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Every now and again comes a book that changes the way we think or the assumptions that we make about our lives.

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The first step for consulting leaders is to constantly keep communication lines open from within and from without the firm.

Have you ever thought about or noticed a competitor utilizing “thoughtleading” as a business development strategy? Positioning yourself and your firm as leading-edge thinkers in your field involves publishing articles and books, speaking regularly to professional groups, getting yourself noticed by the media and surveying your target market in order to produce research data that only you possess.

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Outsourcing is certainly an answer, but it depends what the question is.

There are two reasons for the failure of a suggestion scheme and they both have their roots in the way that the workforce feels about what it does. The first is the way that the members of the workforce feel about what they are doing in the long term.

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Here are five secrets direct from the Obama "war room" that could transform the effectiveness of senior professionals. 1.

As pointed in my column of 2006, ‘The Global Image Repositioning Shifts’, in the US alone hundreds of its world-class brands are being erased, from monster banking to mega manufacturing, some 73,000 stores alone being closed in the first half of 2009 according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, overall a Trillion-dollars worth of branding imagery that took decades of image building is getting scrubbed out worldwide.

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Confidence is at an all-time low amongst businesses, after the annus horribilis that was 2008.

The workplace is for robust, healthy people, yes? Ill people, especially mentally ill people, should be cared for elsewhere, somewhere out of sight.

It is not trademarked, so anyone can call him or herself a partner.

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Even Joe the Pipefitter must look askance at some of the moves made in corporate America when faced with a string of bad news.

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Countless higher degrees and PHD’s have been awarded as we honed our collective understanding of economic cause and effect, but over a century since the beginning of the study of economics we have still not been able to come up with a definitive model that describes how our economy works.

It’s like a human body, when faced with exposure to frigid temperatures, automatically cuts off the blood supply to peripheral vessels in order to preserve core temperature.

As the UK and the rest of the world plunges into recession, businesses may be excused for thinking there are more important things to worry about than the environment.

The picture is further complicated by the increasing use of customer segmentation and the rising number of channels.

According to Coulson-Thomas “While less capable boards focus on survival, cutting costs and laying people off the more effective ones look beyond economies and at ways of improving performance and building market share.

Your journey – the way forward Clearly the business debate is no longer about whether a company should make a substantial commitment to CSR but just how? Companies really do have to get their CSR act together and actually start doing stuff. The purpose of the powerful questions in this book is to help you get your own answers to this dilemma.

In these uncertain times there are going to be some very tough decisions and some very unhappy people, but that is what has to happen in a lot of cases to allow companies and corporations to weather the current crisis such that when the markets regain their strength these same companies will be able to re-employ personnel and continue to provide a livelihood for their employees and shareholders. The efforts of these companies in the short term to reduce costs may be seen as a necessary evil but if they are not conducted in the correct manner then these companies run the risk of damaging their infrastructure to such an extent that they may not be able to recover even when the current pressure is removed. A few years ago I was watching TV and I saw an interview with Rod Eddington, the then Chairman of British Airways.

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The energy sector is entering an period of dramatic change with far-reaching implications for the way consumers and businesses meet their energy needs, reveals a White Paper issued today by Logica, the IT and business services company.

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Getting to and maintaining a healthy weight through good diet isn’t something you stumble across by accident as a busy Management Consultant.

Many of these companies are reluctant to go down the same route as they did in the early 1990s - when redundancies were the first port of call for any CEO looking to balance the books.

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Economic recession presents suppliers with a golden opportunity to build closer relationships with their customers.

The combination of credit crunch, economic downturn and indicators of approaching recession has led many companies to focus anew upon cutting costs.

The sad fact is that the consulting industry is failing at the very core of its business – resource management.

As a consultant to small businesses, I have discovered that many of the complaints I hear over and over again have to do with organization.

How to Get Started Do you really know how you're doing financially? Do you have to check your wallet and your bank account on a daily (or even hourly basis) to know how much cash you have? Are you making purchase decisions based on a plan that you know will lead you to financial freedom - or at least a good night's sleep? Take heart - you're not alone.

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“The real power of Jazz…is that a group of people can come together and create…improvised art and negotiate their agendas…and that negotiation is the art.” Wynton Marsalis from Jazz, a film by Ken Burns What is the connection between change, consulting and jazz? Even as a child I was attracted to jazz music.

Prof Colin Coulson-Thomas told a gathering of customer service practitioners in Oman that: “Successful companies work with customers to find better ways of helping them to cope with tough times.” The professor believes “Economic hardship brings latent qualities to the surface.