Flawless Consulting

A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Third Edition

By: Peter Block

Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt

Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

When the landmark best-seller Flawless Consulting was first published more than three decades ago, it was quickly adopted as the "consultant's bible." With his legendary warmth and passion, Peter Block explained how to deal effectively with clients, peers, and others. The book continues to speak to people in a support function inside organizations as well as to external consultants.

This thoroughly revised and updated third edition of Peter Block's groundbreaking book explores the latest thinking on consultation. It includes new insights about how we can organize our consulting around discovering the strengths, positive examples, and gifts of the client organization or community. The book remains a practical and specific guide for anyone who needs to develop a capacity for deeper relatedness and partnership - which means it is for all who wish to make a real difference in the world.

This new edition covers the consulting challenges that have arisen from the way we routinely communicate electronically and live in the virtual world. Block suggests ways to overcome the distancing and isolating effects inherent in electronic connects. The book also includes practical guidance on how to ask better questions, gives suggestions for dealing with difficult clients, and contains expanded guidelines on more engaging forms of implementation.

Flawless Consulting includes two new examples, taken from health care and educational reform efforts, to show how consulting skills can be useful (and often transformative) in a broader context. These illustrative examples point the way for achieving changes for leadership in business, government, religion, human services, and more.Like the first two editions, Flawless Consulting affirms the notion that authentic behavior and personal relationships are the key to technical and business success. By demonstrating their ability to be truly authentic at each step in the process, consultants can aim toward creating workplaces that are more collaborative and ultimately more successful.

©2011 Peter Block (P)2012 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

"Surpasses the high standards of relevance, clarity, and wisdom characteristic of previous versions... Whether one's consulting experience spans five years or fifty, there is a great deal in this new edition to prompt us to reflect on our own practice and to discuss with colleagues." (Roger Harrison independent consultant and author of Consultant's Journey: A Dance of Work and Spirit and The Collected Papers of Roger Harrison)

Good Content Bad Narration

My thoughts are like everyone else’s. Good content but the voice is hard to take. However, it does help to speed it up to 1.5x.

Voice is almost unlistenable

Not sure if this is AI or not, but 2 chapters in I can barely listen. The vice is smarmy and pretentious. I honestly cannot give any feedback on the content as I can’t get past the voice. May or may not even be able to finish

Great book

Very useful for internal and external consultants alike. Liked it so much that I bought the printed version as well.

Great lessons but flawed execution

The writer provides excellent guidance on building relationships and trust between consultants and clients. He doesn't sugar coat the realities of human behavior organizational politics and the use of power. Then provides clear methods on how to simply be authentic when interacting with anybody.

On the constructive note, the narrator was downright disappointing. His pacing and end of sentence inflections was extremely annoying. It took me a long time to overcome the style for me to focus on what was really good material. I think the audio production company really did the author a disservice for casting this narrator.

Great Book, Annoying Narration

This book is fantastic. It was assigned as a part of one of my grad school courses. I’m so thankful that it’s in audiobook form. However, the narrator distracts from the material by ending each sentence hanging in to the last syllable—like he’s trying to mimic Walter Cronkite. Other than that, it’s great.

Erik Synnestvedt shouldn't read audio books.

This guy has the worst inflection and speech pattern to listen to. He sounds cocky like he's doing you a favor, and emphasizes the end of sentences like an idiot to try to sound smart. Books content is good though. Erik isn't doing Peter any favors on this edition.

Narrators voice gets in the way

TL;DR
Listen to an excerpt first before buying the audio book.

More...
The content is great. Sadly for me, I found the voice of the narrator annoying and distracting. Despite trying not to I was constantly missing content due to my distracted irritation over the narrators voice. Of course the result of that was that I had to re-listen to that content!
The book became more a test of determination and a lesson in tolerance than anything else. How did that go? I'll be getting the physical book as I'm afraid that my intolerance won out - but at least I have a new topic for self improvement to work on.

Great content made unlistenable.

I purchased this audiobook 4 years ago. Every few months I try to return to it thinking I can power through it. Unfortunately not. Without trying to be funny: the vocal inflection the narrator uses at the end of every sentence becomes the only thing you can hear.

Before purchase listen to the sample a couple of times. If it doesn't set your teeth on edge then you may be immune and will benefit from the content.

Great for falling asleep

I rarely leave reviews... But this one needed it. I have no idea what the content is. I couldn't get passed the narrator's droning. He sounds like he smoked some dope, popped a couple of ludes, and shot up heroin before narrating this book.

SAMPLE BEFORE YOU BUY... If you can passed his droning, it may be have great content.

Agree with other reviews about terrible narration

I wish Inhad read the reviews before purchasing - I would have skipped the audio version and gotten the book from the library. The narration is majorly distracting, hard to focus on the content.