The mind of the consulting market

This is Laurie Young, a widely-acclaimed expert and the author of many books on marketing: “As a young teenager I’d visit my older cousins who had one fault: all of them were ‘petrol heads’ ...  Now that’s part of the male psyche that missed me and I had to stand around while they, beer in hand, would talk endlessly about speed and new models in mind numbing detail. But it taught me to communicate. I learnt that, if I asked a question using their jargon (“Is that the one with the overhead cam”) hubbub would follow: corrections, denials, explanations, comparisons and laughter.”

I’m not a ‘petrol head’ either but I can completely relate to the point being made here.  The first book I wrote looked at the language of business (“Reads like a PhD”, opined my solitary reviewer, somewhat ironically in the circumstances).  Among other areas, I wrote about how consultants used language – jargon, in effect – to create space between themselves and their clients: the pen may be mightier than the sword, I concluded, but the three-letter acronym turns out to be more powerful than either.  In the 15 or so years since that book was published, things have changed: if anything, the emphasis now is on speaking the same language and sharing the same values.  “Give me consultants who can fit in with our organisation in cultural terms,” say the clients we speak to, frustrated by the arrogant aloofness which still colours the consulting stereotype.

But there’s a cost to this.  Writing in the 1950s, Wharton academic Wroe Alderton noted that markets develop a herd mentality: customers think they want to buy what suppliers are selling; suppliers go along with prevailing – ‘petrol head’ – sentiment.  And perhaps that’s what’s happening in consulting today, the result, not so much of consultants learning to speak their clients’ language, but of clients learning to talk like consultants.  Enterprise resource planning? We need one of those.  Social media strategy?  Let’s have one.  That’s fine while there are still people out there who don’t have ERP systems or social media strategies, or who don’t think they’re capable of implementing/developing them themselves, but even herds eventually run out of energy.  Moreover, an exhausted market is always open to new, disruptive entrants – the people and organisations which speak a very different language.

Consulting is probably ripe for such disruption: perhaps there’s a Google or Apple already stalking the corridors of consulting power.  Whether the consulting industry is ready for that is another matter altogether.