Human Scale Business

Fabian Pfortmüller is a Swiss community builder based in Amsterdam. He's an experienced entrepreneur, acknowledged innovator, and prolific writer. I had the opportunity to speak with Fabian about cultivating communities from the inside-out at the speed of trust.

Becoming an effective rainmaker doesn't mean we must conform to the stereotype of a pushy salesperson. To the contrary, winning client business is a function of demonstrating our expertise, earning prospective clients' respect, and cultivating trust. That's the message of Doug Fletcher, the author of "How to Win Client Business."

Rosalie Cates advises philanthropic foundations engaged in impact investing. An independent consultant, she's affiliated with The Giving Practice, a project of Philanthropy Northwest. I've been learning from Rosalie for more than 20 years. In our most recent conversation, she shared her thoughts on the centrality of mission and values, cultivating trust, and finding one's niche as a consultant.

Gareth Pronovost of GAP Consulting is the expert I turn to for help with Airtable, the no-code database application. If you are hosting a membership community, you should be considering how to use Airtable and other no-code tools to streamline and automate your workflows. I spoke with Gareth about process automation, the no-code movement, his Airtable Mastermind community, and working through the suck when creating content that demonstrates your consulting expertise.

I had the opportunity recently to speak with Joe O'Mahoney. Joe is a Professor of Consulting at Cardiff University and is the author of a leading college textbook on consulting. Prior to his academic career, Joe was a strategy consultant. Now, he applies evidence-based lessons from his research to help small consultancies navigate the often treacherous transition from early growth to effective scaling of their firms.

The degree to which status and one's ability to contribute are perceived to be coupled can inhibit the participation of relatively low-status persons in collaborative communities. That's a problem because complex challenges are best tackled by cognitively diverse teams. That suffers when the conversation is limited to people who are high-performers along similar dimensions. If we wish to cultivate valuable and equitable communities, we need to find ways to help people identify and articulate the unique value they bring to the conversation.

What if business meetings were something you looked forward to? Maggie Chumbley explains how small shifts in how you approach meetings can yield big differences in outcomes.