When someone joins our team, the onboarding is mostly technical. Product training, access to systems, time with experienced colleagues, a first project to shadow. All necessary. But it covers the part of the job new consultants are already good at.
The part that decides whether a customer trusts them gets much less attention. How to run a first conversation. When to give advice and when to keep asking. What to do when a project is late and the customer is angry. How to explain a technical decision to someone who doesn’t care how it works.
That’s where these five books come in. None of them are about industrial software, and none of them are sales books in the usual sense. They’re about being useful to another person, which turns out to be most of consulting.
1. The First 90 Days, by Michael D. Watkins
This one is about starting a new role, so it’s the obvious first pick for someone who just started. But that’s not the main reason I give it.
Watkins argues that people fail in new roles less because they lack skill and more because they misread the situation. They apply what worked last time without checking whether this situation needs something else. He describes a few types of situations, from start-ups to turnarounds to keeping a successful thing successful, and each one asks for a different approach. He also pushes for a deliberate learning plan and a few early wins that build credibility.
What makes it useful for consultants is that every new customer project is a small version of a new job. A new organisation, new people, a situation you haven’t diagnosed yet. The consultant who walks in with the solution from their last project makes exactly the mistake Watkins describes.
2. The Trusted Advisor, by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford
If new consultants only read one book on this list, it should be this one.
Its best-known idea is a simple formula for trust. Trust grows with credibility, reliability, and intimacy, meaning how safe people feel sharing things with you. And it shrinks with self-orientation: how much you seem focused on yourself instead of the client.
That last part is the one technical people underestimate. Self-orientation isn’t only about pushing your own commission. It’s also wanting to show how much you know, needing to be right, or steering the conversation back to the part you find interesting. Experts do this without noticing, and customers notice every time. A consultant who knows a bit less but listens a lot more often ends up more trusted.
3. The Advice Trap, by Michael Bungay Stanier
Technical consultants are paid for answers, so they give them. Usually too early.
Bungay Stanier calls the part of us that jumps in with advice the “advice monster,” and he describes a few forms it takes: the urge to tell, to rescue, and to stay in control. His answer is short and hard to practise: stay curious a little longer. Ask one more question before offering a solution.
This matters in customer conversations because the first problem a customer describes is rarely the full problem. The consultant who answers right away solves the stated problem. The one who asks another question often finds the real one. It’s the same idea as the first principle in How I work: start with their problem, not your product.
4. Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
Sooner or later every consultant ends up in a hard conversation. A project is running late. The scope is disputed. The data shows that the customer’s own process is the problem, and you have to tell the person who designed it.
The book is about exactly those moments: high stakes, different opinions, strong emotions. Its core observation is that under pressure most people fall into one of two habits. They go quiet and avoid the topic, or they push harder and try to win. Neither works. The alternative it describes is keeping the conversation going long enough that both sides can put all the relevant facts on the table.
Technical people often prefer to let the facts speak for themselves. In a tense meeting they don’t. This book gives new consultants some language for the moments where being right isn’t enough.
5. The McKinsey Way, by Ethan M. Rasiel
This is the oldest book on the list and parts of it show its age. I still give it out for the thinking, not the anecdotes.
It covers the habits that make consulting work structured: breaking a problem into parts that don’t overlap and don’t leave gaps, starting with a hypothesis instead of collecting data forever, focusing on the part of the problem that matters most, and being able to explain your recommendation in the time of an elevator ride.
That last one is the habit I care about most. If a consultant can’t explain their recommendation in thirty seconds, the customer can’t either. And the customer is the one who has to explain it to finance, to IT, and to their own boss.
What didn’t make the list
A few books from my own shelf came close. Radical Candor and High Output Management are excellent, but they’re about managing people, so they’re for later, when someone starts leading a team. Getting More by Stuart Diamond is a great negotiation book, but negotiation comes after trust, not before it.
Books don’t do the work
Handing someone a book is easy. It only matters if you talk about it afterwards: which idea they recognised in a real customer meeting, and which one they disagreed with.
None of these books will teach anyone how industrial software works. That part they learn on the job, and they learn it fast. What these books cover is the part that decides whether a customer wants to keep working with them. Nobody runs a training course on that, so the least I can do is hand them a book.