INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS
New England Chapter

News and Views

In this issue:

Upcoming Events

News from
the Board

IMCNE Member Profile
Eric Esperne

Book Reviews
Wilkinomics
Midas Managers

Upcoming Events

Harvard Business School Press – Dinner Sponsor

Thursday, September 27, 2007
Hilton Garden Inn
Watham, MA

AGENDA
2 to 5 p.m. CMC Information and Application Session
5 to 6 p.m. Briefing by Sponsor Harvard Business School Press
6 to 9 p.m. Networking, Dinner and Panel Discussion

Panel
"Success through Collaborative Consulting" - Advice from Consulting Pros

Has there ever been a time when you could have benefited from additional work given by another consultant? Or perhaps you needed additional skill sets or bandwidth to compete for a consulting project?

Whether you are an individual practitioner or own a firm, forming joint intellectual partnerships are becoming increasingly necessary to thrive in this new century.

Learn how to effectively collaborate with the consulting community from a panel of experts with different but proven business models.

This panel will advise you on:

• How to decide whether to take on partners or go it alone
• Recognize when to modify or expand your business model
• The pros and cons of each approach
• Understand the new laws governing subcontractors
• Learn how to leverage your network and expand your options
• Discuss how to form and manage a team
• Learn what to avoid and share new ideas
• These seasoned consulting professionals have been through it all. They can help you avoid the pitfalls, navigate through the changes and stimulate new ideas that will be sure to impact your success!

Panel Participants

Paige Arnof-Fenn is the founder and CEO of Mavens & Moguls, a global marketing strategy consulting firm. She was formerly vice president of marketing at Zipcar, heading all marketing and sales activity for the company. She was responsible for branding, corporate communications and corporate partnerships for the business and was instrumental in the fundraising efforts for this early stage company.

Previously, she was vice president of marketing at Inc.com and responsible for promoting the company to the business and media worlds, and also for driving E-commerce sales before the company was sold to a division of Bertelsmann. Prior to that she held the title of senior vice president of marketing and was a key member of the IPO team at Launch Media, an Internet start-up that went public in early 1999 and was later sold to Yahoo. She built the marketing organization from the ground up, overseeing all marketing, advertising, corporate communications, market research and promotion as well as their in- house ad agency/art department.

Robert A. Gough, Jr., Ph.D. primary professional focus has been on two fronts: (1) identifying and supporting alternative investment opportunities, and (2) designing and implementing strategic initiatives. With 25 years of experience in management, operations and investment banking, Dr. Gough has been principally involved with Fortune 500 decision makers, both domestically and abroad, national and international government policy makers, and dozens of emerging growth company entrepreneurs.

Dr. Gough is presently Managing Director of Lexington Partners, a strategic investment-banking and advisory firm, where his primary responsibility is the development and assessment of alternative investment opportunities, including the deal structure and capitalization of many portfolio companies.

IMCNE Board Member Ron Visocchi will moderate this discussion. Ron is managing partner of The Benjamin Group. Ron and his team of dynamic sales and marketing professionals help companies grow sales by providing timely, well- orchestrated expertise and guidance. Through a combination of mentoring, training and hands-on strategy and tactical implementation, The Benjamin Group delivers purposeful, accelerated growth.

Pre-Dinner Briefing by Harvard Business School Press

Harvard Business School Publishing is pleased to host a discussion session with the members of our chapter about an exciting new offering they have.

Along with publishing the Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business books and the Harvard Business School cases, HBSP also has a suite of products designed for performance support and corporate learning. The products include Harvard ManageMentor, a desktop support that includes hundreds of HBSP articles, tools, practical advice for improving performance and improving management skills.

Angelia Herrin, executive director of business development at HBSP, and Rich Gravelin, director of strategic content sales at HBSP, will present a brief demonstration of these products, followed by a discussion about how IMC members and HBSP might partner and how we might leverage that partnership for our clients. At the national level, IMC and HBSP are exploring ways to provide discounts and special access to HBSP materials.

HBSP wants to get feedback from you! You'll want to learn how to leverage their tools and content in your own practice. Be there for the beginning of what will be an exciting relationship between our two organizations.

Interested in becoming a Certified Management Consultant (CMC)?

Stop by the CMC Application Session from 2:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn prior to the IMCNE dinner meeting. Bring your laptop! We'll have an electronic version of the application available and CMC committee members there to answer any questions. Come to learn more and get started now on the process. Join us on the 27th and leave with an application ready to submit! For further information, please contact Glenn Bachman at .

Investment
Members: $55 Nonmembers: $65

Monday, October 15, 2007
Profiting from Valued Client Relationships
Rebecca's Café, Burlington, MA
8 a.m.

The success of your consultative projects is in your ability to work effectively with key constituencies in the client organization. How you manage critical interactions is vital in obtaining needed participation and buy-in from all concerned. Accomplishing just what is asked of you or what you initially perceive as the client’s need may not lead to significant and lasting value for either the client or your firm.

Join Harvy Simkovits and look at the core principles and practices of relationship building and generating alignment. Come learn about establishing a profound connection with your clients, uncover what is truly most valuable to them, and generate mutual understands and agreements that help you to deliver results faster and better. With this you can build deeper, collaborative and more productive partnerships between you and the client’s organization in order to generate mutual success. The result can also be longer-term and more lucrative contracts.

Target Audience: All professional service providers, be they new, developing or seasoned.

As an independent consultant, coach, facilitator and trainer since 1990, Harvy Simkovits runs Business Wisdom http://www.business-wisdom.com in Lexington, MA. A certified management consultant (CMC), Harvy works primarily with owner-managed companies who want to be their best and win more at “The Games of Business(TM).” He has published a business-development manual, “Shepherding Business to Your Door” about the Why, Who, What, Where, When and How of growing one’s professional firm or independent business. Recent clients have included AmeriVault, Geek Housecalls, Pinsly Railroad and SCI International. Harvy holds Masters Degrees in both Engineering and Organizational Development. He has also did post-graduate work in business administration, organization systems development and executive coaching.

News from the Board

Announcing the New IMCNE Board:

Office of the President:

• Past President – Carol Bergeron
• President – Mary Adams
• President Elect – Ron Visocchi

Treasurer – Jim Stewart

Membership – Denise Clancey

CMC Development – Glenn Bachman

Member Communications – Lewis Green

Roundtable Programming – Linda Watson

RapidAssist – Allen Falcon

Marketing Support – Adele Pollis

Directors at Large – Vin D’Amico, Jeff Govendo, Ken Lizotte

This is a strong group that is helping us re-create IMCNE into a member-led community. By definition, our vision will only work if we get lots of people involved. Although we love to meet face to face, we do most of our work with IMCNE virtually. There are many ways to help us out without leaving your office and taking too much time from your client work. Please consider volunteering. Contact anyone on the Board in your area of interest or contact Mary Adams at 781-729-9650, .

What’s Wrong with Targets?

This roundtable discussion in September explored the ideas expressed in an article by Ian Graham. Graham’s view is that targets are counterproductive because they focus on the performance of a single individual while most results come from the actions of a system and a team of people. His critiques include, “Targets are a recipe for mediocrity” and “Targets reinforce command and control.”

The discussion was a testament to the power of the intellectual capital of IMCNE. The participants brought diverse experience and knowledge to the discussion. Several participants linked Graham’s view with the work of Deming and the concepts of total quality management and continuous improvement. Some points made in our discussion:

• Many of our clients lack a clear enough sense of direction. In these cases, some kind of target is better than nothing
• It is very important to teach companies how to measure progress. Having processes in place to measure—and then learn from the measurements is critical
• Measurements don’t have to be quantitative, qualitative measures can be even more powerful if gathered in a consistent way

Participant Lloyd Franke suggested an article from Inc. magazine called “Six Sigma for the Mathematically Challenged.” Michael Connolly referred us to a work by Peter Scholtes entitled, “Total Quality or Performance Appraisal: Choose One.”

Another member of our community, Stephen Shapiro, gives keynotes on this topic—we’re hoping to have him lead the follow up discussion.

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

We have a good group of members that are going to pursue their CMC this spring. It’s not too late to join and take your career to the next level. For more information contact Glenn Bachman, CMC glenn@ravenbusiness.com 401-635-0050 or Mary Adams, CMC or 781-729-9650

IMCNE Member Profile

This Family Guy is A Deadhead

Eric Esperne, JD founded James River Consulting LLC in September 2006, the same month he moved from Virginia to Massachusetts with his wife and son. The company specializes in standard contracts and processes and provides negotiation and management services in the IT industry. The family specializes in spending time together and biking and ice skating. Recently they moved to Medway.

Nine Things You Didn’t Know about Eric:

1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, it would be…  Split pea soup

2.   If I weren't a business person, I would be a…  Author of non fictional books

3. Something I would like to do, but haven't had the chance… Visit Quebec for the Winter carnival

4. The last concert I went to…   The Other Ones (Remaining members of the Grateful Dead)

5.  My favorite toy as a kid…   Bike

6.  When I'm not working, you'll find me…  With my family

7.   If I could be any animal, I would be a...  Bird

8.   The last movie I saw was…  Thunderbolt and Lightfoot

9.   If I could have dinner with a famous person, dead or alive, he or she would be…  Annie Proulx or Nick Hornby

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

The member profile was written by Lewis Green, the Founder and Managing Principal of L&G Business Solutions LLC. (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.

Book Reviews

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

This book sets out to show how the collaborative technologies that led to Web 2.0 will lead to wholesale changes throughout the business world. I have to admit that I almost put this book down after the first chapter. It begins with the story of a failing gold mining company that opened maps of its holdings (normally considered a highly valuable secret) on the internet. They received input from (and compensated) a diverse group of collaborators that helped the company find rich new deposits of gold that its own geologists had failed to find. This example is all or nothing. This CEO took the risk of a lifetime. While compelling, it was hard to swallow at first.

Then I took the book on an airplane and gave it another try. New examples and ideas in later chapters begin to show how the technology of Web 2.0 can and will fuel wholesale changes not just in software and communication but in production as well. We all know about Wikipedia, Amazon’s open API’s, mashups with Google and other web-based technology plays. But the three stories in “The Global Plant Floor” chapter take the story to the plant floor. One is Boeing’s 787 that was designed together with a thousand engineers at more than one hundred suppliers collaborating in real-time. This full collaboration led to Boeing’s final specification document for the 787 taking 20 pages versus 2500 for the predecessor plane, the 777. With the 777, Boeing told its suppliers what had to be done in “excruciating detail.” With the 787, Boeing let its suppliers figure it out for themselves. This would not be possible without collaborative technologies connecting suppliers around the world.

Similar stories are told for BMW’s production processes and the success of the totally distributed Chinese motorcycle industry. Other fascinating examples are the “internal decision markets” that HP, Eli Lilly, Siemens and Microsoft use to let stakeholders run a virtual futures market on ideas. HP finds that this market is more effective at forecasting annual workstation sales than their internal corporate forecasts.

Even with all these examples, it is not necessarily obvious where and how to take advantage of the opportunities presented by collaborative technologies. Ultimately, this book is better at showing us the problem and the opportunity than it is with showing us how to succeed in this new world. But we all know that recognizing a problem is the first step to solving it. I recommend this book because it will help you see the world and your business in a new way.

By Rob Slee

Rob Slee is a fun and thoughtful author. The power in his writing comes from his twenty years as a middle-market investment banker. His first book, Private Capital Markets, filled-in a huge gap in business literature on the private markets, and we have actually seen it being used as a business textbook. That book methodically outlined the functioning of the private capital markets that support the biggest, but least noticed segment of our business markets.

Midas Managers shows the power of story to teach. The eighteen stories in the book describe some of the all-star managers that were clients over the course of Slee’s investment banking career. After telling each story, Slee converts the lessons into a formula that, he hopes, the reader can replicate. The stories are broken down into three major categories: Arbitrage, Business Models, and Private Finance.

Slee has a lot of passion for helping American businesses succeed in a competitive global market. That passion comes through in his stories. But he also has a great sense of humor that is sprinkled throughout, especially in the “Investment Banker Man” cartoons that he also wrote.

Many of our clients are, like the entrepreneurs profiled in this book, private business owners and managers. These stories are told from the business owner’s point of view, in the context of their lives and about their journey to create value. Slee expresses something we are always preaching in an especially succinct way, that value is just unrealized wealth.

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.