Instinct

By Fiona Czerniawska.

All of our research on the consulting industry at the moment points to a slowdown in the rate of growth in consulting. There’s still a lot of investment and activity among clients: 93% say they’re looking to increase productivity and efficiency; 92% are investing in digital transformation. But the proportion of people who say that their expenditure on consulting services will increase in the next year has fallen from 72% last year to 55%.

One of the truisms of consulting is that everyone benefits from a growing market—that a rising tide lifts all boats. But a market that’s growing at a lower rate than in previous years feels much less benign because the change in tempo is usually unevenly distributed—some boats stay still or sink, while others may do better than ever. Whether your consulting firm is a rising boat, or is becalmed, watching other boats around you rise more quickly, now is a good moment to make sure that your strategy is—well—water-tight.

By Alison Huntington.

You don’t need me to tell you that digital transformation is big. It’s already a massive market ($44bn by our latest estimates), it’s growing rapidly, and it’s right at the top of the corporate agenda. What’s more, by being multidisciplinary by nature, and requiring a breadth of consulting services to be truly transformational, it’s particularly big news for big firms. Which, if anything, makes it even bigger.

But what does that mean for mid-sized strategy firms? Several barriers to these sort of firms playing in this space spring up, at least in theory: They’re not big enough to have the global reach many clients require; their breadth of services is unlikely to be as wide as the biggest firms; and they may simply not have enough people to deploy, particularly when it comes to turning strategies into action.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

I’m not always a fan of large-scale thought leadership studies, repeated year in, year out, but the title of PwC’s 21st CEO survey caught my imagination—and, I suspect, the Zeitgeist. In The anxious optimist in the corner office, PwC argues that “despite record levels of short-term optimism in the global economy, CEOs worldwide report heightened levels of anxiety regarding the business, economic, and, particularly, the societal threats confronting their organisations.”