How senior managers interact with professional advisors

Spoilt for Choice, 2019

How do senior executives, such as CEOs and CFOs, interact, select and appoint professional advisors? Based on a successful PhD project, the research in this book explores the interactions between advisors of large professional service firms and senior executive clients on an evidence-based academic level. The research journey and the author’s reflections are charted step-by-step, providing an example of how to analyse unstructured qualitative data, reach theoretical saturation and capture emerging substantive theories. Moreover, by taking a unique holistic and inductive approach, this study offers a series of practical insights on how to combine and apply Kathy Charmaz’ constructivist grounded theory with an autoethnographic stance. Divided into eight chapters, the author uses empirical data and rigorous analysis to uncover two distinct decision-making processes, namely (a) the client’s decision to develop and maintain a relationship with the advisor and (b) to select and appoint the advisor for a particular project or services. Mapping these to one common conceptual framework a second complementary model emerges - a type of decisionmaking matrix with the foci ’competitiveness, skills and merit’, ‘continuity and embeddedness’, ‘control and manage’ and ‘trust and empathy’ - which offers the reader an alternative perspective of client decision-making. This book will be useful for practitioners and researchers alike who have an interest in understanding either naturalistic decision-making processes, the complexities of relationship development and procurement dynamics, as well as applied qualitative research methods.

Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2017

The scholarly proclaimed truce between professionals and managers in professional service firms (PSFs) is presently being threatened by changes in the business environment, calling for coordination superordinate to the single professions. The issue of managing professionals in PSFs consequently needs to be re-addressed. We do so by using correspondence analysis to explore the interrelatedness between change initiatives and responses to these changes, in an interview-based case study. Our results suggests that managers can successfully change management related practices without particular consideration of the professionals in the firm, but also that professionals can successfully change professional practices in an unassuming and "practice-like" fashion: with actions rather than with words. Managers who wish to change professional practices, however, need to negotiate the content, scope and purpose of the change initiative with the professionals in the firm.

We are also particularly grateful to the facilitators and participants in the Future of Advisory Services Review workshop (held in May 2009) who generously accommodated our presentation of emerging findings and contributed valuable comments and reflections from their own experiences.

The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting, 2012

In this paper, we analyse the complex interaction between professional advisors and their clients. Our aim is to summarize and critically review the relevant literature and to outline major directions for future research. There are three competing models that discuss the interaction between professional service providers and their clients: the expert model, the 'reflective practitioner' model and the critical model. After reviewing assumptions underlying these approaches as well as their contributions and shortcomings, we suggest that the key problem with these models is that they offer only partial insights into the relationship between clients and professional business service providers. Additionally, they have different epistemological foundations and, as such, they are incompatible. Building upon the existing research and our discussion, we outline the major issues of client-consultant interaction that future research needs to address in order to provide a multifaceted understanding of the client-consultant relationship.

Journal of Management Studies, 1992

Established methodologies of leadership research have placed unnecessary constraints upon our capacity to examine creatively actual leadership practices and to generate fresh insights into their dynamics. A regeneration of leadership research depends upon the development of new frameworks of interpretation which yield new or deeper understanding of processes to which the term ‘leadership’is usually attributed. To this end, the article presents a conceptual framework founded upon well established traditions of social enquiry which have been underutilized in leadership research. The value of this framework is demonstrated through the analysis of data taken from an intensive field study of leadership processes amongst senior managers. It is argued that this methodology for leadership research serves to answer calls for increasing the practical relevance of leadership research without making unacceptable sacrifices to its intellectual credibility.

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2008

Based on the investigation of seven consultancy projects within an international technical consulting firm, we identify three major practices that characterize client-consultant interaction-shaping impressions, problem-solving, and negotiating expectations-and discuss their respective characteristics, activities, and contingencies. Our discussion of these practices provides not only a more differentiated picture of client-consultant interaction but also uncovers the critical role that clients play in these practices.

1997

At last here is a comprehensive text on the managerial problems of professional firms. David Maister, whose international consulting practice has gained him the reputation among his peers as "the guru's guru", brings together for the first time his most brilliant and penetrating work on virtually every management issue facing professional firms today. Professional firms, he shows, are different from other business enterprises in two ways. First, they are in the business of providing highly customized services, and hence cannot apply many of the management principles developed for the mass production industrial world. Second, professional services are highly personalized and involve the skills of individuals. Firms must compete not only for clients, but also for talented professionals. Drawing on ten years' research amid consulting to these unique and creative institutions, Maister explores issues ranging from marketing and business development to multinational stra...

International Journal of Technology Intelligence and Planning, 2010

Managers often need advice: management consultants are quite capable of giving advice. This may seem like the most elementary of transactions, but it is actually fraught with difficulties occasioned by the nature of information. In consequence, it rarely occurs. Instead, managers tend to make do with the prepackaged and neatly labelled information that is management method. They are keener than ever to hire management consultants, but to explain and legitimise management method. This can lead to the dependency of the manager on the consultant, dependency hidden by a prevailing myth that an information transaction has taken place, that the consultant really has told the manager what the manager wants to know.

RMLE Online, 2014

Management Consulting Journal, 2019