A Recipe for Impact (Or, How to Make the Perfect Pastry)

Franklin IQ's user-centric, passion-driven approach to human capital consulting combines curiosity, collaboration and ego-free grit.

Have you ever walked into a bakery asking for a recommendation, only to have the employee walk you through the items sitting on the rack? If Franklin IQ were a bakery, you’d never find us trying to sell you on buying what is sitting on our shelves. In fact, our shelves might be bare! Instead, you’d probably find our bakers spending more time asking you questions than telling you why our cream puffs are the best. Whether you came in with a specific order — a heart-shaped Boston cream with chocolate frosting on top — or a problem to solve (help! I need to bring a dessert to an important dinner party but have no clue what these people like!) you’d leave with the best pastry to meet your needs. Our bakery, much like our consultancy, wouldn’t care nearly as much about how many baked goods we sold as it would about how impactful our bakery was in your total experience (did our cream puffs make you the most popular guest at the party?).   

Well, we're not in the business of baking, but we take the same user-centric and passion-driven approach to address the issues at the core of our clients’ organizations.  

Our Recipe for Impact

Whether we're brought in to figure out how to transition a leading healthcare system to telehealth, create leadership simulations for a newly remote workforce, or walk an executive through one of our leadership labs, we see our role as puzzling out each client’s exact needs and customizing the right solution for lasting change. Our recipe is simple:

Combine Ingredients: Pour equal parts passion, curiosity, and collaboration into a bowl of certified ego-free grit.  Add bourbon to taste (optional). 

Stir Thoroughly: No one likes a know-it-all, and we’re no exception. Our success is bringing together the right people and cross-pollinating ideas.  The end result is better than anyone of us could have come up with alone!  

Omit the Secret Sauce: Throw the "secret sauce" away completely. Salespeople know how to complicate, introduce pain points, and hook people on a secret sauce to solve it all.  It takes really talented consultants to simplify an already complicated world.

Taste: Consultants who sell solutions get really obsessed with why their solutions fit your need —  whatever your need is!  Instead, we obsess over the result.  The most impactful solutions are ones that are continually measured and refined.  

Serve: The best solution in the world won’t solve a challenge if it’s not implemented successfully. Too many consultants leave their clients with "shelfware," long PowerPoints that look pretty but end up in a pile collecting dust. Client deliverables are not ends in themselves, but means to positive outcomes.  

The end result is what we call the Impact Quotient. (We’re so obsessed with it we named our company after it!)  If we train medical professionals serving veterans, the goal is not to increase their score on a test but to equip them to provide better services to veterans. If we facilitate a leadership workshop with supervisors on diversity and inclusion, our goal is not for them to say in a post-training survey that they learned a lot — or worse that they can check the box that they completed a training — our goal is to give the supervisors actionable knowledge that they can incorporate into interactions with their workforce to create a more inclusive working environment.

Also: at Franklin IQ, we don’t wait to improve until we’re done. What sense does that make? We do our assessments throughout our consultancy so that we can improve our program in real time for the current client. By soliciting feedback and crunching the data as we go, we can fine-tune our work to your specifications. That way, if you like our jelly donuts but wish we had chocolate frosted, we can bake chocolate frosted right there, rather than waiting until tomorrow.

If all this makes you hungry for an impact-driven recipe, check out Grandma Rose McElroy’s famous cream puff recipe below and let us know how they turned out.

Cream Puffs

1/2 cup shortening

1 cup water

1 cup enriched all-purpose flour sifted before measuring

4 eggs

Put shortening and water in a quart saucepan and cook on high heat. When mixture boils, add flour, then cook until thick, stirring constantly. When mixture gathers into a mass, remove from range and place mixture in a large bowl or mixer. Turn mix dial to setting 8, add unbeaten eggs, one at a time, mixing throughout after each addition. This will require about 10 minutes. Place in mounds on a greased cookie sheet about 1 1/2 inches apart. Bake in a preheated 400-degree oven for 40-45 minutes, covered. 

It is a good idea to allow cream puffs to dry in oven for several minutes after oven heat has been turned off. Immediately upon removing from oven, transfer cream puffs from cookie sheet to wire cake racks to cool. With a sharp paring knife, slit a small hole in the base of each cream puff. This permits steam to escape, and prevents them from becoming soggy on the inside and collapsing. Fill with custard filling after puffs are cooled.

Filling:

2 packages French vanilla pudding and pie filling (The kind you cook.) Follow directions on package for pie filling.) Cool - refrigerate and fill puffs.

Chocolate frosting:

1 egg

1/3 cup melted butter

1 1/2 squares (1 1.2 oz) unsweetened chocolate melted

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar

Beat egg, add melted butter, chocolate, vanilla extract and confectioners sugar. Beat well. Frost fluffs, then refrigerate.