Top Highlights

• So while we are surrounded by advice (especially if we have a significant other in our lives and especially if we have children old enough to talk), we’re not surrounded by expertise. We, and organizations, have to find it and either maintain it (employees) or situationally secure it (brief engagements by experts).
• Consultant: An expert in one or more identified areas who partners with a client to improve the client’s condition.
• you transfer significant skills but not for an important issue (lower right) then you’re an interventionist. By that I mean that you help people learn how to respond to complaints from customers, or change a tire in the body shop, or underwrite risk in an insurance policy. You’ve done these things yourself and can teach them. But you teach them gen...
• The upper right, collaborator, represents the real value in consulting, where you are both transferring skills and doing so as a vital issue is resolved. That’s where the highest value and concomitant highest fees reside.
• Great consultants teach others how to do what they do and do not create codependencies. Counterintuitively, the more intellectual property you transfer, the more the client will value you.