A simple definition of management consulting might look like this, right. Consultants help executives to break down problems and make very difficult decisions to create change. And you can see the icons that I put right there. So today right now we're going to talk about specifically the executives themselves. First thing you'll notice is that they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and different focus areas. And so specifically, what is it that executives are trying to do and why is it that management consultants target them? So why executives? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is you like me, management consultants, we all want to make a big difference. None of us woke up this morning to come to work and do work that doesn't matter right. We want to make a large impact. And a lot of times that means servicing large organizations that are making a difference that are creating the product that people want to buy. A lot of times they have complex issues or high risk problems, things that need to be solved, things that affect hundreds and thousands of people. And this is not a trivial point. Also, large corporations have the money, right? Big problem, urgent problem, complex problem that needs to be solved typically means that they're willing to pay and they can pay for that. Also in terms of decision making, even though we say serve an executive a lot of times corporations and large organizations, even governments, even though one person might sign your contract. It's a lot of people that are involved in the decision making. As a result of that, there's a lot of different skills that you need to have to be able to do this well when you have multiple stakeholders and cross functional relationships, those are pretty big GMAT kind of words, right? What do you mean by stakeholders? Well, it could be a lot of people, not just your employees, but also your suppliers. If you're in financial services or healthcare, it's very regulated industry. So local and federal government, they want something to say. And then also your customers. We've seen over the last five years companies trying to make money but doing it in the wrong kind of way and customers don't like that. And customers vote with their wallet and when they don't like that, they'll stop buying your products. And then finally, and you've seen this, if you're a consultant and you've been at a final presentation or even the beginning of a project, in the kickoff meeting a lot of times, there's 7 or 8 people around the table. Yes, you were hired by the marketing chief, but in addition to that, the manufacturing person, the finance person, the operations person, the salesperson. They're all around this conference table with the idea that any recommendation you have, you need to sell it, not just to your client counterpart but typically all of her colleagues and her peers too. Because for her to make a difference, it's typically more than just her department. Okay, well, okay John you've convinced me that executives are the right people, right. They've got big problems and they have budget. But why not just help kind of one person at a time? I mean, why does it need to be, the entire organization? So here what I'd say is that yes, there's definitely is work that you could help one executive at a time and a lot of times that's called executive coaching. It's not really management consulting in that sense, you have an executive who wants to improve. Maybe they went from being a director to a vice president or a senior vice president or an executive vice president, and as a part of that you as an executive coach. Our meeting with them once a month, once every couple of months and asking them questions to help them really discover themselves their leadership style, how to motivate their team, how to operate at the next level, right? So that's completely legitimate. A little bit different than what we're going to be talking about over the specialization. Another flavor is subject matter expert. Let's say you have a PhD in a certain kind of chemistry and you are hired by an executive still one executive to do something very, very specific. Maybe you're on retainer, they're paying you $15,000 a month to be on call when they have specific questions or they give you a very specific project and you do the work kind of by yourself. Once again you are a subject matter expert. Nothing wrong with that. But it looks a little bit different than working in more of a team's based environment as a management consultant. The final one is a very large category. I would just call it project management where you're hired to do work and it's somewhat clear what they want you to do, they want you to do A B C D. So in terms of problem solving, the problem itself as well as how to solve it have already been made clear. And your part and your contribution many times is to help them to to do the work. All these a little bit different than management consulting. However I would say even if you fall in those categories many of the tools and the tips and the tricks that we're going to learn during the specialization will be useful to you, okay. A couple of key takeaways, one consulting like anything else professional service is about the clients. So who the clients are, what they need, what will make them successful, and how to best communicate with them is 80% of what the specialization is about. For us, we always need to come back to the client because at the end of the day we're here to make them successful. That really is the criteria. Also and thankfully consultants charge our clients a pretty good amount of money. It's [COUGH] not unusual for consultants to charge $100,000 or a big company might charge a million dollars to a client. So if we're charging them that much money, of course, that means that we need to be developed during this much value.
