When differentiation runs deeper

Following an evening at the Special Forces Club in London recently, I mentioned to a friend - by way of trying to sound coolly underwhelmed by the experience - that I hadn't been terribly impressed with their egg-mayonnaise vol-au-vents. So when I was invited back a few weeks later my heart skipped a beat. Had my friend betrayed my confidence? Were my vol-au-vent-eating days about to come to abrupt end at the hands of trained operatives whose 'Death, and how to dispense it (2012)' manual had been updated to include a section on 'termination by hors d'oeuvres'?

In the event, I lived to tell the tale. And a very pleasant time I had, too. I was there as the guest of Sir Rob Fry, Executive Chairman of consulting firm McKinney Rogers and (pertinently to this story), a former Deputy Commanding General of the coalition forces in Iraq. We were joined by the firm's COO Richard Watts, himself a former Royal Marine with 25 years' experience doing the sort of things most people go out of their way to avoid.

McKinney Rogers is an interesting firm. We've had some contact with its people before, but it first came to my attention when its Chief Executive and Founder, Damian McKinney, launched his book The Commando Way - Extraordinary Business Execution recently. Here's the thing: the services that McKinney Rogers provides don't, at least at first glance, look any different from those which half the firms in the world claim to provide. If we've heard one firm laying claim to its unique ability to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, we've heard a thousand. It's the new lingua franca of every marketing department. Strategy executed. Executed strategy. It's amusing watching firms trying to find new ways of expressing precisely the same thing with somewhere in the region of two words (plus grammatical variations) at their disposal to do so.

But while most firms commit a huge amount of effort to explaining the services they provide (especially at a time when clients are demanding specialism of one sort or another), McKinney Rogers goes one step further and answers the questions that very few, if any, can, without sounding contrived and clichéd: What's it like to work with you? What's special about you? What are your values? And let's be clear: unless your services really are unique, these are questions you need to be able to answer.

McKinney Rogers, in case it hasn't been made clear yet, has very strong links with the military. Many of its people have had distinguished careers within some of the most elite special forces in the world and its philosophy is about bringing that experience to bear in a business environment. It's a simple but compelling story: its people know what it takes to lead and execute in some of the most volatile and challenging situations imaginable, which makes them very well suited to doing so in today's business and economic environment. And you know what? When you meet its people, you don't doubt it; not for a moment. Which, I suspect, is gold dust. Because when you ask clients what single piece of advice they'd give consulting firms who wanted to win more of their business, none of them talk about services; they talk about basic human skills and values like honesty, professionalism and the ability to listen. They want to know something about the type of people they're going to get. And you know what kind of people you're going to get from McKinney Rogers.

Let's be honest: it's not going to suit everyone. As Richard Watts told me, while there may be almost universal warmth towards military people and values in the US, this side of the pond attitudes are more varied. It's something which, according to Watts, has led the firm to do some soul-searching over the years: should it attempt to distance itself from its military connections to make it appeal to people for whom the military thing is a turn-off?

Our answer (and its answer, it would appear) would be a resounding no. Not unless it can find a way to reinvent itself and find another way to answer those tricky questions as clearly as it does now.

And there's the rub: what other ways are there? McKinney Rogers was born out of an institution that comes with a set of ready-made values, and its continued association with those values makes its job in this respect relatively easy. It's also small: with about 65 people, the threat of its values becoming diluted is relatively small. What can a big, global consulting firm do? It's not an easy question to answer, but is it really any harder than answering how those  firms can differentiate themselves by service or industry experience? I suspect not.