INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS
New England Chapter

News and Views

In this issue:

Upcoming Events

News from
the Board

IMCNE Members
in Print

IMCNE Member Profiles
Mary Adams
Carol Monaco

Business Book Reviews

Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success

The World’s Newest Profession: 
Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century

Upcoming Events

Friday, May 18, 2007
Consultants Roundtable
Communicating for Change
Rebecca's Café, Burlington, MA
8:00 a.m.

Anyone involved in change management or corporate cultural transformation knows how difficult it is to get employees engaged in the process. Motivating employees to embrace change and perform work in new ways is critical to the success of corporate change. Jill Hulsen of Insight Out Communications will show you how incorporating entertainment into employee communications can dramatically increase successful change. We’ll discuss what types of entertainment are appropriate and when. In addition, we’ll discuss how to deliver a message that is embraced by employees.

Target Audience: Professionals who provide change management services.

In view of augmented outsourcing efforts across a broad range of industries, virtual teams, assembled from different organizations and at remote locations, are becoming a more common setting to drive projects. This poses particular challenges and may significantly impact the success rate.

The objective of this Roundtable is to increase the awareness of risks and opportunities as a first crucial step towards leveraging the full potential of virtual teams.

Bernd Janssen, PhD, of Science&Management Consulting will lead a 30 minute introduction which will be followed by a discussion amongst participants who want to share their field experience.

Target Audience: Consultants who facilitate team building tasks, coach managers and project leaders

Dr. Bernd Janssen has more than 25 years of experience in Drug Discovery, Management of Research and Development functions and international collaborations.

Prior to founding Science&Management Consulting, a Massachusetts based firm that serves companies in Europe and the US, Bernd held various leadership and management positions in the Pharmaceutical Industry, most recently as Director Medicinal Chemistry with Abbott Laboratories, and previously with BASF Pharma. There he has launched several drug candidates into clinical development stages.

As a graduate from the University of Bonn, Bernd earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Ruhr University of Bochum (Germany). He has coauthored over 50 basic patent applications and scientific papers, revealing his inventive contributions to Dermatology, Oncology and Immunology. He was also awarded the first BASF Innovation Prize for his seminal role in moving a discovery concept into a highly successful marketed product.

Bernd is member of several academic and industrial advisory boards.

EARLY REGISTRATIONS END THIS FRIDAY!

ConsultingWord 2007
June 24-26, 2007
At the Disney Contemporary Resort in Orlando

This is the first national convention being produced with IMC’s new partner, the American Management Association. ConsultingWorld™ will focus on the business side of the engagement. You will discover how you can better serve your clients, improve value, and uncover new money-making opportunities. The program includes keynoters Oren Harari and Steven Covey, workshops, results of national client satisfaction survey, many networking venues, new practice areas, marketing strategies, changes in the consulting marketplace this year, and more. For more information visit http://consulting-world.org/

News from the Board

Next Event: Featuring You?

Have you read a good business book lately? Do you have a question that you would love to ask a group of consultants? Are you one of our New England members that is tired of all our meetings being held in Boston? Do you have a challenge that you are facing and would like to get feedback? Do you have a case study that would fuel a good discussion? THEN USE THIS RESOURCE!! 

It takes about three minutes to fill out a Roundtable Proposal. You give us a title and description; we’ll publicize it and handle registrations. This program helps our members Get Smart, Get Known, Get Business.  What are you waiting for?  Download the form today from our Programs page (http://www.imcne.org/programs.htm)

The Next Step in Your Professional Journey

IMCNE Members in Print

Carol Bergeron (Bergeron Associates) http://www.bergeronassociates.com was a panelist at WPI Venture Forum’s April 10 th event. One May 2 nd she is a panelist at MassBioTech Council’s HR Committee meeting on the topic of succession planning.

IMCNE Member Profiles

She Feels as if She Has It All

Mary Adams says her greatest success is balancing a great marriage, great kids and a great business.  Her business partner is her husband and together they are raising their two boys, building their business and participating pretty actively in their communities.  "We are a modern version of a farm family," Mary adds. "Our work is our passion but it also gives us the freedom to be there for our sons and their sports, homework, etc. Before I moved to Massachusetts in 1990, I had lived in twelve different places on three continents. I’m surprised that I’m still here!"

Mary founded Trek Consulting in early 1999. She was drawn to put her experience to good use after a 15-year career in high risk lending where I learned to analyze the full picture of a business from finances to management, market and strategy. "Over the eight years of my consulting career, I have made it my business to help companies get the information they need to build the best and most profitable business possible, Mary says, "My interest in good information has led me to become something of an expert in intangibles—the unseen but most powerful drivers of business success in today’s economy—including people, knowledge, and external partnerships. We get companies tangible information about these intangible assets—to deliver plenty of tangible profits." 

Ten Things You Didn’t Know about Mary Adams:

1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, it would be…  I am a very healthy eater. But if you gave me chip and dips, I could probably eat them forever.
2. If I weren't a business person, I would be a…  This answer changes over time.  Right now, I would say a researcher or academic because I am obsessed with this intangible thing.
3. Something I would like to do, but haven't had the chance… Travel across Asia.
4. The last concert I went to…  Willie Nelson under the stars last August.
5. My favorite toy as a kid…  A set of big cardboard blocks. They were the foundation of all kinds of construction projects and the walls of bunkers as we pretended to be female Hogans’ Heroes.
6. When I'm not working, you'll find me… reading, cooking, running and kayaking.
7. My favorite TV show is… The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
8. If I could be any animal, I would be a...  I can’t relate to the idea of being an animal—I like being a person.
9. The last movie I saw was…  Volver by Almodovar.
10. If I could have dinner with a famous person, dead or alive, he or she would be…  Peter Drucker or James Burke, the guy that wrote Connections (a book and a show on PBS)—both of them see the very big picture and connect the dots in fascinating ways.

Learn more about Mary and her business by visiting her firm’s website http://www.trekconsulting.com

Carol Monaco lives in Chelmsford with her husband, who is a hardware engineer, and their cats. Carol and her husband love to travel and particular enjoy nature trips (such as traveling to Africa or seeing polar bears in the wild), though there are very few places they wouldn’t go given the opportunity. They recently had the pleasure of traveling to Botswana.

Carol founded MarketWise Insights, Inc. in 1999 and became incorporated in 2005. MarketWise Insights, Inc. helps clients increase their understanding of markets, customers, and competitors via qualitative market research and marketing planning services. Carol has helped small and large companies research and analyze markets, forecast market size, determine market share, and expand their product and service offerings. Recent projects have included investigating the effectiveness of self-checkout machines, determining market share for storage providers, and researching the brand perception of IT service providers.

One of her biggest surprises was the experience of going on safari to Tanzania and Kenya –even animals that seem boring in a zoo are completely fascinating in the wild. One of her most significant successes was delivering ‘bad news’ to a client. The client was launching an educational sports video and predicted the market size would be in the millions or even billions. After completing the research, which was quite challenging as this was a new market, and determining the size of the market was in fact much smaller than expected, she hesitated to deliver the news. However, the client’s response was that this was ‘the best money we ever spent’—as they would have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in product development and instead were able to change their development and launch strategy.

Ten Things You Didn’t Know about Carol Monaco:

1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life…  it would be pizza.
2. If I weren't a business person…  I would be a nature photographer.
3. Something I would like to do, but haven't had the chance go to…  India.
4. The last concert I went to was…  Bruce Springsteen in Fenway Park.
5. My favorite toy as a kid…  was a stuffed tiger.
6. When I'm not working, you'll find me…  out photographing animals somewhere, preferably in Africa.
7. My favorite TV show is…  Friday Night Lights.
8. If I could be any animal…  I would be a tiger or another kind of cat.
9. The last movie I saw was… the last really good one was Last King of Scotland.
10. If I could have dinner with a famous person, dead or alive, he or she would be…  Ghandi. 

Learn more about Carol and her business by visiting her firm’s website http://www.marketwiseinsights.com/

These member profiles were written by Lewis Green , the Founder and Managing Principal of L&G Business Solutions LLC. (http://www.l-gsolutions.com). Lewis is the editor of News & Views. Profile candidates are selected from our volunteers, new members and a random selection of attendees at IMCNE events.

Business Book Review

Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success
by Penelope Trunk

Some of you may read Penelope's blog, also called The Brazen Careerist. For those of you who don't know her work, Penelope is an excellent writer on the subject of career guidance aimed at those generations. Her column, "Brazen Careerist", appears on Yahoo! Finance and also is the name of her blog, and "The Climb", runs in the Boston Globe. Because I am a reader of Trunk's column and blog, I read this book with great interest.

I am fascinated by her writings because they focus on providing guidance to Generations X and Y. And she distinguishes those generations from Baby Boomers (my generation) by saying they are breaking new ground in the business world and that they are searching for new ways to advance their careers without climbing the business ladder. For me, it sounds exactly like what we Baby Boomers said and sought to do and did in many ways. But Penelope sees us much in the same way that we saw our parents. I guess things never really change.
 
Here are a few claims she makes. You decide how different they are from the claims made by Boomers in the '60s and '70s.

• Gender-based pay disparity will disappear.
• So will the glass ceiling.
• People will choose careers because they love the work and it will be self-fulfilling.
• Men and women will share in child-rearing.

For me, I see nothing new. My friends and peers all said the same things decades ago. We made some progress but did not achieve those goals. Perhaps Generations X and Y will.

The writing is excellent and the ideas are solid. I argue, however, that they are not new. That said, I recommend that everyone in the business world should read this book. It either applies to you directly or indirectly in a variety of ways. Directly if you are a member of those generations; indirectly if you are a Boomer and want a sense of how you are being seen.

Review written by Lewis Green, IMCNE Newsletter Editor

This book was written by an academic at Oxford but is very readable. McKenna reviews the history of management consulting in the 20th century and challenges the industry to rise to the challenge of truly becoming a profession in the 21st century.

The most striking thing about this book is the convincing case he makes that the business of the large consulting firms in the U.S. has really been created and perpetuated by government regulation—a few examples:

• The U.S. bias against monopolies (in contrast with the strong industrial groups of Germany and Japan), created the need for a neutral party to provide information across industries on “best” practices—the role of management consultants was knowledge transfer.

• After the Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act took banks out of the business of performing what were referred to as “management audits” and drove accounting firms to focus on providing financial audits. Taking these two traditional players out of the market opened the door for the explosive growth of McKinsey, A.T. Kearney and Booz Allen & Hamilton.

• In the 1950’s, concerns about IBM’s monopolistic power lest the U.S. Department of Justice to prohibit the company from offering computer consulting advice—opening the door for the accounting firms to get back into the consulting business, most notably Arthur Andersen.

• In the mid-1980’s a ruling on liability of the corporate board of Trans Union for failing to exercise “informed business judgment” in the approval of an acquisition.

• This led to a rash of similar suits and a crisis in D&O insurance—until boards discovered the power of consultant reports to validate their decisions—leading consultants beyond knowledge transfer to the sale of legitimacy.

• Ironically, the next turn came when the accounting firms lobbied for their own change in regulation. In response to concerns about the liability of professional firms, Congress overrode Clinton’s veto to pass the Private Securities Reform Act of 1995 which, McKenna asserts, allowed firms to continue to audit riskier clients—and led directly to Enron and the collapse of Arthur Andersen.

• The Enron crisis, of course, led to the exit by accounting firms from consulting and the Sarbanes Oxley legislation—both creating huge new opportunities for the consulting market.

The second big theme in the book is ethics. McKenna is very open in his support for increased professionalism in consulting. He asserts that McKinsey got a free ride in Enron and that, with Sarbox, “having failed to prevent the corporate governance crisis, management consultants were nevertheless once again touted as the best solution to rising corporate liability.” Although the cynical would say that’s a great business, McKenna tells us that the profession “eventually needs to grow up.”

That’s why members of the Institute of Management Consultants need to continue to focus on our Code of Ethics http://www.imcusa.org  and support the work that IMC continues to do to build the shared body of knowledge for our profession. 

You can read more about this book at Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org

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