Books by Neil Farmer

About the Authors Neil Farmer and Bob Lankester are Senior Partners of change management consultants, Total Business Design Ltd. Neil Farmer is a researcher/management consultant specializing in major change. He has established a reputation for accurately predicting fundamental changes in the business environment, and as an innovator he has been a driving force in creating new visions for business organizations into the next millennium. He has led the way in changing the relationship between consultants and their clients through the development of "team consulting" in which clients define their own futures with their consultants providing knowledge, facilitating and challenging the status quo. An honours graduate of both Sussex and Warwick Universities, Neil worked with GEC, Fisons and Smith Klein Corp. before entering consulting with Butler Cox in the early 1980s. More recently he founded Farringdon whose Forum Club members some 70 UK blue-chip organizations provided some of the initial insights for this book. Bob Lankester has had over 25 years experience in the manufacturing industry where he has held management positions in virtually every operational discipline up to and including Managing Director. Since qualifying as an electronics engineer, he has worked with a variety of diverse organizations, both large and small, including Lucas, Globe Union Corp., GEC, and Meyer International. During the late 1970s he migrated from operations management to information systems and began to specialize in organizational issues and areas of best practice such as MRP, JIT and cellular manufacturing. Throughout his career in industry, Bob has been dedicated to promoting continuous business improvement in one shape or form. A theme which he continued after entering the consulting industry in the mid 1980s with MiM Management Technologies. Operating in the UK and Benelux and advising some of the worlds largest corporations, Bob often found himself involved in recovering ailing change projects or system implementations. Invariably he found a near fatal combination of hazy vision, lack of tangible commitment and a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues involved, and the capabilities required, to successfully effect controlled transformation. The result was a growing frustration at the lack of any convincing, complete and accepted approach on which practitioners and their clients could rely to avoid these pitfalls. It led to collaboration with Neil Farmer some three years ago - and the creation of Total Business Design - the approach, the company ... and the book.