The newly appointed president of the subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company requested my assistance in analyzing the performance of two customer relations departments. One was a retail operation that reported within his local portfolio; the other was a commercial unit located in the president’s building that reported directly to his counterpart at corporate headquarter s on the East Coast . He was concerned with the performance of these two units.

Why do today’s consultants find it so hard to stay innovative? Managing partners everywhere can see the competitive half-life of their best ideas shriveling right before their eyes.

There are many reasons why getting started in e-commerce is challenging for most small to midsize companies. First and foremost, business executives (and sometimes their advisors) begin looking for a vendor before they know the questions to ask or understand what is and is not possible. Until a company knows both what it wants and what it can have, there is no way to find those vendors that match its needs.

When I retired from my job as head of the Italian practice of Booz•Allen & Hamilton, I was replaced by a new man from outside the company. I have every reason to believe he was quite competent, but he was much more reserved than I, and there were a few younger men in the company he didn’t get along with too well. “That one rubs me the wrong way,” he would say, or, “I don’t like his attitude.”

Outsourcing has moved from the business press to the front pages of the newspapers. I t has become a political issue in the current presidential contest and is held up as an illustration of the decline of the U.S. economy. I have no intention of taking sides in this argument. My interest is at a more intimate level: How does IT outsourcing affect the companies that decide to utilize it, the IT staff members whose jobs go overseas, and the consultants who advise these firms?

Can you articulate a personal code of ethics? Our management consulting as sociations and firms have their ethical codes. Many of their members commit to them annually by quickly signing a statement agreeing to abide by their code’s provisions. I have done this myself, recognizing that this was the same code I had agreed to for several years running and so just appending my signature. There was no need to read it; if it was valid when I joined, it must be valid still.

Many companies complain that their internal consulting landscape is jagged and fragmented.They have no systematic way to deal with consultants and cannot identify the ones they have already worked with or learn what fees were charged for which benefits. Furthermore, consultants receive acclamation without any type of evaluation, which leads to the uncontrolled diffusion of consulting projects and consultants. Because of unmanaged commissioning, different consulting firms may work in one company on the same problems in a wasted opportunity to bundle consultants' services.

TEN YEARS AGO, Jerry, Clifford, and I talked strategies over a long lunch. Jerry was a solo consultant. Clifford had two other partners in his consulting firm, plus several dozen contract employees. Clifford and his first partner were both Ernst alumni, while their third partner came from Deloitte. Nobody had a better view of their businesses than me, since I sat on both their boards. Rather than tease you with suspense, may I divulge now that Jerry’s personal income in 2004 was $12 million?