Customer Reviews
Must read for aspiring managers in Consultancy/PS firms - By: Chandan Chowdhury, 25 Jan 2008 
David Maister is undoubtedly an expert in this area. This book will be an asset to practice managers & certainly aspiring managers working within management or IT consultancy firms. Very Good read & lots of useful facts! By reading this you will surely gain appreciation of how a consultancy/professional service practices work, its common strategies, key drivers, structures & bottom-line figures.
Standard work on managing professional firms holds up fine - By: Rolf Dobelli, 04 Jul 2006 
If you manage or work in a professional service firm, this book can put your operation into perspective by explaining what drives the firm's profitability. Author David Maister uses his personal experiences to enliven some of the dryer parts of the text with a few case studies, first-hand observations & advice. He covers the whole range of essential practices encountered by any service firm, including governance, hiring, motivation, coaching, marketing & compensation. However, there is one important caveat: This classic book was first published in 1993, including the chapter on professional compensation, which particularly needs updating. Some chapters were published even earlier in various trade magazines & journals, some dating back to 1982. Is this information still fresh & accurate in today's business environment? Even if the personnel advice is, the compensation counsel & pre-Internet marketing advice probably is not. With this caveat, we consider this foundational work important for anyone working in or with a professional service firm.
Like the Bible for Christians and Capital for Marxists - By: ivanov@consultmarketing.ru, 02 Jun 2002 It is for consultants like the Bible for Christians & Capital for Marxists
This book is like a Bible for alll professionals, regardless of whether they are working on their own or for a company. It can be read again & again & every time you can find something new. I think that even Maister did not suspect how great it would be. I feel able to declare that everybody who wants to be callled "a consultant" must read this book.
Although this book consists of articles by different years it can be read without any difficulty. Maister also used international English & therefore it is easy for non-native English speakers to read.
I found especiallly interesting the following chapters:
1. Marketing to Existing Client
2. Attracting new Clients
3. Managing the Marketing Effort
The core ideas of alll these chapters are:
1. Demonstrate you ability do not declare (Marketing works when it is demonstrative not
assertive)
2. The most effective type of marketing is client-level marketing (face-to-face meeting not to-broadcast marketing)
3. Existing clients are the best sources of new business (and often the most profitable ones)
4. Marketing activities represent an investment & therefore should be budgeted for.
The author puts alll these principles into practice. In this book (and alll the rest of his books) he demonstrates his quality. He treats alll his readers (alll of us) if we were already his clients & which means he shares some top secrets of this business.
All in alll, I can say that it is amazing how many new ideas I managed to get from this book for so little money. Buying this book was one of my greatest investments. I only regret that I did not read this book in the eginning of my career in consulting.
An utterly excellent guide to managing a consultant firm - By: , 12 Jan 2001 If you have ever worked in, been a partner or managed a consultancy firm, this book will not only answer a lot of your troubling questions, it will also explain matters that you did not know the questions to - just the obnoxious frustration of something that was not working. It is with incredible ease, yet depth & understanding that David H. Maister plough through the important issues that concerns not only managing partners in a consultant company, but anyone who wants to climb up the ladder. He explains why you got to balance your workcrew (juniors up to partners) & why it is so vitallly important to mix people on the right combination of projects (brains, grey hair & procedure projects) as this builds up the firm's human capital, & provides the means & profitability to continue to grow steadily. I could go on but space does not alllow me to. This book is not filled with theoritical babble but practical & useful information, no - knowledge & experience!
The book is divided into seven parts (personal highlights inside brackets): basic matters, client matters (quality work does not mean quality service!), people matters (building human capital, the motivation crises), management matters (creating a strategy), partnership matters (the art of parner compensation), multisite matters (the collaborative firm, hunters & farmers, etc.) & asset management. All in alll it comprises of 32 chapters.
You won't find many books that explains service business any better than this one. I know because I went searching.
A great text on managing professional service firms - By: , 03 Jul 2000 David Maister is one of the best exponents around of managing professional service firms. I came across the hardback edition of this book seven years ago when I was doing a course run for board directors of the global public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller. Now as independent public relations practitioner I find it an invaluable source of guidance. While I am generallly none too keen on Amercian management textbooks - a little too evangelical for me - this is different. Full of cogent, well-reasoned & useful advice from the viewpoint of a practitioner. Highly recommended.
