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On Friday I’m giving a guest lecture to a “Consultation Skills”
class at Northeastern University. The communications and business
students want to know what it takes to succeed in consulting, how they
should get started, and some color commentary on my 25 year consulting
career.

Here’s what I plan to tell them.

First off, I
never planned to be a consultant. I left a promising corporate
communications position at AT&T’s Western Electric division and
headed up to Madison Ave. to work for a public affairs/crisis
communications consulting firm on the advice of a respected — and
often feared — executive who thought all ambitious people should be
connected to revenue vs. overhead. And corporate communications to him
was big time overhead.

I found that I thrived on working with
demanding clients, being under the gun to deliver position papers,
executive speeches and interviews with The New York Times, and being recognized and promoted for the value of my ideas vs. politics and time in position metrics.

Indeed,
what makes consultants successful — and different from their corporate
brethren — is that they are very good at quickly diagnosing problems
and providing ways to solve them. Chaos, complexity, urgency,
uncertainty doesn’t phase a good consultant. But routine, process
management, and operational minutiae certainly does.

There’s a difference: contractors vs. trainers vs. consultants

Trainers
teach skills. Contractors are extra hands to get work done. Consultants
help cut through the organizational clutter and quickly frame problems
and provide ideas on how to effectively and quickly solve them. Or they
have specialized expertise for especially thorny problems. Some thorny
situations I’ve been asked to address recently:

• We spend $15 million a year on sales materials but the sales reps don’t use them. What’s wrong and how do we solve it?
• Investors
  don’t understand how our strategy fits within the competitive
  landscape. How can we explain our growth strategy so they get it?
• Employees are leaving since the merger because they have no confidence in the new management team. What should the CEO do?
• We just spent a year and $350,000 on a new brand strategy but our sales reps don’t know how to talk about it with customers.
• We’re
  starting to be attacked by community leaders, politicians and major
  funders. How can we diffuse the crisis and help them understand why
  we’re doing what we’re doing?
• We spend $10 million on PR
  agencies but the performance is lacking. Is it us? Is the agencies? How
  do we know we’re getting value?

The 13 most important traits for a consultant:

1. Expertise that provides real business value
2. Ability to cut to the core of an issue or situation and diagnose causes of the problem
3. Creative thinking to develop pragmatic ways to solve the problem
4. Outstanding oral and written communications skills
5. Responsiveness
6. Perspective
7. Influence
8. Confidence & self-esteem
9. Intellectual curiosity
10. Thick
    skin (clients pay you to be frank, but they’ll often push back and
    challenge, as they should. You can’t take it too personally.)
11. Fearlessness
12. Flexibility to create “work arounds” to deliver value within every client’s realities
13. Integrity. A consultant’s only asset is her/his reputation.

How to succeed in consulting by really trying

• When
  job hunting early in your career, look to work for the most demanding,
  smart, respected and disciplined manager. You don’t need nice. You
  don’t need a pal. You need someone from whom you’ll learn.
• For
  communications majors, consider starting out by working for a political
  campaign, a national political representative, or a crisis
  communications agency.
• Do two career-related things every
  year that scare you. Give a speech. Write an article. Volunteer to help
  a highly visible NGO launch a campaign. You’ll learn a lot and build
  your self-confidence.
• Know your way around a 10K. If you can
  talk numbers, people listen to the other ideas you have. I was in a
  meeting recently where a CFO of a large publicly traded firm remarked
  that I was the smartest marketing person he had ever met.
  Interestingly, I don’t think we ever had a conversation about
  marketing. We were just talking financials, but I earned my credibility
  from being number savvy.
• Read. The Wall St. Journal. Harvard Business Review. Fortune. The Economist. Sports Illustrated (the best writing although I’m no sports fan) and Entertainment Weekly (because we all need a little fun)
• Follow
  stories and trends from your consulting perspective. For example,
  there’s no more fun for me as a communications consultant than the
  presidential elections. Aside from feeling for the shareholders who
  were hurt, I also really enjoyed following Tyco, Enron, MCI and AIG
  from crisis and executive communications perspectives. Harvard
  President Larry Summers is a fascinating leadership communications
  subject right now. (Plus I think he really understands how the power of
  influencers.)
• If you want to become an expert in an area, sign
  up to teach a class. The needed research and preparation before you get
  up in front of a class will teach you things you never knew before.
• Never
  stop challenging yourself. Clients have said I’m like a Navy Seal —
  equipped to conduct intense, special assignments that are beyond the
  capabilities of the existing resources. So like a Navy Seal, I train
  constantly, learning about new ideas, staying up on trends, and caring
  for my mental and physical well being.

I have a passion
for consulting. I dislike the occasional periods between assignments
and some of the work it takes to develop new business. But, overall, a
life in consulting is an ideal life for insatiable curious, problems
solvers like me.

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