On this Father’s Day, I wanted to give a short tribute to my dad, and reflect on his professional influence on me. My father is a great man. He received an education in electrical engineering, served in the U.S. Army, been involved in numerous industrial and technology companies around the world, started a number of entrepreneurial ventures, had two kids with my mom (myself and my brother), been successfully married for more than forty years, supported numerous workers and business partners, and managed to stay energized and reasonably healthy to date.

Although I’ve developed a number of blog posts addressing the practice of management consulting, I have spent little time tying things together into a framework of secret

In helping companies develop, tune-up, or reboot their professional services organizations, here are some example of complaints I’ve heard that reflect the need for change:

Got an idea from Dan Wallace (Twitter handle: @Ideafood) to write a manifesto (link to some other examples here). As many regular readers may know, I am pretty passionate about the practice of business and management consulting. Without further ado, here is a working draft of my management consulting manifesto:

Eventually projects with consultants come to an end. Similar to completion of a good run as an employee of a firm, feelings at the end of a consulting project can be bittersweet. For me, the sweetness of successfully completing a project feels great, while the end of the day-to-day, close working relationship with the client can make one reflect for a moment longer.

Over the years through consulting mentors, peers, and personal experience, I’ve learned of some tricks to making transitions smoother for both clients and consultants. Here are some:

When people think about consultants, they often think about those that work for companies like McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte, etc. These are companies that are essentially independent from product vendors. However, there are a number of companies that provide consulting or professional services as part of product companies (e.g., companies like Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Ericsson, IBM) that may sell things like hardware or software.

It’s a tale of Big Company and Small Company.

Big Company likes Small Company’s:

• focus and style
• entrepreneurial attitude and skills.

Small Company likes Big Company’s:

• scale of resources
• scope and number of customers.

Big Company hates thing like:

Many blog posts and articles address when to use management consultants versus not. Some argue that using consultants for strategy development intimate incompetence by management (example here). Others argue that consultants should be used in cases when expertise is higher than that of existing employees.

While I don’t often write about leadership, management, and consulting “techniques”, there’s one that I wanted to share as I’ve found it useful when facilitating a diverse group of folks. I call it “painting the ends of the spectrum”, although I’m sure there other varieties and names for this approach.

Here are a couple of examples of “painting the ends of the spectrum”:

For those unfamiliar with Quora, it is one of the emerging “question and answer” sites on the Internet. Although its positioning is not quite clear to me yet, a point of difference relative to other sites (like Yahoo Answers) is that Quora integrates aspects of social networking technology. Throw in a carefully-honed, early-adopter market segment and some venture capital hype – the result for now seems to be a high-quality, professional dialogue hub.