1. What are the purposes of this website?
The materials on the website were written to give potential clients detailed information about all our consulting and coaching services.

Clients frequently face several obstacles when considering engaging a management consultant. They frequently do not have an in-depth understanding of many of the topics within the discipline of management itself. Nor are they very familiar with the field of management and organizational consulting. They don’t know what’s available, what would suit their needs, or how to evaluate consultants.

This website can help clients come up to speed quickly and get oriented to the lay of the land. It can enable clients to become informed consumers of management-consulting and coaching services, so that they can make a well-informed decision about whether to consider engaging a consultant or coach.

Reading the papers on this website can also be an education in state-of-the-art thinking and methods in the fields of management and organization science. We hope readers will get value from these materials and apply them to their own work and organizations, whether they become clients or not. We also hope our papers serve as evidence of our level of expertise in the areas in which we offer services.
2. What kind of consulting do you do?
Our type of consulting is called “general” management and organizational consulting, because we work on the full range of management and organizational issues. This is as opposed to consultants whose work is limited to a few management responsibilities, such as teambuilding or strategic planning. It is also as opposed to experts in nonmanagement areas, such as marketing or information technology, even though they are sometimes confusingly called management consultants as well.

We offer many consulting services that are fully described (including case studies) on this website. In addition, we frequently customize these services to be a perfect fit for our clients’ needs, and even custom-design whole new services when required.

We conduct our services in four consulting “modes”: assisting (doing some of the work ourselves), advising, coaching, and developing. We balance our work among these modes according to the client’s needs and availability during the engagement. Our services are unusually effective, because we collaborate closely throughout the engagement with the people who will actually be making the improvements, working toward the goals, solving the problems, and carrying out the decisions.

All important general information about our services is provided in detail in “Six Questions Clients Need to Ask When Selecting a Management-Consulting Company, Along with our Answers.” This is the first paper in the Consulting Services section of this website. We strongly encourage anyone interested in our services to start by reading this paper. It will make the individual Service Descriptions much more understandable.
3. What coaching services do you offer?
We offer 28 Talks, 23 Workshops, 4 Skill-Building Programs, and an Executive-Coaching Service. They cover a very wide range of topics of importance to all organizations. They are designed for owners, directors, executives, managers, project-managers, and supervisors of all levels of experience. In addition, most are also suitable for nonmanagers.

These are all described in detail in the Talks, Workshops, & Coaching section of this website. We strongly encourage anyone interested in these coaching services to start by reading the first paper in that section, called “General Information.” It will make the rest of the section much easier to understand, and supply the information common to all these services.
4. Do you offer a free initial consultation?
Yes. We offer all prospective clients a free initial consultation to discuss their aims and concerns. It is to our mutual advantage to see whether we could be of help and whether we have a good fit. There is, of course, no obligation to engage us, and we never employ sales tactics of any sort.
5. What is the “Perspectivist Stage”?
Our company’s name and the first two sections of this website strongly suggest that “Development” is of central importance to us and is our particular specialty. We make extensive use of a Stage-Model of Development that applies equally to individuals and groups (including organizations). This enables us, among other things, to offer something highly unusual in our consulting and coaching services: to help individuals, teams, and organizations shift to a more advanced developmental-stage.

The Developmental Stage we ourselves employ in all our work is called the “Perspectivist Stage.” It is the most advanced stage suitable for management and organizational issues. In fact, it is the only stage capable of coping successfully with the high degree of complexity presented by most management and organizational concerns.

A brief definition of the Perspectivist Stage will be found in the Glossary. More information about it, as well as about the other Developmental Stages and Development as it applies to managers and organizations, will be found in the first two sections of this website: A Model of Development and Stages of Development. We think you will find this unusual information very interesting and even revelatory about many aspects of your work.
6.  Why does the website include information on
foundational topics, such as Cognitive Maps
& Developmental Stages?
Our work is quite unusual, because it makes extensive use of very advanced models and methods; for example, Developmental-Stage models and approaches, Cognitive Maps, and the Perspectivist-Stage. Although these topics are unfamiliar to most managers, a basic knowledge of them is very helpful for understanding our work. They are also the keys to a sophisticated understanding of management and organizations.

Because information on many of these advanced, foundational concepts and how they apply to management consulting and coaching is very hard to find, this website explains them. Development of managers and organizations is introduced in the first section, A Model of Development. The five Developmental Stages are explained and applied to a wide range of management and organizational issues in the second section, Stages of Development.

Cognitive Maps are introduced and several are outlined in the third section, Cognitive Maps. Other topics are treated in some depth in the Library articles, section six. Still other issues are taken up in the Service Descriptions in section four, Consulting Services, and the descriptions of the Talks, Workshops, and Skill-Building Programs in section five. All terms that are not generally familiar are explained in the Glossary.
7.  What results can clients expect from your services?
The bottom-line results we offer our clients are significant improvements in their organization’s quality of goods and services, efficiency of operations, and satisfaction of the members of the organization and its other stakeholders. We are confident that these are the true “End Results” for all organizations. They are the aims that everything else an organization strives for are ultimately for the sake of.

We address the issue of results of our work—an issue many consultants duck—in chapter six of the first paper in the Consulting Services section of this website: “Six Questions Clients Need to Ask When Selecting a Management-Consulting Company, Along with our Answers.” This chapter also outlines an important Cognitive Map for End Results.

In addition, each of our consulting Service Descriptions contains a chart showing what improvements in up to fifteen End Results can be achieved from that service. Each Case Study contains a similar chart, showing what results were actually achieved in that engagement.

We believe clients are entitled to candid, accurate information about what End Results they can reasonably expect from a consulting service. We don’t think clients should settle for anything less from their consultants.