INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS
New England Chapter

News and Views

In this issue:

Upcoming Events

CMC Update

News from
the Board

Welcome New Members

IMCNE Members
in Print

IMCNE Member Collaboration

IMCNE Member Profiles
Martha Hopewell
Allen Falcon

Business Book Review
The Long Tail

Share Your News

Upcoming Events

Friday, January 19, 2007
Creating Great Customer Experiences
with Lewis Green, L&G Business Solutions
Rebecca's Café, Burlington, MA
Noon

It is about the “who” not the “what.” It is always about serving people, not selling products and services. Lewis Green will lead this discussion and focus on creating great customer experiences, building customer loyalty and differentiating our businesses by being known for our customer and client experiences.

Lewis Green, Founder and Managing Principal of L&G Business Solutions, LLC, http://www.l-gsolutions.com brings three decades of business management experience. L&G Business Solutions, LLC, represents his third company. Additionally, he held management positions with GTE Discovery Publications, Puget Sound Energy and Starbucks Coffee Company. He has been a keynote speaker, a panelist and a moderator at workshops, seminars and professional annual meetings held throughout the U.S. His fifth book is scheduled for publishing in the spring.

Walk-ins are welcome and you may purchase lunch at the Café.
For more information go to www.imcne.org

Strategic Partner Events — Check out our Calendar of Strategic Partner and Other Events on our web site for more information on events of interest. Click www.imcne.org/spcalendar.html, then click on the appropriate link for detailed information that could save you money.

CMC Update

Make an informed decision about certification

Our parent organization has put a number of improvements into place to make it easier and faster to pursue certification as a management consultant. You'll be hearing more about this after the first of the year. In the meantime, hear what a panel of certified professionals from a variety of fields (including a CMC) had to say about why they pursued certification and how it has turned out for them. We recorded the discussion and have it available for free download at http://www.imcne.org/cmc.html.

News from the Board

Member Survey: By now, you have hopefully completed the Member Survey co-sponsored by IMCNE and SPC.  If you have not, please fill it out. It is part of an important effort to coordinate our activities and leverage our mutual strengths. But, like good consultants, we don’t want to make any decisions without good data. It takes just five minutes to fill out. You can access the survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=813502929349.

If any of you have ever done a survey like this you know that it requires many drafts to get to a tight text that provides high quality data. Ron Visocchi and I would like to thank our members from Insight Management (www.insightmanagementgroup.com), Charlie Perry and Pat Kirton, for their advice on multiple drafts of this survey. Their advice was very focused and to the point.  Thanks!  -Mary Adams

Roundtables: Our new Roundtable format has been a big success! These small group conversations are proving to be a powerful way to learn from your peers in our consulting community. Attend one soon and please also consider submitting a proposal to lead a Roundtable after the first of the year. Kudos to organizer Linda Watson. For questions or to submit a proposal, contact Linda at . You’ll find the form at http://imcne.org/forms/Roundtable%20RFP%202006-08.doc

New Year’s Resolution: Apply for Certified Management Consultant (CMC) Status - One of our first Roundtables of the new year will be an information session on certification. Get certification is on your list of resolutions and then come to our session to make 2007 a special year. In the meantime, contact Brooks Fenno with any questions

Submissions to our newsletter. A fellow IMCNE member shared with me recently the fact that the highest citations for her firm’s website were from IMCNE. Non-profit organizations count more heavily for search engines. Get your name in our newsletter by contributing tips (see how below), sharing news or serving as a volunteer. Although I promise you’ll get much more than just website rankings out if, we are happy to give you the exposure! Mary Adams (www.trekconsulting.com)

Tools You Can Use: Be featured in one of our weekly newsletters by submitting a Tip to IMCNE at . For your Tip to be considered for inclusion, the Tip should appeal to a wide audience of consultants and should be no longer than 50 words (1 -2 short paragraphs). Make sure to give us a 2-4 word title that we can use in the index. Please include your name, company name, email, phone, website, and one sentence describing your business and/or your tagline. Denise Clancey, Membership Chair, www.teledirectpartners.com

Welcome New Members

Ronna Cohen, The 20-20 Group, LLC

Rikki Bouchard, RH Bouchard & Associates, Inc.

Rikki Hansen Bouchard has over 20 years of pharmaceutical development and contract research organization experience. Her expertise includes outsourcing strategy and implementation, account management, strategic partnering, project management, contract negotiation and management, training, proposal development, business and technology solutions for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. She has held positions with two of the world's largest contract research organizations as the Vice President of Contract Management and Proposals and as the Vice President of Worldwide Business Operations.

Rikki founded RH Bouchard & Associates, Inc. in 2003. The Company offers the services of twenty-one consultants located throughout the US. RH Bouchard’s client base includes pharmaceutical, biotech and contract research companies worldwide. To learn more about Rikki go to www.rhbassociates.com

IMCNE Members in Print

Allan B. Haberman, Ph.D. (Haberman Associates) http://www.biopharmconsortium.com was quoted twice in Pharmaceutical Executive's annual Pipeline Report, published in the magazine's December 2006 issue. The article can be seen at http://www.pharmexec.com

Ken Lizotte CMC (emerson consulting group inc.) http://www.thoughtleading.com Maverick Selling: To Build a Better Client Base, Try Counterintuitive Sales Techniques” was published recently in The Independent Consultant. Ken also delivered a presentation on this topic at IMC USA’s Confab in Reno, Nevada in October.

IMCNE Member Collaboration

I need an image consultant (clothing, make-up, hair style, etc.) for a male TV reporter in the Bridgeport/Stamford/Norwalk CT area. The person I use here doesn't know of someone in that area and there aren't many who do this. Any help would be appreciated. Contact Tom Kennedy (Kennedy Group) at or call 781-259-4411, cell 781-354-6277.

IMCNE Member Profiles

She is Woman, Call Her A Master Juggler of Time 

Martha Hopewell founded Seven Centers Consulting (Leadership Coaching and Consulting) in 2005 but the real story is that Martha is a single mom of two sons, Seth (16) and Timothy (12), and yet manages to find time for her clients. She is a master juggler of time. Read on for the full impact of that statement.

"Fortunately, with two such great kids, this hasn't been too overwhelming, although I sure do stay busy handling it all!" Perhaps it's her practice of meditation and interest in esoterics. On the other hand, who among us wouldn't need to practice some sort of meditation when you add the following to a daily schedule of running a business and caring for two teenagers: Social justice issues, wherein Martha devotes a fair amount of time to her board duties at the International Institute of Justice and Development (www.iijd.org), mixed in with her volunteer activities at the International Health Organization (www.iho.org) - both Boston based non-profits. Plus she adores dancing with a passion as well as gardening.
  
I'm tired just thinking about her life. Oh, by the way, in the early '90s Martha rebuilt a field operation for an international child sponsorship agency in northern Senegal, West Africa. The office was on the verge of closing down due to mismanagement. Within four years she rebuilt the organization to serve a population of about 30,000 people in 171 villages and introduced an innovative program model that became the format for all field offices in Senegal

Ten Things You Didn't Know about Martha Hopewell

1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, it would be Chocolate
2. If I weren't a business person, I would be a. Landscape Architect
3. Something I would like to do, but haven't had the chance. Go on a really posh, adventurous two week vacation
4. The last concert I went to was Mexican thrash acoustic guitarists Rodrigo Y Gabriela at the Somerville Theater
5. My favorite toy as a kid. My imagination
6. When I'm not working, you'll find me taking walks, riding my bike and puttering around the house.
7. My favorite TV show is So You Think You Can Dance - hands down!!
8. If I could be any animal, I would be a... Seagull
9. The last movie I saw was. Happy Feet with my son Tim
10. If I could have dinner with a famous person, dead or alive, he or she would be  Mohandas Gandhi

Learn more about Martha and his business by visiting her firm’s website http://www.sevencentersconsulting.com/

A Legos and Political Kind of Guy

Allen Falcon, President of Horizon Information Group, founded Horizon in 1993. Having served as consultant on-staff to CIOs of Fortune 1000 size firms, Horizon applies industry and technology best practices for small- and mid-size organizations, helping them effectively solve technology challenges and leverage technology to achieve strategic advantage.

Allen lives with his wife of five years, his 3-year old daughter and his 2-month old son in Westborough, MA. When they can, the family enjoys traveling to see family, Disney World and hiking.

Ten Things You Didn’t Know about Allen Falcon

1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, it would be…  Pizza – flown in from Pizzeria Due in Chicago
2. If I weren't a business person, I would be a… Candidate for Governor or Senator (I know I could do a better job)
3. Something I would like to do, but haven't had the chance… Run a philanthropic foundation
4. The last concert I went to…  Newport Folk Festival
5. My favorite toy as a kid… Legos
6. When I'm not working, you'll find me… Spending time with my family.
7. My favorite TV show is… The Wire (on HBO).
8. If I could be any animal, I would be a... Dog
9. The last movie I saw was… Happy Feet
10. If I could have dinner with a famous person, dead or alive, he or she would be… Albert Einstein, to discuss philosophy not physics.

Learn more about Allen and his business by visiting his firm’s website http://www.horizoninformation.com/

Business Book Review

If you haven't read  The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, don't wait any longer. The book may scare you, as it turns supply and demand economics on its head and makes us look at the way we do business in a brand new way. But it should also excite you, as Long Tail economics opens a new window for both producers and consumers.

Like any new hypothesis, the book is generating controversy. For example, John Jantsch worries it will cause businesses to chase the next new thing and warn that we need to focus on what works.

I worry instead that businesses will ignore the Long Tail until it is too late. Of course, we need to continue to focus on the tried and true, but ignoring new ideas is akin to putting our heads in the sand. The point here isn't that the Long Tail currently requires us to dump our strategies and create a brand new set. The point is that we need to pay attention to Anderson's vision and to what that may mean to our business's future.

Too much is being made of the data in Anderson's book. I prefer to look at the Long Tail as a growing future state of business that may represent a substantial market share. Those businesses that choose to ignore new ideas, end up having to catch up to their competitors every time new buying trends appear. I recommend that we instead prepare for new trends by reinventing ourselves regularly so that we are out in front of new trends.

If you haven't read the book, here is a very brief synopsis.

Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired Magazine, who shows us "what happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone." He discusses the impact and shows us the economics of how the many millions of niches we businesses once ignored can now make up more opportunity for consumers and businesses.

These niches reside at the tail-end of "hits," those products that sell to the masses. In today's wired world, Anderson shows us that those tiny niches that we traditionally believe are insignificant sales and that cost too much to reach. My read says that this is a future trend we need to be ready for, because when Generation M arrives to buy from us, I believe they will want it their way.

In short, the new economics of The Long Tail cannot be ignored. This is a must read.

Written by Lewis Green, L&G Business Solutions and IMCNE Newsletter Editor,

Share Your News

Share news about your firm with our community by submitting information on collaborations with other members, upcoming speaking engagements, and new publications. Eligible publications are books or articles that have been published recently by a print or on-line magazine. We are happy to post a copy of your article on the IMCNE website if you send us a Word or .pdf document with the full text.