Detail from “Once upon a Time” by James C. Christensen
Someone once told me, “Alan your natural communication mode is a story.” She didn’t mean it as a compliment.
Some of my stories come from my mistakes or from everyday people with extraordinary insight. Some are retellings of old fables, Celtic fairy tales or Sufi stories.
I told some in leadership meetings or training classes. I wrote some as leave-behinds for clients. Someone suggested I publish. Now I’m a writer and a publisher.
Traveling the Consulting Road: Career wisdom for new consultants, candidates and their mentors.
So you want to be a consultant? This book dissects consulting with specific advice on how to get hired, how to be successful, what to expect, and what skills and methodologies you’ll need over your career, like preparing for “up or out” and whether, when and how to go independent.
These are the funny stories and lessons-learned-the-hard-way from a work-a-day consultant’s thirty-seven year career. Do you want to both get results and be the kind of consultant whom clients perceive as helpful? My advice is often, “Don’t do what I did!”
This book is what I wish I understood sooner.
So You Wanna Be a Consultant
I was extraordinarily naïve when I decided to go to business school to become a consultant This post is an anti-naiveté primer on a consulting career.
My first book Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates and Their Mentors is now available in many places: From your choice of eBook retailers here. Also in print from Amazon and Barnes & Noble here or Direct from the publisher: Paperback here and Hardcover here. (US only for the moment).
You can also order print on demand copies globally through your local bookstore.
Change Leader? Who Me?
A managers’s job is to “get the work done.”. . .. in a steady state. . .
A leader’s job is clarify destination and attract followers in times of change.
A description of how I learned to lead change.
Change Leader? Who Me?
For those new to leading change
These are funny stories and personal essays about many aspects of change (innovation, integration, improvement) and leadership (values, skills and change levers). They come from thirty-seven years of helping leaders make strategic change.
For the neophyte and anyone who is thinking about improving their leadership.
Wisdom from Unusual Places?
Workin’, Lovin’, and Livin’ wisely
Let’s be clear. I am more wiseguy, wiseacre, or wiseass than anything resembling a wise man. In my youth I routinely rejected those who wanted to help me and did lots of truly dumb stuff.
Everybody grows up sometime and somehow, in spite of myself, I encountered wisdom. Perhaps it came in the form of an extraordinary story told to me by a seemingly ordinary person. Perhaps it came on later reflection of my mistakes.
I was rarely seeking wisdom, but I knew it when I saw it and wrote it down.
These are those stories of workin’, lovin’, and livin’ wisely.
What is Wisdom?
Are owls wise? Sure an owl can snatch a nervous mouse running across a wheatfield on a moondark night, but are they wise? What is wisdom anyway?