Volume 3, Issue 2 2009
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We are currently preparing a Special Edition of the JPC. This year at Regent University's School of Business & Leadership 2012 Annual Roundtables of Leadership Research & Practice, the Consulting and Coaching Roundtable made a debut. The topic of the Roundtable was Exploring Research, Practice and Global Perspectives. The papers presented for this Roundtable will appear in the upcoming Special Edition of the JPC.

We Live in Interesting Times!
Bramwell Osula

Welcome to the first issue of 2009! The global economic downturn is the major item on most agendas. While an imploding housing market, crisis in the banking and financial sectors and corporate downsizing with resultant layoffs are the public face of the indelicately labeled “credit crunch,” one wonders what may be occurring beneath the surface.
Practically everyone is affected. Governments, large corporations, small businesses, individual investors and consultants are all feeling the effects of the global recession. Whether opportunities for consultants are expanding or shrinking depends on who you talk to.
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Consulting and the Public Sector: The Role of Consultants as Brokers of Local Business Development: A Case Study

Glenroy Anderson

This case study explores the work consultants do for their clients. It also sheds light on the consultant mindset, focusing on how consultants within a large public authority enterprise unit go about the task of delivering urban regeneration benefits from physical construction schemes. The article demonstrates that consultants can work effectively with other council departments and that consultants are able to establish successful enterprise initiatives, which yield significant regeneration results, by using a private sector approach to broker local business engagement.
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School of Business & Leadership
A Comprehensive Framework for Conducting Client Assessments: Highlighting Strengths, Environmental Factors and Hope
Carla J. Berg

Consultants are often asked to conduct comprehensive assessments of clients, which must be conducted in a way that affords the most complete and accurate data to inform the ensuing recommendations. Appropriate and effective assessments require comprehensive examination of both the individual and the setting. Attending to strengths and weaknesses within clients and the client’s environment allows for a more complete understanding of a client’s situation. Specifically, professionals must attend to four aspects of a client: (a) the client’s psychological and behavioral strengths, (b) the client’s psychological and behavioral weaknesses, (c) the strengths in the client’s environment and (d) the weaknesses in the client’s environment (Wright, 1991). In addition, this approach can be enhanced by using hope theory (Snyder, 1994) as a framework for understanding client goals, along with the routes to those goals (pathways thinking) and the motivation to use those pathways (agency thinking). Finally, the advantages of using this innovative assessment approach to inform the recommendations and professional interactions are considered.

 
If You Cannot Solve The Problem, Change It! Techniques For Effective Problem Design
Jeff Hicks and Padmakumar Nair

Clients often turn to consultants for assistance with problems that are complex or seemingly unsolvable. In our experience, however, we find that in many cases, much of the difficulty comes from the way the problems are framed. In this article, we offer some specific techniques for not just finding problems, but for proactively designing them to be more actionable and solvable in the first place. We demonstrate the application of these techniques with a case study. 

 
Please note: Views and opinions expressed in the articles published in the Journal of Practical Consulting (JPC) represent each author's research and viewpoint and do not necessarily represent JPC or its sponsors. JPC and its sponsors make no representations about the accuracy of the information contained in published manuscripts and disclaims any and all responsibility or liability resulting from the information contained in the JPC.

The Journal of Practical Consulting is a publication of the Regent University School of Business & Leadership | © 2009
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