Brand

Around a quarter of the 400+ clients we questioned recently were HR directors; most were significant buyers of consulting services.  The striking thing about talking to so many of them is how rarely they voluntarily talk about the big HR consulting firms, even though many use their services. This paradox appears to stem from the fact that they think of these firms primarily in terms of administration rather than “consulting”.  “We don’t use any of the big HR firms except on payroll and remuneration issues,” was one, typical comment.

In the course of researching our 2012 Management Consulting Market report we've been asking consulting firms how the competitive landscape has changed for them. Specifically, we've been asking whether they're coming up against competitors they haven't encountered before. In all the conversations I've had so far only one consulting firm has ever been mentioned in response to that question: McKinsey.

Here at Source we like to entertain ourselves with finding parallels between consulting and other industries. I’ve talked before about the similarities with phrama (R&D a challenge) and the film industry (specialisation a must), but until I spoke to Torsten Oltmanns at Roland Berger, it hadn’t occurred to me that we were like the car industry.