Management Consulting and Consultants
**TOP CHOICE Peter Block. The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters. This is a splendid book, detailing the importance of starting with “why” questions rather than “how” questions when confronted with any change. Anyone involved in changing people’s minds needs to read this illuminating and lucid book.
**TOP CHOICE Peter F. Drucker. Adventurers of a Bystander; Managing in a Time of Great Change; Management Challenges for the 21st Century; Managing in the Next Society; and Peter Drucker On the Profession of Management. Drucker is the one truly serious thinker the management consultant industry can point to with justifiable pride. Read anything, and everything, by Drucker. For excellent one book summaries of his life’s work, see The World According to Peter Drucker, by Jack Beaty, and Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, by John E. Flaherty.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. The Witch Doctors: What Management Gurus Are Saying and Why It Matters. This piercing work—by two editors from The Economist—gave voice to the backlash against the $100+ billion profession known as “consulting.” Although the authors bestow far too much power to the consultants in altering the course of life, referring to them as “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” their four defects of the “witch doctors” of our age are mortally accurate. The profession has yet to refute successfully the charges against it, so eloquently laid out in this book. For all those who have suffered through many a poorly written business book, Micklethwait and Wooldridge offer a refreshing alternative.
Richard Miniter. The Myth of Market Share: Why Market Share is the Fool’s Gold of Business. This little book makes a simple, but important, claim: Companies that pursue market share rather than profits hurt shareholders. A great read, which also provides the historical context for the term market share.
Henry Mintzberg. Mintzberg On Management: Inside Our Strange World of Organizations; and Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. If you ever thought our business education—especially the MBA—is dysfunctional, you will find Mintzberg’s work compelling. The second work is especially relevant, and Mintzberg is another management thinker who understands the importance of theory.
Take a Stand for Your Brand
Building a Great Agency Brand from the Inside Out
Take a Stand for Your Brand: Building a Great Agency from the Inside Out shows how marketing firms can do for themselves what they do for their clients—build a great brand.
It’s ironic that advertising agencies preach differentiation but behave like commodities. They are usually so eager to be a “full–service integrated agency” that they try to stand for everything. They forget that standing for everything is just another way of standing for nothing. Just like any other successful product or service, agencies need a meaningful and distinctive position in the marketplace.
Positioning your firm means moving from the middle and taking a side. It means realizing that you can’t “boil the ocean.” If you don’t claim a position, you will be positioned simply by your location—which is really no position at all. And if you don’t have a branding strategy, you’ll become part of someone else’s.
Take a Stand for Your Brand explores not only why agencies need to do a better job of branding themselves, but how, including:
- Focusing your firm to attract more of the clients and people you really want.
- The perils of a business model that’s a mile wide but only a few inches deep.
- Discovering what has made your agency successful up to this point.
- Defining what business you’re really in.
- How agencies have become famous by doing what they do best.
- Giving prospects outside your marketplace a compelling reason to do business with you.
- Aligning your agency brand throughout all departments and disciplines of your organization.
- Why an effective agency positioning means appealing to some clients, but not all clients.
- Telling your agency story in a sentence, a paragraph, and a page.
- How a strong focus can help you playing in a new business game you’re favored to win.
Defining what makes your organization different, then making it different, is the best leadership you could possibly provide your agency. Take a Stand for Your Brand shows how.
Available at www.adbuzz.com or www.amazon.com.
The shoemaker story about holes in their shoes applies to ad agencies as well. ‘Take a Stand for Your Brand’ inspires the people who market for a living to market themselves.
Jonathan Bond, Kirshenbaum & Bond
This is a handbook for any agency that wants to set itself apart from the pack. Tim Williams has distilled much of the best thinking ever done about brands and applied it single–mindedly to the agency business model. It ought to be mandatory reading for serious students of the business.
Robert F. Lauterborn, Professor of Advertising |University of North Carolina
Tim Williams has the best grasp on agency brand positioning I have ever seen. It deserves as wide an audience as possible within our industry.
Cindy Gallop, Former Chairman | Bartle Bogle Hegarty
About the Author. Tim Williams is a recognized thought leader in the creative services industry. As founder of Ignition Consulting Group, Tim is a regular presenter for major advertising industry associations. He has authored numerous articles in leading business and trade magazines, and consults with marketing communications firms throughout North America.
