Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used

This Third Edition to Peter Block's Flawless Consulting addresses business changes and new challenges since the second edition was written ten years ago. It tackles the challenges next generation consultants face, including more guidance on how to ask better questions, dealing with difficult clients, working in an increasingly virtual world, how to cope with complexities in international consulting, case studies, and guidelines on implementation. Also included are illustrative examples and exercises to help you cement the guides offered.

FLAWLESS CONSULTING

When the landmark best-seller Flawless Consulting was first published more than three decades ago, it was quickly adopted as the “consultant’s bible.” With his legendary warmth and passion, Peter Block explained how to deal effectively with clients, peers, and others. The book continues to speak to people in a support function inside organizations as well as to external consultants.

This thoroughly revised and updated third edition of Peter Block’s groundbreaking book explores the latest thinking on consultation. It includes new insights about how we can organize our consulting around discovering the strengths, positive examples, and gifts of the client organization or community. The book remains a practical and specific guide for anyone who needs to develop a capacity for deeper relatedness and partnership―which means it is for all who wish to make a real difference in the world.

This new edition covers the consulting challenges that have arisen from the way we routinely communicate electronically and live in the virtual world. Block suggests ways to overcome the distancing and isolating effects inherent in electronic connects. The book also includes practical guidance on how to ask better questions, gives suggestions for dealing with difficult clients, and contains expanded guidelines on more engaging forms of implementation.

Flawless Consulting includes two new examples, taken from health care and educational reform efforts, to show how consulting skills can be useful (and often transformative) in a broader context. These illustrative examples point the way for achieving changes for leadership in business, government, religion, human services, and more.

Like the first two editions, Flawless Consulting affirms the notion that authentic behavior and personal relationships are the key to technical and business success. By demonstrating their ability to be truly authentic at each step in the process, consultants can aim toward creating workplaces that are more collaborative and ultimately more successful.

Praise for the third edition of Flawless Consulting

“Consulting at its best is about action and interaction, relationships and results. In a highly readable guide that is both inspirational and practical, Peter Block leads consultant and client together through a proven approach to realize their future.”
―SAMUEL R. STRICKLAND
chief financial and administrative officer, Booz Allen Hamilton

“Surpasses the high standards of relevance, clarity, and wisdom characteristic of previous versions.… Whether one’s consulting experience spans five years or fifty, there is a great deal in this new edition to prompt us to reflect on our own practice and to discuss with colleagues.”
―ROGER HARRISON
independent consultant and author of Consultant’s Journey: A Dance of Work and Spirit and The Collected Papers of Roger Harrison

“Peter Block has written a masterful third edition of his masterpiece, Flawless Consulting. Important additions to the third edition are the strength-based strategies that many are beginning to use … in solving seemingly intractable problems in health care and other industries. They are featured in a new Chapter Twelve and form a common thread that runs through this entire path-breaking book.”
―JON C. LLOYD, MD, FACS
senior associate, Positive Deviance Initiative; clinical advisor, Plexus Institute

“Peter’s masterwork, Flawless Consulting, has been my go-to guide since the first edition. …Flawless Consulting is not just a practical, useful, and inviting book for practitioners. It’s all those things, but it’s also a book about some of the most vexing issues we face when consulting to organizations―issues of resistance, truth, doubt, vulnerability, and accountability. If you find yourself giving advice to people making choices, then this book is a must-have for you. Buy it today, use it tomorrow.”
­―JIM KOUZES
award-winning coauthor of the best-selling The Leadership Challenge and The Truth About Leadership, and Dean’s Executive Professor of Leadership, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University

PETER BLOCK is an author and consultant whose work is about empowerment, stewardship, chosen accountability, and the reconciliation of community. He is the author of several best-selling books, including the first two editions of Flawless Consulting, Stewardship, Community, and The Empowered Manager. He is a partner in Designed Learning, a training company that offers his personally designed workshops that help to build the skills outlined in his books.