Most Important Skills For A Business Consultant And Professor At Lucid Morpho LLC
For a Business Consultant and Professor at Lucid Morpho LLC, the most important skills involve a balance of technical expertise and finely tuned interpersonal abilities, requiring one to "open yourself up and be vulnerable" in order to deeply listen to clients, even picking up on nonverbal cues like "hearing that moth wing" to understand their evolving needs. Ultimately, maintaining relationships is key, as people accept change and adjust at different levels.
Active Listening, Technical Skills, Relationship Management, Adaptability, Business Acumen
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Richard Clarke
Business Consultant and Professor
Lucid Morpho LLC
College of Charleston
University of San Diego (MBA, MS Finance, PhD)
Economics
Education, Manufacturing, Operations & Supply Chain
Consulting
Scholarship Recipient, Pell Grant Recipient, Took Out Loans, Transfer Student, First Generation College Student
Video Highlights
1. Importance of active listening, including nonverbal cues, to effectively understand client needs and facilitate real-time ideation.
2. Balancing technical skills (e.g., optimizing order flow, creating organizational charts, financial modeling) with the ability to adapt to changing client preferences (e.g., lease vs. purchase options).
3. Maintaining strong client relationships by understanding and accommodating individual differences in how people accept change, motivation, and adjustment.
Transcript
What skills are most important for a role like yours?
What skills are most important for a role like yours? The first thing is you have to be able to listen, and you have to be able to listen to the nonverbal as well. It's tough. You have to really open yourself up and be vulnerable, because if you're closed up, you won't receive information.
But if you're too open, it's easy to get run over. You're trying to listen, and it's like sensitivity on a microphone. Whenever you're watching a documentary on Netflix, and David Attenborough is out there in the middle of some forest, and they ask, "Can you hear that moth wing?" That requires a certain level of sensitivity.
For me, it's similar when I'm meeting with a client. They're exploring and ideating in real time. Being able to pick up on those things and find that balance is key. What are the technical skills I'm bringing? How are we optimizing an order flow, or putting an organizational chart together that makes sense?
Or if we have job ladders we're working on, or what sort of financial model should we be looking at if we're going to pivot? We thought our client was going to be able to buy everything, but it looks like they'd prefer a lease option or want to rent it from us.
For those sorts of changes, you have to have the technical skill: How do you do that? But you also have to be able to listen and hear different ways. People accept change, motivation, and adjustment at different levels. We all do. So, being able to maintain the relationships is the most important thing.