The MECE Muse: 100+ Selected Practices, Unwritten Rules, and Habits of Great Consultants

Christie Lindor is a management consultant, speaker, expert mentor, and career reinventionist focused on personal, team, and organization transformation.She has spent her entire 16+ year career working for some of the top consulting firms in the world such as Deloitte Consulting LLP and IBM Business Consulting Services.Her mission to be the mentor she wishes she had had earlier in her career and is host of the MECE Muse Unplugged podcast, where she focuses on giving consultants and others strategies for career success.She regularly blogs on her website and currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts. When Christie is not consulting, mentoring, speaking, or writing, you can find her reading business books, talking politics.In this book, The MECE Muse: 100+ Selected Practices, Unwritten Rules, and Habits of Great Consultants, the author discusses and defines career successes and failures as illustrations of the knowledge, experiences, and wisdom gained over the years, giving you an informed perspective. She focuses on helping you maximize your opportunities as a consultant before you begin your career or walk onto your next client site toward a journey of consulting.Consultants specialize in a variety of industries, domains, and sectors including: strategy consultants advisory consultants functional consultants (marketing, IT, finance) industry consultants (consumer, energy, healthcare, government) domain consultants (supply chain, customer, and transformation).Her goal with this book is to create a standard definition of what great consulting looks She challenges other seasoned consultants to continue to elevate the profession responsibly to help shape the incoming generation.Pay it forward is this principle we should also apply to the collective advancement of the profession. She is an expert in being the mentor that she wishes she had earlier in her career, and she wrote the book in that voice. She spent the first 5−6 years of her career seeking mentors, particularly women of color, in consulting leadership roles. After years of feeling lost, she decided to become her own mentor because she was determined to succeed.The concepts highlighted in this book fall under a set of guiding principles that Lindor uses within her career strategy is called the MECE Muse Manifesto of Great Consultants. She advises to live these principles every single day.If you read this book, chances are you might be thinking about going into consulting or deciding whether to stay in consulting and refine your skills or move on. There are a number of options to choose from. Earlier in her career when she was spending a lot of time refining her technical skills, She wishes someone had told her to also focus on her people skills. To be successful in consulting, all types of people—your team members, leaders, clients—have to like and respect you.You have to be able to team and work with people that have very different world views. Great consultants manage expectations and relationships through good project management skills, asking good consultative questions, managing optics, navigating organizational politics, and dealing with conflict.Contrary to popular belief, chivalry is not dead and neither are manners. And great consultants use manners to their competitive advantage. Since consulting is a relationship-driven business, it’s important to have a candid discussion on manners and etiquette. You have to make the most of your project team experiences by learning from past team experiences, being a team player, and learning how to maximize relationships with different team member personalities.The ability to build and foster client relationships is the bread and butter of a consulting career. Great consultants take time to understand the mindset of a client, establishing relationships to become a trusted advisor, taking clients along the project journey, while dealing with conflict head on. Great consultants seek to build rapport with every interaction to create a sense of comfort and confidence with clients. Just look at all the facts about the market, about how we could do things differently, of how—”That we could do the work proposed because we have done this work before. We have demonstrated our ability to add value through research and our work and expertise which are in alignment with marketplace trends that would give them a leg up to take on a dominant market position in this new space using another one of our solutions. The outstanding quality of all the practices and toolkits that are described in the book are based on sound training and experience and on going research relevant to each type of consultng.What Is a Consulting Career Toolkit? Great consultants are in a constant state of 2X-3X growth, meaning that every one year of consulting experience is equivalent to two-three years in industry. To sustain such growth at an accelerated pace, great consultants require an ever-evolving consulting toolkit—a collection of information, resources, and materials that create a competitive edge. The tools of the trade for a consultant are knowledge and expertise. There are a number of consulting techniques in the book, such as being MECE that help you nail insights. With every interaction strive to share data to help your clients view their organization through a different lens. Give them a different way of approaching a problem—one steeped in research and key analysis. Great consultants nail the ability to think critically, problem structuring, root cause analysis, and synthesize data using sound judgment.Lindor includes consulting leaders' Questions and Answers in an interview style. These practicing clients/ mentors give a compact plan to how they arrive at efficient problemsolving in their business.Lindor has compartmentalized data into neatly packaged, black-and-white categories without overlapping concepts. Great consultants are able to operate well in the complex and ambiguous gray of life. She shares resources in the appendix to provide exhaustive details of many concepts outlined in the book that deep dive into strategies and tactics on topics covered in this book.Appendix A: Consultant Toolkit Starter PackAppendix B: Summary of 100+ Selected Practices, Unwritten Rules, and HabitsArmed with all advice in the book you are sure to succeed not only in business but also in your personal life.Scarlett Jensen13 February 2018

The MECE Muse : 100+ Selected Practices, Unwritten Rules, and Habits of Great Consultant, by Christie Lindor“MECE” is an acronym for Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. In the field of consulting, MECE describes a technique on “how business problems are visualized and understood in order to solve the root cause.” Lindor, we presume, is the Muse. Let’s follow her: “In this book I focus on selected practices, unwritten rules, and habits of business consultants that solve problems for organizations. The goal of a business consultant is to do three key things: 1. Become a trusted advisor. 2. Create value-added impact to a client’s career, team,....... or company. 3. Constantly create relationships,... [and do those things that allow doing] steps 1 and 2 phenomenally well.” The book is organized as follows: Sectional content;The Mindset of Great Consultants; Performance and Conditioning of Great Consultants; and Reflections of a consulting Career. Within each Section there are several chapters comprising ‘Guidelines’; ‘Make it MECE”; and an ‘Interview’ with a Consulting Leader. In these sections are contained “... illustrations of the knowledge, experiences, and wisdom gained over my fifteen-plus years of consulting experience....” The point is to “ give you [the reader] an informed perspective’ helping [you] to “ maximize your opportunities as a consultant before you begin your career or walk onto your next client site toward a journey of consulting greatness.”I am seeing this book form the view point of a non-consultant. I recognize that it is focused on big-time business consulting and directed to consultants, but I challenge you to determine how much the general principles apply to other life ventures. In one summary, a successful consultant must be: ‘be focused on your brand with integrity and with executive presence’. This extends (among others) to dress, good manners, and presentations - verbal and written. There is relatively little in the book on technical or analytical expertise - perhaps taken as a given), but there is a tremendous lot about people relationships - to self, to team, to client, and to the public in general. Not compromising but rather building these (trust) seems to be an overarching paramount principle. Notwithstanding that the experiences are those of the author and other great consultants, the book exposes client problems with seasoned and new consultants. Any young consultant (or University student) will do well to ponder on these experiences and guidelines. The guidelines are clearly set out, and one feels the mentorship capabilities of the author in laying them out. I felt that I would have liked to keep this book in my briefcase, not necessarily as a reference but like a refresher or booster, and I feel sure the more times I read it, the more I would get out of it. However, if I had my druthers, I would have three books consistent with the current three sections, instead of one 300+ page book physically and content heavy. I was impressed but the author’s dictum: ‘research, research, research’, and I had a chuckle when reading her ‘worst team experience’. I could not help thinking that she should have taken her own advice, but I concluded that that experience probably birthed the dictum. And therein lies another of the strengths of the book: with her experience of 15+years (and including the interviews) , she comes over as authentic, genuine and credible as she advises young and currently installed consultants to get on the way to “unconscious competence”Business changes will certainly take place over time. I do hope this book follows the trends with adjusted guidelines and principles.

It's so refreshing to read about someone who gives selflessly to others. She is so passionate about consulting and anyone in this track should take heed!

Pro: The information presented is partly interesting and gives geniune insights into the professionContra: Very bad writing style rendering it almost unreadable. The paragraphs merely consists of unconnected list-sentences each one beginning with "great consultant". Almost no insights into the technical part or the actual MECE-tehcnique. More about the lifestyle one have to adapt in order to become a **great consultant**.Bottom line: If you can ignore the word *great consultant* popping up every two of three sentenses the book might provide you some insights in the consultant lifestyle.

Great read, very practical and enjoyed the interviews with industry players.