Overview

"Karen Phelan is sorry. She really is. She tried to do business by the numbers-the management consultant way-developing measures, optimizing processes, and quantifying performance. The only problem is that businesses are run by people. And people can't be plugged into formulas or summed up in scorecards. Phelan dissects a whole range of consulting treatments for unhealthy companies and shows why they're essentially fad diets- superficial would-be fixes that don't result in lasting improvements and can cause serious damage. With a mix of clear-eyed business analysis, heart-wrenching stories, and hard-won lessons for both consultants and the people who hire them, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore. Karen Phelan and other consultants may have ""broken"" your company, but she's eager to make amends."

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9781609947392

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Reviews

Finally, an author challenging our broken management models who has credibility--she has been there. Karen Phelan not only explains why the emperor--our sacred ways of managing--has no clothes but provides us with insightful alternatives that promise to add real value to our organizations and the people that make them function. <br>--Dean Schroeder, award-winning coauthor of Ideas Are Free<br><br> Funny, irreverent, and outrageous, this book is making a deeply serious point: talking to actual people and figuring out how to help them work together better is what's going to make organizations stronger, not another PowerPoint presentation. <br>--Rosina L. Racioppi, President and CEO, Women Unlimited, Inc.

Named one of The Globe and Mail's top ten business management books of 2013 I learned early in my consulting career as a professor coach that it is all about building relationships. Karen reminds us, It's the people stupid! and then shows us in this wonderful book how the recommendations of the the commercial consultants are basically just ways of keeping the consulting industry profitable. The best thing about this book is the concrete examples, not just the critique. It shows us over and over again how problems are not solved by extensive programs and studies, but by getting people together and building relationships. The most important of those, and often missing, is the relationship between the client and the consultant. This book shows over and over again that when the consultant finally talks to the client and establishes a relationship, problems begin to be addressed and solved. In the end this turns out to be a book about how to manage and how to live, not just how to be careful of consultants. --Edgar H. Schein, bestselling author of Humble Inquiry and Helping Former Fortune 100 executive Phelan skewers the mystique of management consultants in this entertaining guide for how not to manage a business. Drawing on her own consulting experiences, she portrays them as providing pre-packaged, unproven theoretical constructs that substitute for getting people to work together better. Phelan argues convincingly that using statistical models to solve all problems exalts the process of measurement above the goals of improving employee efficiency and performance. Phelan's unpretentious style engages the reader in the unfolding revelation that prevailing business models are wrong. If, as she maintains, the misconceptions propagated by the consulting industry underlie many business problems today, a fresh approach is needed. Readers will be intrigued by her thesis that no principles apply universally, and that companies that hire consultants to think for them are courting doom. Her message that consultants can contribute to a two-way relationship offers a hopeful contrast to her earlier warnings. Although Phelan belabors her main points, her caution against relying on one size fits all advice rings true. --Publishers Weekly (Reviewed January 2013) Finally, an author challenging our broken management models who has credibility--she has been there. Karen Phelan not only explains why the emperor--our sacred ways of managing--has no clothes but provides us with insightful alternatives that promise to add real value to our organizations and the people that make them function. --Dean Schroeder, award-winning coauthor of Ideas Are Free Funny, irreverent, and outrageous, this book is making a deeply serious point: talking to actual people and figuring out how to help them work together better is what's going to make organizations stronger, not another PowerPoint presentation. --Rosina L. Racioppi, President and CEO, Women Unlimited, Inc. I highly recommend the iconoclastic and people oriented book to any organizational leaders, decision makers, managers, and consultants who are seeking an approach to finding workable, realistic, and lasting solutions to the most pressing problems within the firm. The author shares timeless and empowering ideas that will engage and inspire the employees, and avoid the latest fads and acronyms at the same time. --Blog Business World Review, April 2013

Named one of The Globe and Mail's top ten business management books of 2013 I learned early in my consulting career as a professor coach that it is all about building relationships. Karen reminds us, It's the people stupid! and then shows us in this wonderful book how the recommendations of the the commercial consultants are basically just ways of keeping the consulting industry profitable. The best thing about this book is the concrete examples, not just the critique. It shows us over and over again how problems are not solved by extensive programs and studies, but by getting people together and building relationships. The most important of those, and often missing, is the relationship between the client and the consultant. This book shows over and over again that when the consultant finally talks to the client and establishes a relationship, problems begin to be addressed and solved. In the end this turns out to be a book about how to manage and how to live, not just how to be careful of consultants. --Edgar H. Schein, bestselling author of Humble Inquiry and Helping Former Fortune 100 executive Phelan skewers the mystique of management consultants in this entertaining guide for how not to manage a business. Drawing on her own consulting experiences, she portrays them as providing pre-packaged, unproven theoretical constructs that substitute for getting people to work together better. Phelan argues convincingly that using statistical models to solve all problems exalts the process of measurement above the goals of improving employee efficiency and performance. Phelan's unpretentious style engages the reader in the unfolding revelation that prevailing business models are wrong. If, as she maintains, the misconceptions propagated by the consulting industry underlie many business problems today, a fresh approach is needed. Readers will be intrigued by her thesis that no principles apply universally, and that companies that hire consultants t

Author Information

Karen Phelan is a cofounder of Operating Principals, a consulting firm that replaces bad business practices with ones that work. A former engineer with degrees from MIT, she spent more than a dozen years as a consultant with Deloitte & Touche and Gemini Consulting and afterward worked in management at Fortune 100 companies.

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