The New Professional Service Firm: How Consultants, Accountants, and Lawyers Need to Reinvent Themselves (Business Guides on the Go)

Contents
Welcome to the New Professional Service Firm
About the Authors
List of Figures
1: Disruption Is On the Way
	1.1	 We Cannot Go On Like This
		1.1.1	 Accountants Diversify as Auditing Declines
		1.1.2	 Lawyers Automate as They Specialize
		1.1.3	 Consultants Threaten to Lose Focus
	1.2	 The Four Major Disruptions of Our Professional Existence
		1.2.1	 Technology Disrupts
		1.2.2	 New Generations: A Different Breed of Professional
		1.2.3	 What Do the New Generations Want?
		1.2.4	 Critical Clients Find New Solutions
		1.2.5	 Surviving Complexity
	1.3	 Current Strategies Will Not Help
	References
2: Understanding How Professionals Work: Building Blocks for the Future
	2.1	 Understanding Our Business Model
	2.2	 Services: What We Deliver
		2.2.1	External Perspective
		2.2.2	 Creativity
		2.2.3	 Leadership: Ad Interim
		2.2.4	 Connections and Network
		2.2.5	 Coach and Trusted Advice
	2.3	 Three Ways to Deliver Professional Work
	2.4	 Compensation: How Professionals Are Paid
	2.5	 What Is Our Business Model?
	2.6	 How We Work Today: Our Archetypes and Their Limitations
		2.6.1	 Our Gentlemen’s Club
		2.6.2	 The Professional Corporation
		2.6.3	 The Flexfirm
	2.7	 Today’s Archetypes Are Not Sustainable
		2.7.1	 Which Model Is the Most Forward-Looking?
	References
3: Profiting from Disruption
	3.1	 Introducing Case Studies on Business Communities
	3.2	 Two Expert Communities: Cambridge Technology and Merlin
	3.3	 Flexible Consulting and Law: Eden McCallum and the Montage Legal Group
		3.3.1	 Flexible Job: With Quality Results!
	3.4	 Computer-Based Professional Services: Rocket Lawyer
	3.5	 A Community of Software Firms: BSO/Bureau for Software Development
	3.6	 The Berkeley Research Group: A Professional Community with a Wide Range of Services
		3.6.1	 A Unique Business Model
		3.6.2	 A Quick Start
		3.6.3	 Challenges
	3.7	 What We Have Learned from These Cases: Conclusions
	References
4: The Professional Service Community: The Way Forward
	4.1	 What the Professional Service Community Looks like and how it Works
		4.1.1	 From Firm to Community
	4.2	 The Community Has a Future, unlike the Old Archetypes
	4.3	 Vision, Leadership, and the Pop-Up Team
		4.3.1	 What Should the Leadership of our Community Look like?
		4.3.2	 Coordination of Accounts and the Pop-up Project
	4.4	 Sources of Professional Value: Brainpower, Skills, and Knowledge
		4.4.1	 Finding and Retaining Brainpower in our Community
		4.4.2	 Skills and Capabilities
		4.4.3	 How Do we Acquire New Skills?
		4.4.4	 Knowledge in our Community
	4.5	 Creating Professional Value through Organization, Good Economics, and the Right Culture
		4.5.1	 Organizing our Community
		4.5.2	 How Should we Govern our Community?
	4.6	 Creating the “Superculture” in the Community
		4.6.1	 How Do we Build our “Superculture”?
	4.7	 How to Make Money with our Community
		4.7.1	 Work Steps to Arrive at the Appropriate Economic Model
	4.8	 Reputation as the Sustainable Foundation of our Community
		4.8.1	 Reputation Is the Name of the Game
		4.8.2	 Reputation: A Special Challenge for our Community
	4.9	 Delivering Value with our Community
		4.9.1	 Which Services we Want to Deliver with our Community
	4.10	 A Promising List of Clients
	References
5: Foundations of the Successful Professional Community
	5.1	 Our Professional Community Needs Strong Foundations
	5.2	 What Does Success Mean in a Community?
	5.3	 Connectivity, Compatibility, and Commonality
		5.3.1	 Connectivity
		5.3.2	 Compatibility
		5.3.3	 Commonality
		5.3.4	 Conclusion
	5.4	 The Successful Community Professional
		5.4.1	 What Characteristics Should we Expect Them to Have?
			5.4.1.1 Curious, Creative, Entrepreneurial
			5.4.1.2 Positive, Optimistic, Can-Do Mentality, Persistent
			5.4.1.3 Communicative Leaders of People and Ideas
	5.5	 Trust, Tolerance, and Transparency: Cornerstones of Culture
		5.5.1	 Trust
		5.5.2	 Tolerance
		5.5.3	 Transparency
	5.6	 Growth: The Great Imperative
	5.7	 Synergy: Translating Strong Foundations into Measurable Success
	5.8	 Innovation and Renewal
		5.8.1	 Why Innovate?
		5.8.2	 Alienation and Spin-Offs Threaten
		5.8.3	 How Do we Strengthen Innovation and Keep Innovative Teams on Board?
		5.8.4	 How Do we Start and Manage Innovation?
	References
6: Fieldwork: Monday Morning Actions
	6.1	 Off to Work!
	6.2	 Understand Our Current Strategic Position and Disruptions
		6.2.1	 Step 1: Follows Chapter 1 of This Book
	6.3	 Evaluate Our Business Model
		6.3.1	 Step 2: Follows Chapters 2 and 3 of This Book
	6.4	 Assemble Our Community Model
		6.4.1	 Step 3: Follows Chapter 4 of This Book
		6.4.2	 Agree on a Vision for the Community and Its Core Consequences: Reputation, Brand, Standards
		6.4.3	 Decide on the Leadership of Our Community and Its Pop-Up Projects
		6.4.4	 Define Our Sources of Professional Value: Brainpower, Competences, Knowledge
		6.4.5	 Determine Our Organization, Economics, Culture, Strategy
	6.5	 Invite Partners to Our Professional Community
		6.5.1	 Make Sure the Foundations of Our Professional Service Community Are in Place: Step 4: Following Chapter 5 of This Book
		6.5.2	 Get Our Colleagues On board
	6.6	 Make Sure We Remain on Track
Closing Remarks
	After All
Afterthoughts
Index