| The Value-Creating Consultant:
How to Build and Sustain Lasting Client Relationships
By Ron A. Carucci and Toby J. Tetenbaum
New York: Amacom, 1999, 285 pages
Reviewed by Anne Patterson
Despite its focus on the larger consulting community, this book
offers suggestions about how to become a value-laden partner to
anyone who serves clients in a strategic or design capacity. Carucci
and Tetenbaum base their recommendations on an exhaustive five-year
study of consultants and their clients. Their investigation is impressive
and insightful in its thoroughness. The authors slowly and deliberately
build their case, first with examples of unprofessional consulting
traits and then with illustrations of “value-creating”
practices. The authors go on to advocate tactics such as “gutsiness”
and “tough love” as means of helping clients tackle the
deep-rooted causes of organizational dysfunction.
Carucci and Tetenbaum then construct a model for consultants to
use when developing a valued partnership with clients. Dubbed the
EARTH model, this relationship framework encompasses the “softer,”
defining qualities of equality, advocacy, respect, trust, and hope.
At this point, the book departs from its academic rigor and begins
to resemble a self-help manual. The authors list several qualitative
tactics useful for consultants who hope to build valued client partnerships.
They also advocate self-help techniques to track personal development
and growth. The authors conclude their volume by guiding readers
through an interactive exercise in which the value-driven consultant
is prompted to use the techniques learned from the book within this
case-study setting. This exercise pulls the reader back into an
academic realm while it provides a useful context for testing this
newly gained perspective.
With its sometimes muddled blend of academia and self-help techniques,
The Value-Creating Consultant does contain pertinent lessons
for consultants who wish to abandon “cookie-cutter” approaches
in favor of tailored solutions and perspectives. The emphasis placed
by the authors on the more human side of establishing relationships
is also timely in today’s environment of constant change and
challenge.
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