Articles
Explore over 350 articles that will help you grow your client relationships and improve your personal effectiveness.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Client Advisors
Executives tell me it’s not easy to find an advisor with the right balance of experience, expertise, relationship skills, and client orientation. That’s not surprising. It’s a difficult role to pull off well. There are also lots of bad habits that professionals fall into when it comes to serving clients. Here are seven types […]
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The Ten Habits of Terrible Listeners
You’re probably not as good a listener as you think you are. In fact, most people are poor listeners. What’s worse, as we get older and more experienced, it actually gets harder to listen. In any area you may work in, there are a limited set of problems that you will encounter. Once you’ve seen […]
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Follow the Person, Not the Position
A client of mine was promoted to a very senior position in a large, Fortune-100 company. She had been the deputy in her area, and was now at the top. She told me that the day her promotion was announced in the newspapers, she got dozens of calls from suppliers wanting to do business with […]
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Peter Drucker’s Five Magic Questions
The management guru Peter Drucker framed his consulting advice around five critical questions. With the answers to these five questions, you could run and grow your business. Peter Drucker is considered the leading management thinker of the last century. He wrote 40 books on management, including several when he was in his 90s. He coined […]
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When it Pays to Be Audacious and Just Ask
Many years ago my coauthor, Jerry Panas, was asked to organize the annual meeting for the chamber of commerce in Alliance, Ohio, where he once lived. He decided—rather ambitiously—to ask J.C. Penney to be the annual speaker. At the time, Penney—know as “Mr. Penney” to everyone—was one of the greatest merchants of the 20th century. […]
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Why you must improve your conversational skills
I’ve heard a common complaint from the senior corporate executives I work with and also from some of our young, single female friends in New York City: Why can’t people have a good conversation anymore? In the executives’ case, they are complaining about the external service providers and advisors they work with, who can’t stop […]
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The WhatsApp acquisition by Facebook and the Twenty-Third Law of Relationships
Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp underscores something I’ve believed for a long time: that notwithstanding social media’s ability to connect us with thousands of contacts, we ultimately gravitate towards a small handful of deep, meaningful relationships at work and at home. About Facebook’s latest move, The New York Times wrote, “Weary of noisy social […]
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The Enduring Power of Culture—and Chutzpah: Duff McDonald’s new book on McKinsey
The Firm: The Story of McKinsey is an in-depth profile of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. It was written by journalist Duff McDonald. Many terrible books have been written about the consulting industry, mostly by people who worked for a few years at a big consulting firm and then decided to write a “tell-all” […]
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