Manage Organizational Entropy at your professional service firm
Strategic management consulting for small and medium-sized professional firms (20—500 employees) in search of new capabilities and predictable performance.
Entropy Entropyt Entropy
energy; work; transformation[en-tropy] — an amount of energy within a system that cannot be used to perform useful work, pursue and achieve goals;
amount of uncertainty within a system that hinders accurate specification of the current state and its transformation into the desired future state.
Proprietary models and frameworks to deal with organizational entropy at nine critical control points:
- Growth Strategy
- Organizational Structure
- Organizational Culture
- Market Positions
- Client Management
- Marketing Activities
- Team Performance
- Project Management
- Skills & Career
Most of the organizational drift occurs at these key areas. As a result, anxieties rise, conflicts abound, folks leave, service quality plummets, productivity drops, and aspirational goals get shelved.
Our solutions were designed to help management navigate uncertainty, reconfigure organization for optimal performance, and reveal new capabilities with existing organizational resources.
Latest Thinking ▾▾▾
-
Boosting Workplace Productivity through ...
One simple managerial intervention may drastically boost productivity of your firm’s professionals.
-
Four Goal Facilitators to Improve your S...
The famous expert on organizing may teach us a thing or two about making our offerings complete.
-
How to Think about Positioning a Profess...
Poles and spans, lenses, function, and timing — everything you need to know to understand positioning better.
-
Branding professional services: two oppo...
Branding is a painful process. Marketing firms want it to appear more valuable and smooth than it really is. Professional firms often downplay or disregard the benefits of branding. With two opposite ...
-
Performance of a Professional in a Neste...
In a professional service firm, every staff member, professional, and partner operate in a nested relational structure. The overall performance of an individual relies on its proper position at each i...
-
Diagnose, Explore, Prescribe & Execute f...
Not every buyer is shopping for all four stages of the engagement. Matching buyer's type to the right mix of these four phases is key to market success of the firm.
Hi, and welcome! I’m Sergei N. Freiman — an advisor to senior management of professional firms. I wrestle with issues that captivate leaders and managers; research, think, analyse, and share my perspective with prudent folks like you.
Subscribe to receive free bi-weekly(-ish) e-doves that deliver insightful articles straight into your mailbox. Peppered with actionable ideas, subjects cover: strategic management, organizational entropy, marketing, client management, and service design — to name a few.
Join 2028 subscribers. Easy to unsubscribe.
when team members want a fresh perspective from the outside — a professional consultant capable of noticing things without the baggage of organizational memory
when leaders want to hone their mastery of pulling the right levers at the right time, getting what they aimed for, while having complete recognition of ensuing consequences and inevitable trade-offs
when you get a notion that folks around the office, being overwhelmed with tantamount options, seem to struggle to move forward with confidence
when management wants to validate their working hypotheses with relevant research, theory, and best practices, obtaining a professional second opinion and recommendations
when stakeholders welcome additional complementary frameworks to constrain, structure, and direct a challenging, unfamiliar team task
when partners and senior managers are curious about dormant capabilities of their own firm or groups
when there is a common tacit understanding of a conundrum, but befitting articulation down the chain of command currently escapes you
when none of the teams’ generated actionable options are satisfactory to secure a mutual agreement among key stakeholders
Maps of Strategic Management to navigate most challenging business problems
As you know, much of the so-called best practices and subsequent consulting advice often proves inapplicable, if not detrimental. Our proprietary models were constructed through a rigorous process of multidisciplinary synthesis. In our work, we have analyzed and integrated numerous well-established managerial models. Together, we’ll work through the good and the bad options.
Based on prominent studies, research, scholarly papers, and management literature, we’ve created integrative models so that your team wouldn’t have to sift through an overwhelming plethora of data and frameworks.
To skillfully manage the firm, your team needs to ramp up the quality of business decisions. Especially nowadays. We use the models as navigational tools — maps — to assist you confidently chart your organizational course. Among a myriad of seemingly equal directions, your team will identify the one most suitable option given your unique circumstances.
| Advisory Services | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solutions | Growth | Structure | Culture | Positioning | Clients | Marketing | Teamwork | Projects | Career & Skills | |
| Future-Proof Firm | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Sweet Spot Firm | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | |
| Client Magnet Firm | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | |
| Talent Magnet Firm | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | |
| Productive Profitable Firm | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | |
| Growth Catalyst Firm | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | |
| Sustainable Growth Firm | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | |
| Collaborative Eager Firm | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
awezzom is a Management consulting practice for multidisciplinary Professional services firms
that seek to explore new capabilities dormant within to navigate uncertainty and manage more confidently.Today, the world desperately needs more competent professionals. Because organizational entropy is a constant problem — an ultimate test — we want to enable top management of professional service firms to manage it deliberately.
To continuously raise competence levels at scale, we have to develop an affordable strategic management framework that would allow firms to make quality business decisions confidently. Join us if you find this vision compelling.
We think and write for professional services firms. Join other 2028 prudent decision makers.
Questions & answers▾▾▾
Our insight comes from various sources. It is an intersection of our work with clients, research data, other consultants’ insight, company financial reports, business books, white papers and academic literature.
On the surface, your challenges aren’t quite as special as one might think. Therefore, the solutions will follow a similar path. However, given your circumstances, often the combination of individual challenges at your firm will be quite unique, hence requires customization to our approach.
The nature of our work requires full confidentiality. We will not risk sharing potentially sensitive data about our clients or their businesses.
The very fact of our engagement may reveal competitve information.
In other words, we will not discuss any of our clients at all; ever. Period.
We can’t assume responsibility for how firms (e.g.) treat their employees, handle clients, or how markets will change. Our approach is based on a synthesis of best practices.
Most consulting fails when organizations fail to act in a disciplined manner. We’ll provide you with tools and frameworks, but it’s up to your team to decide what they will or will not do.
We’ll have a brief conversation after you submit the contact form. A paid Diagnostics session follows. It will reveal most appropriate options to address your current challenges. Please refer to the “Process” page for more details.
Sometimes, yes. After thorough diagnostics, and during later stages of the engagement, we might agree to reconfigure the initial arrengement when it makes sense.
Two reasons. First, it’s a laborious business. Second, we want to make sure folks are serious about the work that follows.
If after the diagnostics either of us determine that now is not the right time to move forward, or that we’re not a great fit, we will refund you this fee.
Our Diagnostics session is a must for any meaningful advisory. A minimum of $2,000 is required.
There are individual modules (e.g., Naming) that do not require diagnostics.
We have an unconditional satisfaction guarantee policy. If, for whatever reason, you are not 100% satisfied, we will adjust the fee for the amount you feel is fair, or refund your firm in full.
No strings attached. We will only require you to provide feedback on where our consulting services fell short. See Refund policy for details.
At our core, we understand the value of connection between two worlds: intuition and logic, emotion and reason, artistic and industrial. We won’t give vague advice. We always assess the consequences of practical implementations: costs, feasibility, time, effort, priorities, politics, feelings, etc.
We encourage you to go through our articles, and draw conclusions about us for yourselves.
We expect key decision makers to take part in our workshops. Normally, we’re looking at partners, co-owners, principals, C-level execs, department heads (etc.) to join our conversations. This depends on which CRICPs we’re dealing with.
We provide a structured approach via frameworks. These are based on proprietary models. The models themselves come from synthesis of well-established practices and proven models.
Apart from that, there is also a benefit of an outsider who doesn’t possess your organizational memory. Hence, will notice things you won’t.
We were told that we are more focused; that we had helped to stay on course without sinking into off-topic discussions. We were praised for our ability to listen, pay attention and pick important nuggets of information that were otherwise unseen, overlooked and unrecognized.