The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion: A Guide to understanding your expertise

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise is a compendium of advice, stories, techniques, and guidance from more than 30 consultants. The book tends to address the “softer side” of consulting issues, particularly organizational and development issues. As the author puts it: “Questions of truth, honor, risk, loyalty, intimacy, and other themes that some might label more ‘philosophical’ than ‘real world’ are the stuff that we yearn to talk about with true friends and wise advisors.”

The book addresses issues such as increasing participation in meetings, overcoming resistance to change, accepting that change involves risk, listening to your audiences’ concerns, and building relationships with clients. Useful stories and case experiences are interspersed with softer issues. This reviewer’s only complaints are that the book doesn’t flow well from a reader’s standpoint and that some chapters are light on ideas. But with more than 30 consultants offering ideas and examples, the book has plenty of useful information. It may be most useful as a reference source for ideas to solve people-related problems, especially those that involve group dynamics. For CFOs and other managers, the various consultants’ perspectives on motivating, changing, or developing group interaction and loyalty will be informative.

Samples of the advice found in the book include the following:

On being a consultant: “The hard part of consulting is building the business. Consultants need to ask themselves, do they want a practice or a business? A practice is just selling your professional time. A business could be selling your professional time, having overhead, a bunch of people working together, generating some wealth and profits, and selling a product. These are two very different things. It’s all about how hard you want to work. Consulting takes tenacity. You have to be sales-driven; patient with the sales process, with clients, with yourself; and more energetic than the average person.”

On homeopathic consulting: “The underlying core belief of homeopathic consulting is that the client has the latent or manifest capacity to solve [their] own problem. When I draw the conclusion that my client is incapable of solving [their] own problem, I become judgmental and ineffective.”

On consulting leadership and inner strength: “Anxiety freely accepted translates into strength difficult to dislodge. Anxiety, far from being a sickness, is the actual experience of being strong, of growing or building character, of achieving pride. And those are the final values of life, not shallow pleasure, but solid personality.”

On risk: “Our job is to help ourselves and others move toward risk, see it as the life-giving, transforming dimension of our work. It is in the risk that hope resides.”

On company and personal problems: “We project onto the most vulnerable member of the group the problems we do not want to face in ourselves. In family therapy, the child that gets all of the negative attention is called the ‘identified patient.’ And that ‘patient’ carries the symptoms of what is really a family problem.”

One of the greatest lessons of this book is to rely on experience and intuition in initial discussions with a potential consulting client. If it doesn’t “feel” right, it will be difficult to complete an assignment to the satisfaction of everyone involved.

The author states from the start that the book “is meant to be a companion to anyone attempting to help others affect a change in their [life] or work.” Change often occurs when we look at a problem differently. This book provides various perspectives on approaching human behavioral problems that consultants are likely to face, and provides different ideas on how to solve these problems.

The CPA Journal is broadly recognized as an outstanding, technical-refereed publication aimed at public practitioners, management, educators, and other accounting professionals. It is edited by CPAs for CPAs. Our goal is to provide CPAs and other accounting professionals with the information and news to enable them to be successful accountants, managers, and executives in today's practice environments.