After March 3, I plan to leave my current gig to pursue freelance consulting for awhile, along with a number of colleagues. The exact vehicles and logistics are still in the formative phase - fortunately the administrative logistics for consulting businesses are not too arduous.

Background: Management strategy consulting professional David Dalka, Florian Hollender, and other management consultants are using Twitter.

Florian Hollender at the Killer Consultant blog has some good Consulting 101 tips on how to shop for clothes when starting as a new consultant. I've never really commented on dress considerations publicly, but I'll add just one recommendation on dress based on personal experience:

Gautam Ghosh has both a good find and interesting comments on management consulting recruiting in the current environment. A few themes permeate his post: 1)laser-specific recruiting, 2) hybrid experience, and 3) focus on productivity. I can't really comment on #1, but as for #2, I have known a number of ex-consultants return to their prior consulting firms after having left once for operating companies (in some cases, the returns have been even more numerous than once).

Awhile back I had a post on triangulation, and although I had received a number of questions on how this might be depicted, I never got around to showing it. The attached picture below is pretty good and is motivated by an engagement involving wireless spectrum valuation. The basic idea is that we used three methods to get the range of potential dollar values for each wireless spectrum property. The chart below is the summary chart that ties the results of separate analyses together.

Disclosure: In early March, members of my team and I will most likely be casualties of the economic downturn and inferred strategic changes by our employer, Nortel. This post reflects my perspectives only and not necessarily those of my employer and colleagues.

Dr. Robert Lahm, Jr. (Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship with Western Carolina University) looks like he may have organized some links and resources on consulting here. There are a number of blogs listed along the right hand side of his web page, a number of which I have never covered on this blog before.

For what it's worth (FWIW) - I just ran across this Blog Index (Alpha). Not sure when this was introduced (perhaps vintage 2008?). I don't fully understand the scope and rankings yet, but I find the discovery interesting given my time away from actively being involved in the corporate blogging space. Notes to self: one consulting firm (Accenture) on the list at #18 of 48, heavy tech in top 10, and mixed industries in top 30.

Kevin Gao conducted an interview with me about management consulting (targeted as those seeking to learn more about the field and/or gain employment as a consultant). The interview is posted here at his blog, Management Consulted.

ConsultantNinja has an older but excellent post painting a picture of the prospect for jobs in the consulting market. The upshot of his annecdotes are that demand (for candidates) is down and supply is up. (Note: ConsultantNinja also has a later post that characterizes the current market as "the worst time in the last 20 years to try and get into consulting").