- Consultants need to grow their soft skills, and books can be a valuable resource.
- Consulting experts and business school professors shared their go-to reads for leadership and managing advice with Business Insider.
- Titles range from a 90s classic, "The McKinsey Way," by Ethan M. Rasiel to "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss, a former international hostage negotiator for the FBI who shared tips on how to get through to anyone.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
Management consultants are essentially business doctors because large companies rely on them to help fix complex problems.
Consultants specializes in advising leaders to make smarter money and business decisions. They usually have a knack for diagnosing company strengths and weaknesses on the fly. Apart from the high salaries and prestige, consultants spend their days collaborating with teams, negotiating with high-profile clients, and solving complex problems. Most of their skills are mastered through business school and rigorous training from elite firms but there are some skills management consultants can learn and develop from books.
Business Insider has compiled a list of books recommended by MBA graduates, business school professors, and former consultants. This wide-ranged reading list gives tools for problem solving and persuasion, teaches the impact of different management styles, and informs you on what you're expected to know.
Here are 18 books you should read if you want pursue a management consulting career.
"Quiet" by Susan Cain
"Quiet" is a curriculum requirement in Zoë Chance's lectures at Yale School of Management.
Chance, a management professor teaching "Mastering Influence and Persuasion," shared in a Medium post that her students can become better leaders once they figure out how to work well with introverts.
In this book, author Susan Cain gives a crash course on how extroverts and introverts think differently. She explained their strengths and weaknesses in problem solving, and she emphasized that introverts can make great (if not better) leaders.
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"Good to Great: Why Some Companies make the Leap and Others Don't" by Jim Collins
Davis Nguyen, went to Yale and worked at Bain & Company for two years. He also founded careers company My Consulting Offer. He suggested several books that helped him through job transitions and leadership challenges.
The first is "Good to Great," a leadership book that is applicable to today's changing workplace, and it's also a standard read in business school, Nguyen said.
Author Jim Collins previously published "Built to Last," a six-year research project that provided a blueprint for building long-lasting companies. In his latest book, Collins takes a closer look at what turns the good companies into great ones.
"Good to Great" lays out four key management strategies that combine classic business concepts with an entrepreneurial mindset.
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"The McKinsey Way" by Ethan M. Rasiel
Landing a job at McKinsey & Company is challenging. One way to prepare for their hiring process is to read about how the "McKinsey-ites" think.
Author Ethan M. Rasiel is a former consulting associate at the company. The book title, "The McKinsey Way," is as on the nose as it sounds. Rasiel discusses how McKinsey consultants' approach to every aspect of the job — how they brainstorm, how they build a team, and how they navigate through a high-pressure work environment.
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"Stories that Stick: How Storytelling can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business" by Kindra Hall
Morgan Bernstein, director of strategic initiatives at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, recommended Kindra Hall's bestseller for management consultants who want to be more effective in their jobs.
Consultants are also storytellers. They compile data, research competitors, propose a plan, and paint a picture for each client through presentations.
Hall's "Stories that Stick" classifies four types of stories that appear in business: The value story, the founder story, the purpose story, and the customer story.
Hall's book gives concrete examples and templates on how to leverage storytelling as a business skill.
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"The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable" by Patrick Lencioni
Nguyen said "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" is one of his favorite leadership books — it's also a standard issue at Bain & Company once you take on a leadership role.
Author Patrick Lencioni offers practical information to build small and large teams. He pinpoints five main dysfunctions that even the best companies struggle with. These dysfunctions are often identifiable and curable, he wrote. The author gives ways to overcome those issues.
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"Linchpin: Are you Indispensable?" by Seth Godin
In this book, bestselling author Seth Godin draws attention to an emerging third team in today's workplace: The linchpins or the people who figure out what to do when there's no rule book.
Godin refers to real-world narratives of people who refused to conform, carved their own paths, and succeeded. As one of Harvard's recommended books for aspiring consultants, "Linchpin" guides readers to find their own niche and see work through an entrepreneurial lens.
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"Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't" by Simon Sinek
In "Leaders Eat Last," bestselling author Simon Sinek puts the spotlight on leadership and management sacrifices.
Sinek, who's also career and workplace keynote speaker, travelled around the world and came across a variety of team cultures. He wondered what builds trust in a workplace, and why some leaders fail to establish that same trust with their employees.
After an encounter with a US Marine Corps general, the author finally understood a crucial lesson in management — it's that great leaders sacrifice their own comfort for their teams.
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"HBR's 10 Must Reads: The Essentials" by Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review editors compiled 10 seminal articles by management's most influential experts.
Some of the big ideas in "The Essentials" include how to understand customer needs, the importance of soft skills in business, and the eight critical stages in leading change.
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"Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World" by Bob Goff
"Love Does" is written by Bob Goff, a New York Times bestselling author and a former lawyer. His memoir is another book included in the Yale School of Management's curriculum.
Chance assigns two particular chapters for her MBA courses.
Chapter six, "Go Buy Your Books," is to encourage her students to seize an opportunity when they get one. Chapter 10 in the book, "The Interview," is when Goff finally realized that success is much more about hard work and strategy rather than talent, as he discovered that "ordinary people" can become important.
Unlike the more practical reads in this list, "Love Does" documents Goff's journey in overcoming challenges with a positive attitude and how he adapts to life's curveballs.
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"The Trusted Advisor" by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford
"This book is given to every Bain manager who is on the path to becoming partner," Nguyen wrote in an email to Business Insider. "This is also one of the managing partners of Bain's favorite books. I learned this while working with him."
The three authors (who are also former management consultants) give readers the essential tools for consulting, negotiating, and advising. They emphasize perfecting soft skills to build trust with clients.
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"Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone" by Mark Goulston
Effective people skills are hard to master. For Mark Goulston, the many aspects of connecting with someone, whether they be a client, friend, or spouse, is an art form.
The author draws from his experience as a psychiatrist, business consultant, and coach to identify techniques for persuasion, negotiation, and sales.
"I think of this as the modern version of "How to Win Friends" for anyone who loved the classic but want to hear more about how it is applied this decade," Nguyen added.
Get it here >>
"Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way we Live, Love, Parent and Lead" by Brené Brown
Bernstein recommends this book for business school students who want to be successful and deliver compelling "stories that inspire an audience to take action," she wrote to Business Insider.
Social worker Brené Brown, a New York Times bestselling author, dedicates her career to studying shame and vulnerability. In this book, she leverages grounded theory research and offers advice on how to navigate through failures and discomfort.
In business and in life, we often stay away from the unfamiliar, but regaining our footing during hard times make us better, Brown wrote.
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"Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People" by Ken Watanabe
"Problem Solving 101" is written by Ken Watanabe, a former McKinsey consultant who later became a school teacher. He originally wrote the book to encourage the Japanese education system to redirect its focus from memorization to critical thinking, and it soon became an international bestseller.
"He wanted to be able to teach McKinsey's way of thinking creatively and structurally to kids at a younger age," Nguyen told Business Insider. "It's one of my favorite books and a gift I give to a lot of my mentees."
Throughout the book, Watanabe uses logic trees, matrices, and illustrations to simplify complicated concepts. It's essentially a guide for consulting beginners disguised as a teen read.
Get it here >>
"Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success" by Adam Grant
Adam Grant, an award-winning organizational psychologist and a Wharton professor, documents in empirical detail how being a "giver" — that is, someone who seeks to help others — is a strategy for career success, as opposed to only "taking" from other people, which often comes back to haunt would-be high achievers.
"In class, we discuss why so many of the least and the most successful people are givers," Chance wrote of the book in a Medium post.
Get it here >>
"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini
An essential skill for any consultant is persuasion.
Cialdini's bestseller is a must-read book in business school, Chance said. It teaches six universal principles on persuasion that are based off decades of scientific research and experiments. The liking principle, for example, refers to how we're more likely to agree with people we like and how we're also prone to like people who agree with us.
You can use this book as a guide for better negotiations once you understand the behavioral concepts.
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"Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your Life Depended on it" by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz
Nguyen recommends "Never Split the Difference" because it teaches readers how to deal with tough conversations.
"This happens a lot in consulting where you have multiple stakeholders and you need to decide how to best work with them," he wrote in an email.
Author Chris Voss is a former international hostage negotiator for the FBI, and he simplifies negotiating into nine core principles you can use to become more persuasive. For example, the first big tip in the book encourages readers to be better listeners. Making your clients feel heard is the very first step in any negotiation.
Some other strategies Voss discusses include mirroring their clients and getting better at saying no.
"Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean" by Karen Berman and Joe Knight
"Financial Intelligence" is the closest reference to a textbook in this list. It's a guide that helps people make sense of the numbers and why it matters.
"To be a consultant, you need to be able to read financial statements and be comfortable with numbers," Nguyen said. "This is a primer guide to accounting and understanding what the numbers mean."
Get it here >>
"The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There are no Easy Answers" by Ben Horowitz
If anyone knows how hard it is to run a successful business, it's Ben Horowitz.
He had previously run Opsware, a software company that was sold for $1.6 billion in 2007. That acquisition led to him cofounding venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
In this book, he reflects on his experience as cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and gets candid about the entrepreneurial challenges that he never learned in business school.
The author shares insights on how to maintain a growth mindset, establish sustainable growth, and outperform business competitors.
Get it here >>
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