SIXWhat You Need to Do, Part 2: New Client Acquisition

In 1975 Herb Shepard, one of the “fathers” of organization development, penned a list of “Rules of Thumb for Change Agents” (Shepard 1975). The first was “stay alive,” by which he meant that the consultant shouldn’t take actions that result in being dismissed by the client if the intent is to be of help. It’s hard to do good work after getting yourself fired. While this seems obvious, Herb felt he needed to say it because he observed that many consultants were standing their ground on value differences or arguing over the path forward with their clients, with the result that they were walking away from the work. They felt proud of themselves for sticking to their guns but Herb thought such ...

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