INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS
New England Chapter

News and Views

In this issue:

Sales Tip

Member News

Upcoming Events

Holiday Greetings from your IMCNE Board

Many of IMCNE’s members are like me and have spent time in larger organizations in the past. Back then, we had support systems to help train us, help us grow as professionals and provide us with a built-in network of peers to help us solve any number of problems—from the very practical to the extremely challenging.
 
For the management consultants in our community, IMCNE plays that role. It’s our support system and a peer network that helps us solve challenges large and small.
 
IMCNE has played that role in my practice. My firm benefits from the learning, connections and relationships we have developed here. We have won business, found high quality resources and taken our business to the next level because of IMCNE—and for that, I am truly thankful.
 
If you are a serious management consultant that wants to continue to grow your skills and your practice, I hope that you will see us as a resource. I also invite you to become more active in our community. As in everything in life, you will reap what you sow in our community. I hope to see you on-line and at our exciting events in 2008. Best wishes for the holiday season and the new year to you and your families.

Mary Adams
President
Trek Consulting
http://trekconsulting.com

I feel blessed to be a member of IMC because it is a truly unique professional organization of top level management consultants who give me guidelines, support, friendship and keep me on the leading edge of what is a sophisticated and challenging profession. Some perspective: It was the first and best organization I ever joined when starting as a consultant; I would have been lost without the support of this group.

I am involved, beyond receiving what I described above, to give back. I wish for every member to become more involved so that in fact they will receive more by that very involvement… and to have more fun!

My gift, or hope, is to play a part in bringing IMC just a little bit closer to realizing the tremendous and exciting potential that remains ahead of us as members.

Ron Visocchi
President-Elect
Managing Partner, The Benjamin Group LLC
http://www.benjamin-group.com/

The best part of starting the New Year as a member of IMCNE is the connections that I have made over the last year. I have gotten to know a number of members well and have been able to call on them for advice and counsel. And, in the spirit of the season and the spirit of giving, there have been a number of opportunities to provide leads and referrals. 

Best wishes for your new year.

Denise Clancey
VP Membership
Teledirect Partners
http://www.teledirectpartners.com/

IMCNE is a great resource to meet other consultants and to learn about best practices. I see the organization that way now and envision it growing increasingly into an organization where members can more easily collaborate on projects to their mutual benefit. Perhaps a project-specific database of "consultants seeking consultants" could be established. My Christmas wish for IMCNE members is.... more satisfied clients!

Jim Stewart
VP Finance
Principal, JP Stewart Associates
http://www.projmanage.com

Best wishes for happy and healthy holidays, and a prosperous 2008!
With special greetings and appreciation to old and new colleagues who have joined me in exploring our profession, entering into spirited discussions and enthusiastically challenging the status quo. I think of you as part of a wonderful community who are both friends and family.

Glenn Bachman CMC, AICP
VP CMC Development
President, Raven Business Group, Inc.
http://www.ravenbusiness.com/

As we each make are way through the holiday season, I often look forward to my New Year's resolutions. This year, I encourage every member if IMCNE to join me in one of my resolutions -- to invite and convert one new member in the coming year. If we all make and complete this simple resolution, the ranks of IMCNE will easily double. 

With numbers comes strength. Whether looking for guidance in building your practice, finding a resource for a client or helping a peer solve a problem, the IMCNE community provides members and our clients a breadth of experience and service unparalleled by even the largest management consulting firms.

Allen B. Falcon
VP RapidAssist
Horizon Information Group, Inc.
http://www.horizoninformation.com/

IMCNE is one of the blessings in my life. I have been privileged to meet many of you, both personally and virtually. And I have been honored to facilitate several roundtables. To all of you, blessings of peace from my home to yours.

Lewis Green
VP Communications
Editor, News & Views
Chief Communications Officer, L&G Business Solutions
http://www.l-gsolutions.com

Sales Tip

You can’t achieve high expectations unless you set them high. I expect that you will all have the best holiday season ever and an outrageously successful 2008! Just make sure you define outrageous!
-Ron Visocchi, Managing Partner and Sales Sage,
The Benjamin Group, http://www.benjamin-group.com

Member News

Bonni Carson DiMatteo, CMC http://www.atlanticconsultants.com will be speaking at Bryant University Women’s Leadership Summit, March 13th on “Creating the 'E' Factor - How Engaged Staff Create Measurable Results.”

Upcoming Events

Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Consultants Roundtable
Noon – lunch is included

The Business Case for Sustainability:
Opportunities for Management Consultants?

with Glenn Bachman, CMC

Regus
Riverside Center
275 Grove Street
Suite 2 - 400 Newton, MA
Click here for directions

The price will be $30 for members, $40 for nonmembers—lunch is included.
Please register in advance so we have enough food.

Target Audience: General. Other disciplines may be interested: e.g. Process engineers, green builders, landscape architects, HR, marketers, PR, risk managers, financial folks.

What do climate change, demographic shifts and stakeholder accountability have to do with conducting business? Everything!

Businesses are deluged with conflicting information about greening their organizations and demonstrating community responsibility while maintaining profitability.

This roundtable clarifies the difference between green vs. sustainable and uses slides to describe the ecological, economic and social trends that are shaping the marketplace.

We then go on to profile how sustainable businesses position themselves: first describing the characteristics of sustainable businesses and then how those qualities create tangible benefits for organizations.

We conclude with a description of various consulting assignments that can accelerate our clients’ considering and adopting sustainable practices in order to gain competitive advantage.

This is a new and improved version of the well-received presentation given at this October’s Confab. Relevant. Timely. Inspiring. Perhaps, even catalytic.

Glenn Bachman is President of Raven Business Group, Inc., a CMC and Certified Planner with nearly 30 years of consulting experience in management consulting, marketing and environmental planning.

Glenn, who holds a Masters degree in Planning, was a partner in a highly regarded environmental consulting firm, where he was involved in approximately 150 projects, ranging from Environmental Impact Statements to energy facility cost-benefit analyses.

For the past 15 years Glenn has been a management consultant specializing in strategic planning and alignment, marketing and metrics. Tapping into his appreciation for the environment and flair for systems analysis, Glenn’s practice has evolved into sustainability consulting where he provides assistance to organizations that desire to become more environmentally responsible or that have green products/services that they wish to take to market.

Thursday, January 24, 2008
Dinner Meeting - 5:30-8:30 pm
Hilton Garden Inn, Waltham, MA

Pick a Pack of Perfect Panelists:

Succeed as an event moderator and deliver a lively program

Engaging, informative panel discussions – online and in-person – require planning, pacing and control. It’s an honor to be asked to moderate a group discussion, and it can be an effective business development tool. But it’s critical to determine what the audience needs and ensure they get the information they want and not a sales pitch or rambling war stories. The difference between being a host and an effective communicator means profiling your panelists, managing their agendas and reining in some strong personalities.

This program presents the keys to successful preparation and delivers a “panel of panelists” to show how it’s done.

Moderator

Bob Feldman
HPC Marketing

An Emmy-nominated TV broadcaster and marketing/sales consultant, Bob Feldman is an experienced public speaker. For more than 20 years he has been a presenter, producer and voice-over artist. He directed the award-winning series "The Right Way to Manage," hosted by Sir David Frost and has worked with such clients as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, National Semiconductor, Dow Chemical, Lucent, Thinking Machines, Sequent/IBM and the Army National Guard.

Speaker Bios

Kevin Carroll
Executive Search Practice Leader in Life Sciences
Phillips DiPisa, Inc.

Kevin has spent years recruiting senior executives and interviewing C-level officers for commercial, medical and sales roles. He also trained sales teams at Bristol-Myers Squibb. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he teaches a course titled "Assembling the Management Team” for the Medical Device Management Certificate Program.

Jeff Govendo
The Innovative Edge, Inc.

Jeff specializes in leading discussions on corporate innovation and creative thinking in industries ranging from high technology to consumer products for clients pursuing new products and businesses and planning for the future. He has designed management conferences with creative approaches for addressing difficult corporate issues.

Dick O'Brien
Nagog Hill Partners

In 2004, Dick founded a marketing consultancy addressing business development and growth issues for emerging companies in medical device, biotech and pharmaceutical companies. He is frequently asked to moderate and arrange panel discussions at the WPI Venture Forum and Merrimack Valley Venture Forum.

Other Events

Friday, March 28, 2008
Full Day Thought Leadership Conference
Hilton Garden Inn, Waltham, MA

Recap of December 7th Roundtable
A Whole New Mind –
Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future – a dialogue
with Mira Furth

The roundtable was a blend of shared information from 'A Whole Mind/Daniel Pink's book and a group dialogue. Information shared from the book included elements of right directed and left directed thinking as well as the six high-concept and high-touch aptitudes, “the six senses”, Pink claims have become essential in this new era.

During the most engaging dialogue, participants were sharing their experiences of applying whole-mind thinking. Examples include:

• 'event driven programming' in the IT world where many things happen at once
• the value of leaving space for exploration as coaches/consultants, during the relationship building phase, before getting into the consulting engagement.
• Mutual proposal writing with the client, asking directly “what would you like in the proposal” which then takes the guess work out of proposal writing and ensures clarity of scope.
• With greater awareness of our client's thinking preference we as consultants can better help reduce their discomfort with uncertainty, and to view the issue at hand as a solvable problem.

If you are interested in a summary Mira prepared for the whole mind dialogue email our Administrator, Donna Powell and she will send it to you.