Email-free consulting?

When Thierry Breton, Chairman and Chief Executive of Atos Origin, announced last month that he wanted his firm to be a “zero email company” he raised some interesting questions about how consultants do business.

He wasn’t talking about external communication. Forms of communication, once established, are hard to eradicate (there are still some people out there using faxes) and it’s rare for organisations to have the clout to force their customers to change their behaviour (although people who write personal cheques or who apply for state benefits may think differently). Breton’s focus was internal, arguing that managers spend between five and 20 hours per week writing and reading emails. Instead, he believes that communication will happen via instant messaging and the internal equivalents of social media: employees will effectively “pull” what they need from others, rather than have it “pushed” at them.

I don’t think we should dismiss this as a promotional gimmick. It’s a point that’s been taken up in a host of recent books, including John Hagel’s The Power of Pull and Kelly Monney’s The Open Brand and it obviously builds on a much wider debate about “open” collaboration and innovation. There are, I think, two reasons why this initiative could well be important for the consulting industry as a whole, not just Atos Origin.

The first is that point about where and how consultants add value. I’m spending hours every day at the moment on the phone to consulting firms across Europe, talking to them about trends in their local markets. One of the common themes that’s emerging – and we see echoes of it in our client research as well – is that consultants help organisations cut across their internal boundaries. Twenty years after the advent of business process engineering, most big organisations still struggle to be joined-up. “Consultants help bridge the spaces between our different divisions,” is how one executive put it. “They can connect bits of information in a way we find difficult and make sense of it.” Of course, consulting firms are just as internally divided as their clients, but they’ve got round this through key account management – inter-disciplinary teams focused on external clients, rather than internal issues – and using social media to build on this (imagine each key account being the equivalent of a LinkedIn group) makes perfect sense.

The second reason is innovation. As I’ve observed before, the pre-recession consulting industry rested on its laurels, relying on recycling old ideas rather than developing new ones. Most firms recognise this but struggle with how to stimulate thinking in their busy, margin-squeezed worlds. Using social media to spread new ideas could be part of the solution to that. But, perhaps even more importantly, an announcement such as this one rekindles the idea that consulting firms are pioneers of new ways of working.

It’s easy to forget that, back in the 1970s when consulting really started to take off, consulting firms offered a novel approach to work. Their people could be “hired and fired” at a time when heavily-unionised labour made workplaces rigid; they also offered a breadth and depth of experience rare in management circles of the time. These days, consulting firms can look too much like their clients: big corporations with high overheads and set ways of working. Being email-free could just change that.