AMERICAN WAY: You place a lot of emphasis on helping clients become more innovative. How does a consultant help them achieve that?
FOREHAND: Innovation needs to be proactive, anticipating change ahead of the competition, because getting there faster with better results differentiates the winners from the losers. But often, clients don't need fresh ideas as much as they need help in prioritizing and deciding how to deploy financial or human capital to deliver results. Consultants can also point out downside risks, address how to mitigate them, and manage difficult projects involving hundreds of people, which might not otherwise get done.

We help clients to understand that management has to reward risk-taking and doesn't punish failure that is reasonable. Of course, you have to be prudent enough to be more right than wrong, but occasional failure shouldn't prevent someone from thriving. In an entrepreneurial organization, everyone will strive to see how to better it.

AMERICAN WAY: Where do even the most sophisticated companies fall short when it comes to management?
FOREHAND: I travel 200 days a year and get to meet hundreds of top executives, and increasingly we discuss the gap we see in the ability to develop good leaders. Many CEOs focus a great deal of their time on management development and yet they tell me it is their company's most significant weakness.

I believe the primary responsibility of a leader today is to become a teacher of future leaders. I've been working with our leadership team to challenge every assumption we've ever made about what it will take to build the workforce and management we'll need over the next decade. We've just created a chief leadership officer who reports directly to me, whose responsibility is management development and succession planning on a broader basis, so more people are ready to take on more responsibility.