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Oliver Scott Consulting - People Performance Profit
Picture of Tony and Jo on the Millenium Wheel
Jo Oliver on +44-20-8883-3937 or +44-7940-717-589, or Tony Scott on +44-20-8444-8800 or +44-7973-829-209
Whos who

A website can give you only a flavour of the range and depth of experience available through Oliver Scott Consulting.

We can, of course, call in other professionals beyond our own people to meet the needs of any particular assignment. But because our networks are informal, you pay only for the experts you need - and only for the time you need them.

Each of our people can also draw on the expertise and skills of all the others. So when you buy the head and hands of one, you get access to the brains of all.

Picture of Tony Tony Scott
Communication is Tony's passion. Fleet Street gave him the opportunity to hone his skills around the world. A stint as editor with an international publisher taught him how to make any specialist subject accessible. Consultancy has enabled him to help businesses, departments and Boards to communicate better with each other or themselves.

He has written or helped to write several books - including last year IT's legal, about the use of technology in law firms - as well as editing for Reader's Digest half a dozen global best-sellers. He has also worked around the world for some of the world's best-known newspapers - including The Australian, the Toronto Star, the Rand Daily Mail and, in London, The Sunday Times.

Since moving into consultancy in 1988 - initially with Ernst & Young, now as a director of Oliver Scott - he has worked on many projects. Among them:

  • Culture change and strategy for the UK's largest market research firm, and marketing skills for the directors of one of the UK's leading business schools.
  • Account management, selling, writing and presentation skills for partners and staff at two law firms, two fund managers, two insurance brokers, two consultancies and two engineering firms.
  • Ministerial reports for three Whitehall departments, including the Treasury.
  • Leadership, influencing, team-building, communication and strategy skills for four NHS Trusts and four IT firms.
  • Negotiating, selling, management, report-writing, presentation and client-handling skills for seven accountancy firms, including all of the Big Four.

In addition, he coaches senior executives on individual issues, and advises businesses on live projects. During the boom years of the 1990s, for example, he devised for an international insolvency practice a new technical report model which was received with acclaim by the four main UK clearing banks. He then taught all 30 of the practice's partners and 150 of its senior managers how to use the model to attract new work. In the following twelve months, the practice reported a rise in revenues of 175 per cent. He also resolved for an NHS Trust in a few weeks a year-old funding dispute involving £1.1m.

More recently, he's helped to shape a new £10m-a-year strategy for a national sporting body. He's sharpening the management skills of senior executives across Europe for a global hardware manufacturer. And he's coached scientists at a firm selling satellite data - game-planning meetings, drafting a business-focused proposal and rehearsing their final presentation - to help the firm win back its largest single contract: a £300,000-a-year deal with a Government department.

A health consultancy team he's coached on selling skills for the past three years has quintupled its turnover in that time. And he's helped rebuild morale and effectiveness for the management team of a financial-services firm in Glasgow and a UK government agency in Brussels.

Tony writes an occasional column on leadership for the magazine Professional Consultancy, lectures at the London Business School, and is a guest speaker on proposal-writing and business-winning for the Institute of Directors. Married, with two grown children, he lives in London.


Picture of Jo Jo Oliver
Jo's career is an unusual combination of people management and commercial business roles. She worked for Marks & Spencer as an international buyer, then ran the company's management development function before leaving to run the London operation of Coutts Career Consultants.

More recently she's been an executive director of JSB Training and Development - with whom she still works - a non-executive director of a London NHS Trust, and now a director of Oliver Scott.

Over the past few years, she has come to focus on executive coaching and top team/ Board development in both the private and public sectors, often with professional-service firms. She is a member of the Institute of Directors, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and an associate of the Association of Cognitive Analytic Therapists.

Among her recent assignments:

  • Working with senior individuals and groups to help align strategy, effectiveness and relationships.
  • Helping businesses to shape their management development and succession plans.
  • Tackling and solving specific organisational issues such as performance review and competency analysis.

Four areas of special interest shape most of her current assignments:

  • Executive coaching, especially where it is linked to the performance of the top management team.
  • Dealing with real business issues with groups who need the help of a facilitator to come up with practical solutions.
  • Helping people to unlock their own potential.
  • Relating the motivational aspects of people development to the achievement of real business results.

Qualifications and approach
Jo has a BA in English and History. She is licensed to use the Myers-Briggs and Firo-B psychometric tests and regularly uses other 'profile' tests covering such topics as emotional intelligence, managing conflict and influencing style.

Her approach to personal development and coaching is essentially pragmatic and practical. She focuses on behavioural awareness and change, especially for senior executives who are coping with periods of intense pressure.

The approach is designed to help the executive develop the self-awareness and self-discipline required to make decisions and any changes which may be needed. Her aim is to put executives in 'conscious' control of what they do and how they do it, so that they can make clear and confident decisions about all aspects of their lives.

This requires a confidential and challenging relationship over time so that trust is built up, actions can be seen through and results analysed and assessed.

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Oliver Scott Consulting Ltd is registered in England no 4576659. VAT registration 602 9241 67