Situation: You are stuck on a desert island with no lifeline access. What are the essential books and tools you need for management consulting?

Management consultants often create CVs that are included in firm directories or as addendums to proposals to clients. The structure of these CVs often differ significantly from that of traditional, chronological resumes used to apply for jobs - namely "consulting-style CVs" are used to highlight project experience and either functional skills or focus areas. This is in line with a consultant's desire to land projects and fill temporary skill gaps in a client organization as opposed to landing a permanent position within an organization.

When one is thinking about developing a brand identity from a marketing perspective, it is best to think broadly so that a cohesive system and set of principles are built to support the underlying cause. Dr. David Aaker (e.g., in his book "Building Strong Brands") puts forth a system that challenges practitioners to decompose the way they think about brand identity (both core and extended) along several dimensions, including "Brand as a Product", "Brand as an Organization", "Brand as a Person", and "Brand as a Symbol".

Tony Karrer gave a Web 2.0 presentation in Los Angeles to an audience at the Institute of Management Consultants (unfortunately I was not able to attend having just learned about it that day).  He covers two aspects: serving clients and reaching prospects. Apparently, most of the interest was in the latter area, and as a summary of one of his theses, I reference the title of his blog post, "LinkedIn - Prospecting No - Conversation Yes : eLearning Technology".

A lot of people in Twitter circles characterize that twittering feels like the days of early majority blogging, for me circa 2004ish with an even less mature toolset (I am being generous). With respect to business use, it seems like everyone needed more help back then, as not everyone came out of the gate running. Here Dave Sify summarized the state of the corporate blogosphere in 2004. How few the companies were.

Nail in the coffin. Perhaps not, but I'd have to agree it's a bad case. The New York Times portrays a tough canvas of MBAs and their responsibilty in the economic crises in the article entitled, "Is It Time to Retrain Business Schools?". The article starts off:

The term "workstream" is often used in consulting, but offhand I cannot think about where it is defined for new consultants to reference. A workstream is not a fancy concept, yet it is an important construct that often has ties to consulting proposals, engagement management and division of labor, and processes used with the client. Note that not all consulting firms will characterize workstreams the same way that I describe them here, but I have found similar structures used in a number of consulting organizations that I have worked with.

Kelly points me to a list of blogs for MBAs. There's a mixture of new ones and older ones in the list (looks like this blog just made it on the page at #100). I'll have to check out the list (and add a few to my newsreader) as my involvement with various business school communities has been increasing as of late.

Three years ago I wrote a post entitled "Leadership Is An Innate Skill?". In that post, I essentially avoided the core topic (because I didn't have an opinion), but I made some anecdotal points about  how one could foster one's leadership style (which I thought was a more important point).

Whether to use consultants versus interim managers can be a bit of a loaded topic, and I'll choose not to address every angle in one post. Here I will just scratch the surface and paint some color by relating some anecdotal experiences. Depending on interest level, I may follow-up this post with additional discussion at a broader level.

To set the context, here's a couple of working definitions that I'll offer up: