[poulsbohemian]

I like and recommend this one, but I also think he pulls a lot of sleight-of-hand... a lot of it is based on the premise that the client is willing to share (or can even get, in big enough companies...) numbers that inform the value created. For a tech consultant bopping between companies and industries, it's really challenging to come up with these numbers. Likewise, I found that even if you can prove a number, getting a big company to bite on it (unless you are truly talking to a Cx0) is nearly impossible... case in point... a major west-coast health care company had a crisis. I found the problem and laid out a path for a few million dollars to solve the problem. It was somehow way easier to pay IBM $50MM to "solve" the problem rather than the $10MM or less by actually fixing the problem. You run into a lot of that at the Fortune 500, which makes it clear it isn't about "value". Weiss seems to gloss over a lot of this.

[squirrel]

You probably weren't talking to an economic buyer.

[poulsbohemian]

I was and I wasn't - and in fact we knew we didn't really have a shot at getting to the economic buyer who made the choice to spend stupid money. But that's kinda my point - most of us are talking to mid-level management and down when we are interacting as solo operators / small consultancies into larger clients. That Director you are interacting with likely doesn't have the authority to authorize anything beyond a consulting contract at $xxx /hour as they are going to have someone in finance scrutinizing their spend.