Thursday 8th Mar, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
You know the feeling: You’ve seen the dress online, or the fancy watch in a shop window. I’ll look so good in it, you think. It’ll be just perfect to wear to that wedding next month, you think. I’ll get compliments from strangers, you think. Life will be better.
But you try it on and it’s not quite right. It’s too big around the middle, the colour isn’t quite right. The oversized watch face makes your wrist look like an udon noodle. You really want it to be the one for you, but after standing there for a few minutes trying to persuade yourself that it’s right, you reluctantly concede that it isn’t.
Clients of consulting firms describe a similar journey with the consulting firms they encounter.
Wednesday 28th Feb, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Everyone thinks they know everything about pricing in consulting. “Segmenting the consulting industry is very simple,” a senior French consultant once told me, with one of those quintessential gallic shrugs. “There are very expensive firms, less expensive firms, and cheap firms.”
That attitude might have been just about defensible 10 years ago, but it would be difficult to justify today. True, clients’ overall sense of the importance of price, relative to other factors they take into account when deciding which consulting firm to use, hasn’t changed much. In our most recent survey of around 3,000 senior executives in six major consulting markets around the world, 6% said this was the attribute that mattered most, up from 5% in 2017. Last year, price came out as the 9th most important attribute; this year it’s moved up to 8th. Those changes are within the margin for error: What we see in our surveys and hear from clients we speak to, is that price is a qualifier, a guide to whether a firm has understood the scope and scale of a project, and a reassurance that they’re not being ripped off. While there’s clearly a minority of clients to whom price is genuinely critical, most think about price only to be able to put it on one side in order to focus on more important aspects: ‘Innovation and the ability to implement’ top this year’s list.
Tuesday 20th Feb, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Sixty-six million years ago. In the apocalyptical gloom, the world’s last dinosaur is dying. Snout down in the icy mud, its eyes starting to close, the dinosaur glimpses movement: A small animal, whose fur has kept it warm, is scurrying. “I wasn’t expecting that,” thinks the dinosaur as extinction finally closes around it.
The world is full of surprises.
We were interviewing a consulting firm recently that, on the cusp of winning a multi-million-dollar transformation deal, found themselves out manoeuvred by a much smaller firm, against all expectations. “We’d dismissed them,” said the partner we spoke to. “Not only had we never heard of them, but they hadn’t listened to the client’s brief, had questioned the scope of the project, and come back with a proposal that didn’t deal with the key issues.” Just a minor detail, then, that the client loved a genuinely innovative, more challenging approach.
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