Change or Die...may I have a third option please?

If you can change the way you THINK about client development, you can change what you DO about it. And if you change what you DO for the better, you’ll get better RESULTS.

That’s a lot of change. And, as journalist and author Alan Deutschman points out in his new book, “Change or Die,” when faced with a life or death situation that requires change…most people still won’t budge. Alan studied the few folks that successfully changed their entrenched behavior and distilled their secrets in his book.

How can you strengthen your adaptability and ability to change? Exercise your change muscles.

Alan agreed to share some thoughts on this for us. He writes:

“When Andrew asked me how my recently-published book “Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life" would apply to professional service firms, I immediately thought of the interview I conducted with Dr. Michael Merzenich, a pioneering neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco, and what “Merz” (as he’s known) said about lawyers. The background to our conversation: I was asking him why it’s so hard for people to change how they think and act. Merz explained that change is basically about complex learning. If you maintain your “brain fitness,” then you’ll be up for the challenge. But brain fitness typically begins to decline at around age thirty for men and a little later for women. (Yes, just when you’ve come into a partnership or leadership role at the firm and you're facing the biggest challenges and responsibilities of your career.)

The way to keep up brain fitness is by continuing to learn. We all do that, right? Actually, few of us really do. If you’re the senior tax partner at a large corporate law firm, then reading the latest journal articles about the tax code isn’t what Merz means by “learning.” The law partner is already an expert at that kind of precise verbal reasoning. In that case, real learning might mean taking beginner’s lessons in downhill skiing or ballroom dancing. The idea is to escape from your expertise and become a novice in an entirely different pursuit. It’s about taking on challenges that you’ll be bad at for quite a while rather than always returning to pursuits you’ve been good at for many years. And it’s about using different kinds of intelligence—verbal, mechanical, physical, mathematical, and such. That’s why learning a foreign language or a musical instrument is a particularly valuable exercise for brain fitness. “My suggestion is learn Spanish or the oboe,” Merz says.

Now this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep up with the latest twists in your professional field. But it does suggest that you’ll be more adaptable to new ways of thinking if you also invest some time, energy, and effort in new types of learning.

For a more detailed look at how to keep up brain fitness, check out the new book “Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife,” by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin. She had been a successful journalist in her twenties but felt that she was somehow losing her sharp edge in her thirties, which led her to explore the complex science behind memory and brain fitness.”

- Alan Deutschman, Journalist and Author

Check out Alan’s writing and buy his books by going to http://www.alandeutschman.com/

Are You A Vendor or Advisor? A Professional Client or Client from Hell?

I’m not a vendor and neither is any advisor I hire to help my business advance. A vendor is a guy who sells hot dogs on the street corner in Manhattan...not a high-end professional services expert.

The nature of client-advisor relationships is eroding; threatened on one side by commoditization through Internet “procurement” processes and by the relationship-breaking consequences of Sarbannes Oxley on the other. Because of the nature of advisory services, a company’s decision-making process is best based on judging both a potential service firm’s technical skill as well as their advisory skills. That is, both what is done and how it is done by both the advisor and their client makes an enormous difference to the success of a client advisor engagement. In the current climate, what does excellent client advisor behavior look like and how do we measure it?

If the world is, indeed, flattening to the extent that some aspects of professional services can be outsourced overseas, what’s left for professionals in the U.S.? What’s left is to get better than ever at being great advisors.

Similarly, as companies increase their outsourcing efforts, what’s left for top executives is to improve their skills at managing outside services providers as if they were inside employees. This blog is intended to be a dialogue about how professional services firms and their clients can turn potentially commoditized company-vendor situations into high value client-advisor relationships. I suggest five key competencies that will foster the most successful engagements for both professional services firms and the organizations that hire those advisors.

· Collaboration – successful professional services providers consistently demonstrate a team-oriented approach to their client and colleague relationships. Successful clients operate as if the professional service advisor is a virtual part of their organization while, at the same time, respecting all legal and ethical boundaries.

· Creativity – successful professional services providers consistently demonstrate innovative approaches to solving client problems and to growing the client-advisor relationship. Successful clients consistently encourage their providers to provide innovative approaches to solving client problems and to growing the client-advisor relationship

· Content and Value-orientation – successful professional services providers will consistently demonstrate thought leadership on behalf of their clients. Successful clients look beyond fees and pricing of professional service firms to the total value provided.

· Capability – successful professional services providers consistently maintain and demonstrate their subject matter expertise and capabilities at the highest levels of their profession. Successful clients appropriately staff engagements with client-side personnel who meet their obligations to client-advisor projects to ensure successful deliverables.

· Credibility – successful professional services providers consistently demonstrate integrity and the ability to build and sustain trust at the highest levels of their client-base. Successful clients consistently manage professional service firm relationships in a forthright, high-integrity, intelligent and humane manner.

For more about these ideas and how they are being championed check out www.clientadvisorawards.com