I tweet a daily consulting tip on the @artofgig twitter account and compile them every couple of weeks here as a newsletter issue.
Here are tips 28-44.
Consulting Tip #28: Do not get religious about the indie consulting life. You were probably a paycheck type once, and might be again. Or you might be part-time paycheck, part-time indie. The goal is to steadily increase individual agency over time, not cargo-cult religiosity.
Consulting Tip #29: Accept that you will often be misunderstood and viewed with suspicion by missionary types with a strong sense of belonging to organizations. Mercenaries have value precisely because missionaries suffer from loyalty blindness.
Consulting Tip #30: Google, learn about, and internalize Hirschman’s Exit, Loyalty, and Voice” model. To be an indie consultant is to deeply internalize exit-oriented decision-making defaults.
Consulting Tip #31: Develop empathy and compassion for those with voice-oriented decision-making defaults, and learn to respect how and why they behave as they do, and how they serve as the yang to your yin. It takes both exit and voice types to make a world.
Consulting Tip #32: Turn public celebrations of freedom into private celebrations of your own. Take a moment to reflect on, and update, what freedom means to you. If your understanding of freedom isn’t evolving, neither are you. Happy 4th of July.
Consulting Tip #33: Employees need to get their head in the game, but consultants need to get the game in their heads. A good way to hone this ability is to read sectoral histories, biographies, and historical documents.
Consulting Tip #34: Take business cartoons like Dilbert, and workplace shows like The Office seriously. Your ability to get the jokes without being terminally depressed by them is a measure of your understanding of a work culture.
Consulting Tip #35: Learn to recognize common workplace watercooler versions of transactional games like “Ain’t it awful?” and gently resist being drawn into them. They’re a perk for employees, not you. Read Eric Berne’s classic, Games People Play to learn the basic ones.
Consulting Tip #36: Examples, examples, examples. Your advice is only as good as your examples. Collect examples everywhere, from all sources. Half your value lies in being an encyclopedia of examples, with ready access to greater volume, velocity, and variety than employees.
Consulting Tip #37: Read up on classic/cliched examples commonly cited in your consulting niche, and have something fresh to say about them. Examples: Southwest Airlines (strategy consultants), iPhone (design consultants), AlphaGo (AI), BP futures (futurists).
Consulting Tip #38: Beware obscure, marginal examples unless they seem like portents of future megatrends. Obscure examples are the consulting equivalent of citing practices of isolated hunter-gatherer tribes in anthropology. Go for unfamiliar aspects of familiar examples.
Consulting Tip #39: Do not half-ass statistics as an element in anything you do, whether it’s macroeconomic trends or A/B testing of UIs. Either go deep and do it right, or stick to narrative-mode justifications. Half-assed statistical thinking is often worse than none.
Consulting Tip #40: Try to be higher availability to longer-term clients. The better you know a person, the more valuable spontaneous or quick-scheduled conversations are to both of you (1 hour to 2 days out).
Consulting Tip #41: Stay aware of the tempo of the engagement relative to the tempo of the normal workflows of the client. A weekly standing meeting with a client team that meets daily means up to 5 internal course changes might happen between your own updates.
Consulting Tip #42: Primum non nocere. First, be mostly harmless.
Consulting Tip #43: You are likely just one source of counsel for your client. Learn about the other sources, and do your best to harmonize with them, but if you must pick a battle, do so as openly and directly as possible. Influence undercutting games are rarely worth it.
Consulting Tip #44: Beware the boom-bust psyche, swinging between tactical hustling during cash-flow crunches, and coasting after a few good-sized invoices get paid.
Here is Compilation #2 (14-27) if you want to backtrack and catch up.
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