The Advice Business: Essential Tools and Models for Management Consulting

The dramatic growth of the consulting industry in the last 20 years can, in part, be traced to rapid changes in technology that have provoked dramatic changes in the ways companies compete. Consultants provide companies facing such rapidly changing environments with an important means of developing, acquiring, and processing much-needed know-how. Increasingly, consultants have proved to be a vital strategic weapon that companies rely on to improve their competitiveness in a world characterized by technological convergences, strategic consolidations, and growing interdependence. KEY TOPICS: The Advice Business introduces readers to the art, the practice, and the problems that consultants face. The book sheds light on the complex roles that consultants and consulting firms play in enhancing the effectiveness of their clients. Contributions of both academics and practitioners to this emerging field include original case descriptions based on real consulting assignments, and career advice. MARKET: For consultants in varying areas of expertise, and for the clients and potential clients in need of their services.

Charles J. Fombrun is Executive Director of the Reputation Institute and Professor Emeritus of Management at the Stern School of Business of New York University. Before discovering the social sciences, he earned a B.S. in Physics from Queen's University (Canada) and did his early research on magnetic levitation. Tired of staring at oscilloscopes in lonely labs, he turned first to mathematical economics before edging closer to the social sciences at the University of California (Berkeley) and then at Columbia University where he completed a Ph.D. in organizational theory in 1980. He was the youngest professor at the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) when he taught there from 1979 to 1984.

Dr. Fombrun is the author of Strategic Human Resource Management (1984), Turning Points: Creating Strategic Change in Corporations (1992), and the best-seller Reputation: Realizing Value from the Corporate Image (1996). He has published over 100 articles in leading research and professional journals, where he writes principally about how companies build and sustain valuable reputations, and how they should manage their resources strategically.

Dr. Fombrun's perspective on corporate reputations has made him an invited speaker at many corporate or industry gatherings and international conferences, as well as an advisor to such companies as Royal Dutch/Shell, Interpublic Group, and Amway. He has served on numerous editorial boards, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Human Resource Management, and Human Resource Planning. In 1996, he ran into Cees van Riel, a professor at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, from which a fruitful collaboration started that has fostered executive programs, annual conferences, a quarterly journal (the Corporate Reputation Review), and the Reputation Institute, a private organization devoted to research, measurement, valuation, and consulting about corporate reputations.

Mark David Nevins is the President of Nevins Consulting; he is an organizational advisor and coach, and consults in the areas of organizational design and development, curriculum creation, leadership and management development, change management, and sales and client-facing effectiveness.

Prior to starting his own firm, Dr. Nevins was Global Vice President of Human Resources and Organizational Development for Korn/Ferry International, the world's leading retained executive search firm, where he drove organizational and cultural change to help the firm migrate from a private sales-focused partnership to a publicly held professional services firm. Previously, he was for many years the head of professional development and training worldwide for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the world's leading strategy and management consulting firms, where he had responsibility for all of the firm's formal and informal training and development programs for all levels of professional staff, and was one of the drivers of the firm's HR strategy and people programs as well as primary architect of the Booz Allen Curriculum.

Dr. Nevins has consulted with large and small organizations, both public and private, for more than 15 years; he has studied leadership, management, and organizational development extensively, with a special focus in professional services firms. He is a moderator for The Aspen Institute's Executive Seminar on Values-Based Leadership., and regularly guest lectures on major business school campuses.

Prior to his career in the private sector Dr. Nevins taught at Harvard University, where he also held several administrative positions. He was graduated with honors from the College of the Holy Cross, where he studied sciences, philosophy, and literature. He took his Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard University, during which time he received awards for his teaching, as well as scholarships for research and study in the United States and abroad. He has worked, traveled, and taught in more than 60 countries on 5 continents, and in his free time he enjoys film, wine, reading, snowboarding, and scuba diving.