The consulting craft · 1985

The Secrets of Consulting

Gerald M. Weinberg · 1985 essential

Loose ink sketch of an open jam jar with a knife resting across a piece of toast
The Law of Raspberry Jam — the wider you spread it, the thinner it gets

Weinberg wrote the only book on this shelf that’s honest about what advice-giving actually is: a strange, slightly absurd trade in which the people who hire you often don’t want the thing they asked for. He compresses thirty years of it into named laws — jokey on the surface, structural underneath — and the joke format is precisely why they survive: you’ll forget a framework, but not a punchline that later costs you a client.

The ideas that stick

  • The First and Second Laws of ConsultingIn spite of what your client may tell you, there's always a problem — and no matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem. The technical diagnosis is the easy layer.
  • The Law of Raspberry JamThe wider you spread influence, the thinner it gets. Books scale; workshops less; real change needs contact.
  • The Orange Juice TestThe right answer to a hard client demand is a price, not a refusal: "we can do that, and here's what it costs."
  • The Ten Percent Promise LawNever promise more than ten percent improvement — bigger claims trigger the immune system of the organization.
  • Marvin's medical secretsAmong them: most problems solve themselves if you can keep people from making them worse — the least billable and most valuable insight here.

Where it creaks

The register is 1980s campfire: personal anecdotes, invented character names (Marvin the great secret-keeper), and a looseness that method-hungry readers mistake for lack of content. Some laws overlap, and Weinberg never pretends they compose into a system — that’s the point, but it means you can’t hand this book to a junior as a manual. It works as an inoculation: read it after your first year, once you’ve been burned at least once, and half the laws will name wounds you already have.

Essential — because it’s the book that tells you the truth about the trade the other books are teaching you.

Read it if

  • You've been effective and ignored on the same project and want to know why
  • You like your wisdom compressed into laws you'll quote for the rest of your career
  • You're technical and suspect the technical part is not the problem

Skip it if

  • You want a method you can follow step by step — this is anti-method
  • Folksy delivery grates on you; every law arrives wrapped in a story