Wednesday 17th Jan, 2018
By Fiona Czernawiska. No one likes the middle ground. You’re caught between a rock and a hard place, or are tumbling between two unhelpfully positioned stools. You’re betwixt and between; neither fish nor fowl. So much better to be on one side of the fence, than sitting on it.
Tuesday 9th Jan, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Martin stares at the pine needle swirling around in his coffee. Christmas already seems a long time ago, but even a few days can feel like a month when you’re a stellar marketing executive working for one of the world’s leading consulting firms.
Tuesday 17th Oct, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
At the last count, it’s been estimated that around 900 gorillas live in the lush, dense forests of Rwanda. The gorillas are protected, and rightly so, but our research suggests that management consultants may be even rarer...
Tuesday 15th Aug, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Organisations have always used consultants for two main reasons: to access world-class expertise and to give them organisational flexibility (teams brought in at short-notice to accelerate the delivery of a project, extra pairs of hands when the business-as-usual work threatens to overwhelm their in-house resources, etc.). Conventionally, these two needs have been mutually exclusive: you want a specialist or a generalist. Increasingly, though, clients want both.
Tuesday 11th Jul, 2017
By Alastair Cox.
Let’s get something straight: If a consulting firm dedicates a partner to a specific area, it’s an area with plenty of opportunities. Therefore—flipping this—if a consulting firm doesn’t dedicate a partner to a specific area, it’s surely an area not worthy of investment and without many opportunities, right?
Wednesday 12th Apr, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Regular readers of this blog will know that we see the consulting industry dividing into two markets: the low-cost market, where familiarity results in super-specialisation, standardisation, and—ultimately—commoditisation; and high-value consulting, in which unfamiliar problems can only be solved by smart people supported by clever tools. We’ve argued that these two markets co-exist, but the former, although bigger (about 70% of the total, we estimate) is growing more slowly than the latter—which would be fine except that clients are telling us that these markets are also diverging, making it hard for firms to do both. All that’s created pressure on the consulting business model.
Wednesday 5th Apr, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Size has long mattered in the consulting industry: in the last five years, we estimate that firms with more than 1,000 consultants have grown by 46%, 2.3 times the rate of smaller ones.
That’s not new: if you went back to the 1970s and tracked firms’ growth since, allowing for all the inevitable mergers and acquisitions, you’d see that the firms that dominated consulting then are still those that rule the roost today. Smaller firms come and go, but the big firms march relentlessly on. There are several reasons for this. Big firms are more likely to work on big projects for big clients: if you’re the CEO of a major corporation you’d don’t hire a ten-person firm to do the global roll-out of your new strategy. You may bring small firms in for specialist advice, and you may well be prepared to pay a premium price for that, but you don’t expect them to cover the ground. With more money coming in, big firms have been able to invest in account management, so they’re alert to upcoming opportunities and are more likely to win them because they know those involved. The biggest firms, too, have been able to attract the best people because they pay more and claim to offer more interesting work with iconic brands.
Thursday 24th Nov, 2016
By Edward Haigh.
That’s the deliberately slightly playful question we’ve been asking consulting leaders recently, as part of our research into what’s going on from a talent perspective. And it’s already elicited some interesting responses.
The one that caught my attention the other day was someone saying that they’d build more relationships with small specialist firms.
Tuesday 21st Jun, 2016
By Fiona Czerniawska
We’ve talked on this blog before about what we modestly describe as our ‘string theory’. No, it’s not an attempt to re-write the laws of physics or to solve some of the great mysteries of the universe, but to highlight the way in which the consulting industry is being pulled in two directions.Torn between growing demand for high-value consulting and a shrinking (but sizeable) need for low-cost consulting, the market, like a piece of string, is being pulled in different directions and may break in two.
Tuesday 26th Apr, 2016
By Alison Huntington.
When you look at the conditions endured by French peasants in the late eighteenth century, it’s surprising the revolution didn’t happen sooner than 1789—the French elite had it coming for a long time.
It mirrors the situation consultants in France find themselves in with respect to digital, just without the angry peasants, the riots, the beheading, and general goriness. So not at all really. Except that, like the late eighteenth century, the conditions are all set for a revolution—but it just hasn’t come about yet.
There’s a lot of talk about digital in France, but to date, little action. Despite this, there’s a definite sense of urgency that something needs to be done. Clients have seen decades-old business models turned on their heads by plucky digital disruptors, and know they could be next for the guillotine (sorry).
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