November 2023

Paradigms Lost

by Alan Culler | Nov 25, 2023 | Living

A Rant

I’m not really a rant-kinda-guy, no really, I’m not. . .

Whined the wishy-wash writer-wrestling with what the wrecked-world hath wrought . . .

Resistance is futile . . .a least, . . . that’s what “they” say . . .

So ranters gonna rant, rant, and rant, and I guess that’s me . . . today . . .

Yeah . . .

This is a rant – the ramblings of an old brain, retired from the rotation of the rat-wheel, writing, and writing, just the same –“Alan, you’re still working; you’re just not getting paid for it.”

This tirade was sparked by David Brooks of the Times who post-October 7^th posited four paradigms for the on-going morass of the Middle East:

paradigm of persecution, murder and abuse, centuries from Hittites, Babylon and Masada, Charlemagne, Emico, Hitler and Stalin, burnt offerings and pogroms endless and then ̶ an anguished cry “Never again!” – We fight!
paradigm of colonization, oppression, landlessness, subject to Crusades, and roving wars with Persians, Ottomans, British, never asked, never free, now we say No More and chant “from the river to the sea.”

(when you say from the “river to the sea,” I hear eradicate me).

mental model of the nattering nabobs of naiveté, ever-smoothing, quoting Rodney King and Martin “why can’t we all just get along?” preaching Partition, peace, prosperity and absolution, contained in an ever-changing Two-State-Solution.

And lastly, the archetype no one openly espouses . . . but many secretly believe:

“It’s a dog-eat-dog world” – Grab it and Growl ̶ we want the farmland, the minerals, the water and to get it, we’re willing to do anything, even what you call slaughter.

I paraphrased (just a little) this David Brooks, named for the psalmist king of three thousand years ago, who started this mess by uniting Israel and Judah, or maybe that was earlier, Moses with the forty-year ramble with Pharoah, the Big Stick, close behind, and the Ultimate Carrot ̶ the “land of milk and honey” just an analogy for locality, an end to wandering, so goats could graze and bees could breed in a basket-hive. Young David (Brooks) sparked my synapses to pondering paradigms.

My first memory of when I first used the words in conflict resolution “Paradigms, Stereotypes and Mental Models” when men mocked my vocabulary and crazily wiggled their butts and offered me two dimes (“mental-models-and-pair-a-dimes-get-it?”). At least I didn’t use the word “heuristic.”

But paradigms, mental models, organizing principles, worldviews, viewpoints, points-of-view kept poking my preconception and stirring up this stew I call Cartesian cognition, “cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am,” which no one ever admits is really “Cogito ergo cogito me,” “I think therefore I think I am.”

Paradigms are the problem!

What started as a descriptor, a string-tied metaphor to help us make sense of the world, a model to eliminate distraction from interesting but irrelevant input, and ease the decision-to-action pathway has become hardened. The map has become the territory!

Not just in Israel, not just in Ukraine, nor Sudan nor Sri Lanka, nor Myanmar nor in US politics, but anywhere we generalize to simplify complexity, where we don’t-know-and-don’t-ask-and-make-shit-up.

Oh we might hang high sounding words on it-“Shining-City-on-the-Hill,” Zion, Caliphate, “Rule-of-Law,” “Geneva Convention,” “White Man’s Burden” . . .

. . . but let’s be clear we are often just making-shit-up to justify taking-what-we-want-and-to-hell-with-anyone-else.

A stereotype is not a combination of entertainment and word-processing equipment, neither is it Truth. A stereotype starts as a mental model, a way to understand someone we don’t know – “all Italians talk with their hands” ̶ that’s crap, of course, but it may help us to understand an energetic, expressive friend of Southern European ancestry, but it’s a generalization to simplify complexity – and worth as much as male bovine feces -maybe less if you’re a gardener or farmer.

Our stereotypes get us in trouble when we generalize a very large population – “Bob is an engineer. Bob struggles to express his feelings. All engineers are cold fish.” ̶ and don’t get me started how we generalize about gender ̶ really? Half the population are jerks, insensitive- idiots, hyper-emotional basket cases, or pains-in-the-ass. Right.

We use humor to reinforce our paradigm of the “Other.” All over the world there are border jokes that impugn intelligence of the “others” on the wrong side of a line on a map –“how do you know I’m from across the border; is it because of the way I talk when asked to buy a potato?” “No, son . . . It’s because . . . this is a hardware store.”

I’ve heard this joke in Newfoundland about Nova Scotians and In Georgia about Alabamans and vice versa. I wonder if it is told along the India Pakistan border.

Jean Shepherd, narrator and author of the movie “A Christmas Story,” who had a midnight radio show on WOR in New York City – WOR was a Big Stick” station, 50,000 watts of broadcast power, and I used to listen in my Boston suburb under the covers as a rebellious 9:00 pm bedtime kid, Jean said it all in one classic Shep routine,

“Ethnic humor demeans an entire group of people based upon something they have no control over ̶ the accident of their birth. So ethnic jokes are Bad – problem is some of those jokes are really funny – so I came up with a solution ̶ a mythical land called “Ethnicia” –“How many Ethnician’s does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Four, one to stand on the chair holding the bulb and three to turn the chair chanting ‘clockwise.’” Shep found a way to save the joke without the mean-spiritedness behind it.

But that is often what a stereotype is, a mean-spirited generalized paradigm to talk about the “other,” someone we don’t understand because of where they live, or how they look, or talk, or ̶ God-forbid ̶ what they believe. We take one small piece of information and generalize it about an entire group ̶ sometimes we don’t even wait for one piece of data ̶ we just make shit up

Talk about making shit up ̶ can you believe how we “otherize” people who believe different things than us. Religion is the ultimate paradigm, a mental model invented to explain the unexplainable.

OK, true believers, people of Faith, forgive me, can you, at least, admit that God, gods, Spirit and the Divine are man’s inventions. No? You’re not going to do that, are you? Silly me. Respect.

Maybe though, you might agree that all this talk about “the chosen people,” “One True Faith,” “The Way and the Light,” is a tad exclusionary, and might make people think you think you’re better than them. Still, no? OK, I respect your right to your religion, just don’t try to make yours mine and stop fighting wars over it, OK?

Me? I’m with the late Andy Rooney, closing curmudgeon of the CBS show Sixty Minutes,

“I might believe in religion, which I don’t, if believing in it made people nicer, but it does not seem to.”

Here’s my paradigm, for what it’s worth, certainly not more than the twenty cents I was offered when I used the word:

God was some person’s way of saying, “Get over yourself. Look up to the sky. Look around. There is much that is greater than you. Have some respect.” Heaven and hell are a heuristic action plan –“Hey listen up ̶ you’ll feel better at the end of your miserable time on this earth if you’re nice to people. If you’re not nice, with your last breath you’ll feel the everlasting burning fires of regret for what you woulda, shoulda, coulda . . . but didn’t.” So fagetabout the angels or virgins and smiling horned red-face demons and try a little kindness.

That’s the problem with paradigms, with the mental models we construct. We come to believe they are real, even though we know there are many that were very wrong:

“The horse is here to stay. And the automobile is just a fad.” Horace Rackham (Henry Ford’s lawyer)
“Recorded music will destroy all musical ability.” John Phillips Souza (America marching band leader)
“Telephones will never catch on.” William Orton (President of Western Union when Alexandr Graham Bell offered to sell him the patent.)
“Television won’t be able to hold on . . . People will get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” Darryl F. Zanuck, (CEO Twentieth Century Fox Studios)
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, (CEO IBM, 1943)

So what are our paradigms today ̶ about changes in the climate ̶ about innovation vs. resource use reduction ̶ about competition vs. collaboration ̶ about what government should do for us and at what level (local, regional, federal)?

Are our mental models about people formed by what they look like, what they believe, where they live, what they have or don’t have?

Or are we ready to lose those stupid stereotypes and kill-or-be-killed paradigms, and have an economy based upon helping, sharing, lifting others up, rather than buying more crap and building arms, opioids and walls.

I confess I haven’t always paid attention, have been too wrapped up in the petty quests and vicissitudes of my existence, had my conscience soothed by a few charitable contributions and I know that a rant like this is useless unless I change my own paradigm.

Let’s think differently, hell, let think for a change, not get stuck in the unbreakable mental model of inertia.

Will you join me, help me, help us?

“You might say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

It’s Thanksgiving, Be Positive!

by Alan Culler | Nov 19, 2023 | Living

I wrote a rant to post this week.

Then Dennis reposted a BizCat article I wrote six months ago where I was genuinely asking what we might start doing about the “Problems of the World.” It was written by my less-cynical self, who grabbed my grumpy-old-man self-by the proverbial lapels, shook me, and said “Dude, can’t you be a little more positive – It’s Thanksgiving week!”

Thanksgiving – gratitude, gratefulness, thanks, counting our blessings, appreciation – thanking our lucky stars, appreciativeness, grace, respect, love, giving.

This week in these United States of America, many will gather with family or friends or both. Some will eat turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing themselves with plenty, saving room for the pumpkin pie, or sweet potato, apple, mincemeat, pecan, or wherever your pie-jones leads you, (Do people eat cake on Thanksgiving? – Well, “Let them eat cake” said Marie, “I prefer pie.”).

Some will watch on TV, what is called the Macy’s Day parade in New York City, inflated balloons of beloved cartoon characters fly, (if it isn’t too windy, ‘cause there was that year that Snoopy got loose and took out a light pole and injured that woman,) and pretty young women wave from floats built on bus platforms, while military drill teams strut their stuff and teenagers in marching high schools bands from the Mid-west couldn’t be more excited to be here.

Thanksgiving – gratitude, gratefulness, thanks, counting our blessings, appreciation – thanking our lucky stars, appreciativeness, grace, respect, love, giving.

I pulled out and reposted an old article that talked about how gratitude was a pre-requisite for leadership, mixed with a story about my mother’s recipe for pumpkin pie, which I’ll make again this year to take to my daughter’s hosted gala feeling supremely lazy, while my eighty-seven year old sister hosts 22 people in Lexington!

Some will watch football. No turkey this year for those Packers, Lions, Commanders, Cowboys, 49ers or Seahawks, (NFL teams playing on Thanksgiving 2023). No mashpotatoes-‘n’-gravy for Ole Miss Rebels, ’n’ ’sippi State Bulldogs, (Is there really only one NCCA game on T’day? “Watz ‘merica cummin’ ta?”). OR maybe it’s High School? Does Lexington High School still play Concord-Carlisle on Thanksgiving morning?

Thanksgiving – gratitude, gratefulness, thanks, counting our blessings, appreciation – thanking our lucky stars, appreciativeness, grace, respect, love, giving.

And I pulled out last year’s post, which traces the history vs. the myth of the first Thanksgiving and ends expressing my gratitude for my readers. I’m still grateful for my readers

But the born-to-shop know what Thanksgiving week is for – training, training, training for BLACK FRIDAAAAY! Black Friday is the day all retailers, but mostly department stores and big box stores in malls give DEEP DISCOUNTS – It’s the starting gate of the Consumer Buying Extravaganza that is Christmas here – the time to buy this year’s go-to robot for Robbie, American Girl doll for Annie, and to pick up the latest iPad for recipes or 119” flat-screen TV for your man-cave.

Thanksgiving – gratitude, gratefulness, thanks, counting our blessings, appreciation – thanking our lucky stars, appreciativeness, grace, respect, love, giving.

Apparently, I’m a little more cynical about this holiday this year. That isn’t to say I am ungrateful for the privilege of my life – ”still vertical and looking at the green side of the grass,”- and for all those who love me, loving wife, children, grandchildren, sibling, siblings-in-laws, their children, and grandchildren, friends, connections, readers, – I am embarrassed by the feast of loving people around me.

I am fed, sheltered and safe unlike so many in this world.

Well, the safe part really means I have no bombs falling on my head, have access to healthcare and vaccines and am in a place relatively less ravaged by the floods, fires, earthquakes and storms that changes in the climate seem to be making worse. Safe doesn’t mean safe from my own stupidity, like cutting myself using my jack knife as a screw driver, or pouring hot water on my hand making coffee, or falling off a ladder. I’m better at that kind of safety, but I still have a long way to go. The “Culler Curse,” as my late brother-in-law used to call my family’s innate clumsiness, is exacerbated by not-paying-attention.

Thanksgiving – gratitude, gratefulness, thanks, counting our blessings, appreciation – thanking our lucky stars, appreciativeness, grace, respect, love, giving.

I am not rich, but I have reached the point in my life where I am OK with that. I am not famous, but haven’t wanted to be since I was a celebrity speaker booking agent and saw what a pain-in-the-ass-lifestyle being famous actually entails. I am reasonably healthy, not without a little extra weight and aches and pains to complain about and not take any action to alleviate.

I am doing better than far too many people I see on the street and on the news. Watching the news on TV should make anyone grateful – if not for the natural disasters and people treating people badly reported every night onscreen, then for all the pharmaceutical ads –“Do you have mild to moderate_____?”- “Doctors recommend______ to supplement chemotherapy and radiation.” –“Daddy that toe fungus is disgusting; it won’t go away on it’s own and it could be contagious -you don’t want to give me toe fungus. Do you?!” –“I’m 78 years old and I work with people much younger than me -before I took massive doses of _____ they all thought I was stupid – now I can hold my own; they still don’t take any of my ideas, but that’s something other than my creeping-forgetting-what-I was-saying-mid-sentence affliction.”

Thanksgiving – gratitude, gratefulness, thanks, counting our blessings, appreciation – thanking our lucky stars, appreciativeness, grace, respect, love, giving.

I have a great deal to be thankful for. Perhaps you do as well. If not, I send my sincere wishes that your life improves. There are a lot of problems in the world and there may be a key-log or two that we might remove to break the log-jam. We should keep looking for those.

Gratitude and kindness may be a beginning. At least, it might be like my friend’s Jewish grandmother said about the efficacy of a steaming bowl of homemade chicken soup as a cold remedy,

“Well, it couldn’t hurt.”

Preparing to Lead Change

by Alan Culler | Nov 13, 2023 | Leading

The times they are a-changin’

My father and mother were born in 1904 and 1908 respectively. In 1988 I interviewed them with a cassette recorder and I just found the tape. I had to scramble to find an old Walkman to listen to it. It was strange to hear their voices as they passed more than twenty years ago, but their answer to one question still amazes me.

“You folks have seen so much technological change in your lifetime, what change had the biggest impact on your life?”

I don’t know what I was expecting. Cars? Airplanes? TV? Computers? After all, my mom was a computer programmer and my dad worked setting type at The Herald Traveler when the newspaper went from linotype to computer typesetting. But the both said in unison,

“Refrigeration!”

“Refrigeration?” I said. I was incredulous.

“Absolutely! Having a refrigerator in your home was a life changer.” said my mother. “In central Florida you had to shop every day. If you bought your meat before three o’clock in the afternoon it spoiled before dinner. Vegetables wilted. The only ice cream you could ever eat was from the drug store or maybe the bicycle ice cream man – if you caught him in the morning.”

“We put the icebox on the front porch, ‘cause it faced north,” my father chimed in. “The iceman came every day. You put your 25¢ or 50¢ card in the window. Heaven help you if you forgot to put it out.”

“But when we got a ’fridge’ you could shop once a week! Talk about freedom!”

I was surprised, but it made sense.

Technology changes and it changes people’s lives, sometimes for the better, sometimes, not-so-much.

I remember when my parents bought a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, I spent less time in the library, but I also put off longer term homework till the night before. Much later, I was working for the owner of Collier’s when encyclopedias went to CD Rom format from print. Talk about change. They started to make the transition and then sold to Microsoft for integration into Encarta. Of course, everything is online today. I get effusive thank you emails from Jimmy Wales for being in the small percentage of Wikipedia users who donate to the support of the platform.

Change. There’s a lot of that going around. If you look back one hundred fifty years and contemplate the change that has occurred it makes your head spin. Just picking two:

Transportation: from walking and horseback to trains, planes, and automobiles, and bicycles, motorcycles, electric scooters and skateboards.
Communications: from face-to-face talking and print to telegraph, telephone, radio, film, TV, Internet streaming, cell phones, VOIP, smart phones, Zoom, Skype, blogs, vlogs podcasts, etc.

I’m not even touching how computers have evolved in my lifetime from warehouses full of vacuum tubes to the power of the smart phone to super-computers of quantum computers and generative artificial intelligence.

Reactions to change

These changes changed people’s individual lives and they changed how people interact locally and globally. The changes in transportation, communications, and the transfer of information shrunk the world. People started talking about “globalization.” The export of communications and entertainment products from the developed nations created a homogenization that some found offensive. There was a resurgence of identification with local identity, nationalism, in some cases a kind of tribalism.

Companies in developed nations started staffing and producing all over the world. Then during the Covid epidemic, extended international supply chains became a problem. Off-shoring became balanced by re-shoring.

That’s the thing about change; it produces reactions. Newton’s Third Law, “Every action produces and equal and opposite reaction,” applies to social systems as well as physical bodies. Pendulum’s swing: growth and recession, innovation and improvement, fragmentation and consolidation, start-ups and acquisitions, progress and retrenchment.

Some people say this is because “people fear change.” But if that were absolutely true, no one would ever leave home, get married, have children, move their home or do anything difficult that might mean they might be a different person.

People don’t fear change; they fear loss – loss of job, power, status, whatever. Some people also see the potential for loss in the unknown more than others. Mostly, though people don’t like to be compelled to change. They don’t fear change; they fear your change. They fear potential loss when they don’t have a choice to make it their change.

Time keeps on slippin’ into the future

There are myriad challenges facing us. How will we respond to changes in the climate? Will we innovate our way out of the problem or reduce human behaviors that damage the environment, or both? How will we balance equity of basic needs and opportunity for growth with return on investment, and reward for assuming the risk of growth?

So as we look forward, we should expect change. Perhaps this has always been true. There is a story of a young prince, one Siddhartha Gautama who lived around 450 BCE. He became newly and thoroughly wise and was asked the secret of life. “It changes,” said the one who came to be called the Buddha, (teacher).

As I look forward to the future and realize just how much change the next generation will need to adapt to I thought to write down some ideas for those who step up to lead.

Leading change

I often differentiate leaders from managers. Managers get the job done in a steady state. Leaders operate in abnormal circumstances like change, to provide direction and attract followers. I developed this description when I was delivering leadership workshops for senior or mid-level leaders engaged in change, because the question always came up. Of course, this is overly simplistic and ignores the fact that a leader and a manager are often the same person applying slightly different skills in different circumstances. The leadership rubric of direction and attracting followers is a good start, but not enough.

Max Depree, who was at one time the CEO of Herman Miller, the high design office furniture maker who made the Aeron chair that supports my back even as I write this, wrote two books, Leadership is an Art, and Leadership Jazz. These books are a description of Mr. Depree’s philosophy of servant leadership passed down to him by his father. I’m not sure which book it’s in, but I wrote down Mr. Depree’s words:

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality; the last is to say thank you.”

Start with Why

Start with Why is the title of Simon Sinek’s best-selling leadership book. Stating the compelling case for change and expressing gratitude are ways to attract followers, to enroll followers to make the change happen. There was a story that was told to me so many times during the British Airways privatization project in the 80s that I thought I’d witnessed the meeting. Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister that privatized the airline,, said to the gathered executives, “Gentlemen, please understand I will sell you. I can sell you off in little pieces, planes and routes one-by-one if I have to, or I can sell your stock in a public offering. It’s your choice.” This was the first and maybe the best compelling case for change in my career.

Late in my career, I worked at another of Mrs. Thatcher’s privatizations, BP (shortened from British Petroleum). I helped with Continuous Improvement work focused on improving process safety. The compelling case for change was the accidents at the Texas City refinery, and the Deep Water Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. No one had to tell that story repeatedly; one only had to mention the name of the sites to focus everyone on improvement.

Begin with the end in mind

“Begin with the end in mind” is habit number two of Stephen R. Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It describes planning using outcomes and work backwards, but also setting direction, vision, a clear and inspiring description of the desired future state.

Recognize that everyone will change

In the 1990s I wrote an article that rapid-fire change as a “speed-learning crisis.” Change like we are experiencing was already visible. Now one might argue change is accelerating and it requires new knowledge and skills, new models for leading, and a perpetually adaptive mindset. At that point, I had watched Colin Marshall the Chief Executive of British Airways transform from a well-dressed toff barking demands for tea to a shirt sleeves colleague willing to listen and respond positively to his mid-level leaders driving the change. I heard a BA union rep respond to a rank and file complaint about the money spent on privatization, “True, mate, but then we were re-educating our Chief Executive and you know how expensive that can be.”

“The thing about change management,” says Dr. Nelson Repenning of MIT, “Is that nothing happens unless someone does something different.” New thoughts and new behaviors change you, make it impossible to be aloof or to delegate change. I changed tremendously over my thirty-seven years as a change consultant. Sometimes I changed slowly or reluctantly; sometimes I used my late-adopter persona as an excuse, but I changed and you will too.

So while the entrepreneurs and engineers bring on the transporter beams and tricorders, prepare to lead or follow, but decide what shouldn’t change no matter what.

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality; the last is to say thank you. In between the leader is a servant” who ensures that no one is left behind and that followers learn and grow.

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Paradigms, Stereotypes and Mental Models

by Alan Culler | Nov 5, 2023 | Consulting

You know who you are.

You decided to become a consultant for a good reason. Maybe you liked business, loved problem-solving and were good at the analytics. Maybe you were freaked out by how much to had to borrow to get the degree that was your ticket to consulting. Maybe everyone in your top of your class cohort joined the consulting club and the discussion was electrifying and you aced the interview case prep.

So you interviewed. The interview team was impressed by your volunteer work and, once again, you aced the case they asked you about and loved it. You felt at home. They made an offer to you – one of the very few they offered to anyone at your school. They liked you.

Or maybe you were headhunted or sought out a consulting firm after you had worked in industry and had some specific expertise. Your accomplishments were impressive. They liked you.

You joined the firm. You worked very hard. You knew there was an “up or out” policy, (even though it’s now called “grow or go” by HR) but it never worried you. Even among the other smart, nice, interesting people you work with, managers and partners are impressed with you. You got promoted, maybe even more than once.

No one calls you “Newbie” anymore.

You hear yourself referred to as a “Journeyman” or a “real Yeoman.” (Maybe you didn’t have to look that one up and enjoy the compliment of being called the first medieval farmer who actually owned the land he farmed or carried a longbow and was the backbone of the English Army in the thirteen century.) Even though you hated the term newbie, you hear yourself referring to the newest class that way.

You’ve gone from crunching numbers till long after dark, to managing schedules and budgets and supervising the people who crunch numbers till late at night. You are a lot nicer to the newbies than some managers were to you.

Now what?

If you are asking yourself this question, you have raised your head from the work and are considering (reconsidering) your career.

Maybe that is because salary increases have levelled out. Maybe you are looking at the personal relationship challenges from your travel schedule. Or maybe you are feeling that the job has changed and is changing as you rise. Are you managing the work more than doing it? Is there pressure to “extend” or “expand” your project, i.e., sell more work?

You have reached a fork in the consulting road.

You might have easily missed the earlier “doesn’t have ‘right stuff’” fork. You know the one I’m talking about – the associate that can’t estimate how much time a task takes and misses a deadline. You’ve never been the associate who gets too chummy with a junior client and shares a finding before the presentation.

If you joined from your undergraduate university you might be up against a bias in some firms, “real consultants have graduate degrees,” and be considering a return to school. You might even be among the infinitesimal percentage of consultants in the big firms that might be sponsored for a graduate degree.

But even so or if you joined from graduate school, suddenly you are faced with choices:

Do you like managing? Mid-career consultants, manage the team, manage the schedule with the client, manage the client’s acceptance of findings. They know when they can manage the “big client” on their own and when they need to “roll out the partner.”
Can you, do you want to, sell? OK, maybe they never use the word “sell” in your firm. Maybe they use euphemisms like “extension” (more work from the same client buying center) or “expansion” (additional similar work from another part of the organization). Maybe bringing in new project work is called “business development” or “client development,” or maybe there is a quasi-mystical language like “we’ve been asked to serve,” but if you’ve gotten this far you know, partnership and the real money in consulting, is reserved for the people who “feed the firm,” ”bring in new business,” “acquire clients,” “establish relationships.” There are two primary sales paths:
- Rainmaker – direct sales. These partners often maintain excellent relationships with people who currently hire consultants or will shortly rise to that role.
- Thought Leader – indirect sales. These people attract clients with research, published books and speaking or media engagements that turn into service offerings that clients want to buy.
Do you want to keep the multiplier? Clients pay fees that are two and a half to five times what you are paid. At mid-career, many consultants say to themselves, “if I worked for myself I could keep some of that money.” At this point some mid-career consultants consider, starting their own firm, or “going independent.” If you are in this group, think carefully. All of the above choices will still apply, all at once, immediately. Ask yourself, who are the clients that will hire me, right now? Next month? Next year or the year after?
Do you want to stay a consultant? I was a consulting “lifer.” Over almost forty years, I worked for five different consulting firms and worked for myself as a firm founder, independent, and as part of a network of independent consultants. You could say I liked the field. I loved the learning curve associated with a new client or new project. I loved working with smart, nice, interesting people. I loved helping clients change their business for the better. In my retirement, I still write about the industry. I also recognize that consulting isn’t for everyone.

Mid-career in consulting is a time of choices. Choose wisely.

I wrote a book. (Maybe you know that).

EBooks are now available in many places, print copies still just on Amazon (for now), but coming soon to a bookstore near you.

I would be grateful if you read it. Thanks.