Standards, Professionalism, yada, yada...

A friend of mine told me to read True Professionalism by David H. Maister.  You know those guys that articulate what you are thinking in a much better way than you can? 
He's that guy.
For anyone in the management consulting business- or just professional services in general, I highly recommend reading this book. 
In the book, there are 11 mechanisms that he outlines to enforce the values of your organization or Firm. If you are managing a professional services organization or are leading one, replace Throwing the Elephant with this one. Trust me on this.

1. Professionals agree to be coached and managed to strictly enforced, agreed upon standards. There is a lot going on in this first one. A person has to agree to be coached. An organization has to have standards. Personally, you need to have standards as well. 
2. Teamwork is mandatory, not optional. There's a poster on despair.com that says, "Meetings: None of us is as dumb as all of us." (Everyone laugh). The real truth is that a lot of minds attacking a problem is better than just one. Even Steve Jobs had a wing man. 
3. Continuous investment must be made in getting better. If you or your organization is not evolving and / or maturing, another company will come and disrupt you before you know it. It may not be immediate. But if you are not taking profits and investing it in your business to make it better, disruption will come sooner than you think. 
4. Enforce excellence in wise management of clients' resources and firm's finances. My old firm you used to tell me to observe the expense policy by saying, "Treat the Firm's money as if it was your own." I noticed that Partners were really good about this because it literally was their own money that they were spending.
5. Excellence in client satisfaction is an enforced standard. Defining excellence is one of those "it depends" type of things. You can always do something better. You should always have a benchmark for a standard. It also needs to be consistent across the Firm. More importantly, it needs to be enforced. If not, those people don't belong on the bus. 
6. Excellence in managing those you supervise is an enforced professional standard. The apprenticeship model is a must for any Firm. It's how the model lasts. 
7. Personal professional growth is a nonnegotiable minimum standard. If you are doing the same thing today that you did 25 years ago, you've got a job, not a career. 
8. All partners show a sincere interest in clients' affairs and a sincere desire to help them. It's too easy for partners to chase the paper and lose sight of why they are doing the work they are doing. Consulting is the business of helping others. Quite frankly, conscious business is the business of helping others. Revenue targets make it easy to forget that. 
9. Departmental resources are considered collective assets and cannot be allocated autonomously. Once you find good resources it's hard to let them go. But the reality is that everyone needs to grow. So don't hog a good resource. 
10. Primary focus must be on relationship building. Business is about emotion and relationships. I know business school teaches you that the purpose of a business is to make money. But the "how" is all in the relationship building. Read Give and Take by Adam Grant to get a great perspective on what that really means. 
11. Be intolerant about the pursuit of excellence. Personal excellence can be quantitatively defined by perfect standardized test scores, A pluses on papers, and that perfect score in an athletic game. But every professional and Firm should continue to raise the bar and believe that excellence is something to continually strive for, not a reason to stop doing what you are doing once it's been achieved.