking full measure of these changes, Alan Weiss, the "Rock Star of Consulting," will guide you through the process with a revised and completely updated sixth edition of his authoritative guide to consulting success.

As Darwin famously observed, the beaks of each generation of Galapagos Island finches change to accommodate shifting food resources, allowing the birds to survive by adapting their capabilities to the new environment. Today's business people should take note: In the post-crisis economy, traditional career strategies spell professional extinction, but the fluid new "gig economy" offers tremendous potential for anyone willing to adapt.

Digital Business Transformation: How Established Companies Sustain Competitive Advantage from Now to Next offers listeners a framework for digital business transformation. Written by Nigel Vaz, the acclaimed CEO of Publicis Sapient, a global digital business transformation company, Digital Business Transformation delivers practical advice and approachable strategies to help businesses realize their digital potential.