Consultant & Advisor Thinking Frameworks
Advisory thinking frameworks from the consultants who documented how trust gets built, sold, and priced, distilled into .md skill files for Claude, ChatGPT, and every LLM.
Selling expertise is a different discipline from selling a product, and the practitioners in this collection documented it as one. David Maister's work, with Charles Green and Robert Galford, turned trust into an economic asset with an actual formula rather than a soft virtue, and his one-firm-firm research showed why most professional firms know exactly what good client service looks like and are structured, deliberately or not, not to deliver it. Mary Parker Follett described power-with instead of power-over decades before management theory caught up with her. Edgar Schein documented why asking a genuinely humble question builds more usable trust than arriving with the answer already prepared. Blair Enns and Alan Weiss both made the case, from opposite ends of the same argument, that pricing on value and refusing free speculative work is a documented method, not arrogance. This collection captures each practitioner's documented method as downloadable .md skill files for Claude, ChatGPT, and any LLM. Use them when a client relationship needs more trust than technical correctness alone can buy, when pricing conversations keep defaulting to the billable hour, or when a firm's stated values and its actual incentive structure have quietly diverged.
How consultant & advisors think
- The Trust Equation: Trustworthiness = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation, the joint documented model from David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford's The Trusted Advisor, useful for diagnosing exactly which input is missing when a relationship isn't earning the trust the work deserves
- Power with, not power over: Mary Parker Follett's distinction between coercive power exercised over people and integrative power built jointly with them, which produces durable cooperation instead of resentful compliance
- Humble inquiry: Edgar Schein's discipline of asking a genuine question you don't already know the answer to before offering a diagnosis, because arriving with the answer prepared signals status, not partnership
- Win without pitching: Blair Enns's documented case against free speculative work, that giving away strategic thinking to win business trains clients to value the thinking at zero
- Flawless consulting: Peter Block's argument that authentic engagement with the real problem, including the parts the client would rather not name, matters more than technical correctness in whether an engagement actually lands
Frameworks in this category
David Maister
The Trusted Advisor & the One-Firm Firm
Blair Enns
Win Without Pitching & Pricing Creativity
Mary Parker Follett
Power With, Not Power Over
Edgar Schein
Humble Inquiry & Process Consultation
Charles Green
Trust-Based Selling & the Trust Equation in Practice
Peter Block
Flawless Consulting & Authentic Engagement
Alan Weiss
Value-Based Fees & the Million Dollar Practice
David C. Baker
The Business of Expertise & Positioning
Frances Frei
Uncommon Service & the Trust Triangle
Gerald Weinberg
The Secrets of Consulting & the Orange Juice Test
Marvin Bower
Professionalism & the Making of McKinsey
When to use these frameworks
- Diagnosing why a client relationship has technical competence but not the trust to act on it
- Structuring a pricing conversation to move away from the billable hour and toward value
- Deciding whether to give away strategic thinking for free to win an engagement, or to hold that line
- Building genuine partnership with a client or stakeholder instead of a compliant, transactional one
- Recognizing when a firm's stated values and its actual incentive structure have quietly diverged
Start here
David Maister
The Trusted Advisor & the One-Firm Firm
Adjacent thinking
Frequently asked questions
Is this only for consultants?
No. The frameworks apply to any expertise-selling relationship: agencies, freelancers, fractional executives, and internal advisors all face the same trust, pricing, and engagement problems these practitioners documented, whether or not the word 'consultant' appears on the invoice.
Will this help me raise my prices?
Honestly: it can, by way of Enns and Weiss specifically. The documented frameworks reprice work around value and trust rather than time, which is where the documented gains actually come from. There's no income promise here, only a repricing method that has been published and tested for decades.
Are these the same as the authors' own courses?
No. These are independent educational distillations of the published books, built from documented public material, with a pointer to the original books included in each file. They are not licensed content from, or a substitute for, any paid course or program these authors sell directly.
Why is the Trust Equation credited to three people instead of one?
Because that's the documented history. David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford developed and published it jointly in The Trusted Advisor (2000), and every framework in this collection that references it, including Charles Green's own, credits all three rather than assigning sole authorship to whichever persona the framework happens to be built around.
Is Mary Parker Follett's framework outdated? She was writing a century ago.
The age of the framework matters less than whether the underlying pattern still holds up in practice. Her power-with distinction predates modern management theory and is still cited directly in negotiation and organizational behavior research, not as a historical curiosity but as a working model for building cooperation instead of compliance.
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