16 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
After we had finished the exercise, he asked me to come in and do some-
thing similar with his executive team. As it would turn out, “team” probably
wasn’t the best way of describing the group. It was made up of the members
of two families, and as is frequently the case with family businesses, there
was a lot of baggage at and under the table. All kinds of conflicts, petty and
otherwise, divided them.
I came in and began the work, but as I progressed, it became clear that
the problems the company had were not going to be solved by a basic
assessment exercise. A couple of years earlier, I might not have been alive to
that. I had been a Good Soldier, I was selling product, getting revenues in
and couldn’t really see beyond the next training course or workshop.
But now I saw clearly that the client’s needs exceeded my program, so I
used that basic transactional intervention to leverage the conversation and
begin a sort of preliminary strategic planning exercise: Where are we now?
Where do we want to go? How are we going to get there? I was moving
things forward to Level 2; I was still basically offering a product, I wasn’t
embedded, but my portfolio of solutions offered considerably more value
than an assessment module possibly could.
I now had a much better perspective on the client’s needs. What’s more,
that original Level 1 exercise had given me enough exposure to the client
that he trusted me sufficiently to take it to next level. I was introduced to the
president, the son of the founder.
And now the real story began to emerge. The original founder, this man’s
father, had died two years previously and the son had taken over the business,
which was now losing market share, and rapidly. The larger box stores, the
Walmarts and so on, were starting to come in and eat his lunch, and the execu-
tive team really hadn’t done much about it. They were getting great compensa-
tion and their heads were in the sand. There was no innovation, no change.
The other thing that emerged was that the deceased founder had a very
authoritarian management style. This had left a legacy of bad feeling and
damaged relationships, and the son felt he had to adopt a more collaborative
style to help redeem the situation. It wasn’t working, not least because there
was very little talent in the executive group. They were operating a very old
business model, but were still able to live quite nicely off the avails, and that
bred complacency.
Outside business experience was almost entirely absent. The siblings
worked in the business during the summer, and were then automatically
enrolled in the company when they graduated, frequently with nothing