Business model

By Fiona Czerniawska.

We recently asked around 100 senior people in large US-based organisations whether they’d be interested in converting traditional consulting work (short-term advisory work, paid on a fixed price or time and materials basis, measured on inputs rather than outcomes) into an on-going service, aimed at delivering a specific and concrete outcome, and involving a combination of software, data and analytics, and consulting expertise. Ninety-one percent said that they found that suggestion attractive, and three-quarters said they could envisage buying consulting in this way and that this could represent the future of consulting.

Perhaps that level of positive engagement shouldn’t have surprised us.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Regular readers of these blogs will know that I’m quite a fan of Talking Politics, a podcast orchestrated by David Runciman, Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge. Professor Runciman and his panellists have been discussing the middle ground as well. They’ve hypothesised that, although politicians often continue to talk about owning the middle ground, recent events suggest that the middle ground in politics is being hollowed out, that in these days of divisive issues and hyper-partisan parties, there are very few issues that people agree on in the centre. You’re either for Trump or against him; keen to keep the Affordable Care Act or desperate to do away with it; a Brexiteer or a Remainer. In this environment, politicians can’t and don’t win by being in the middle, but by being at the edge; they have to take an extreme position, rather than find consensus. To win an election, so many of which seem to be on a knife edge because the electorates seem almost evenly split between the extreme points, you have to find issues that cut across the spectrum, not because they’re in the middle, but because people, who might otherwise hold utterly conflicting views, agree on them. Sitting here in the UK, those issues are probably student loans and the National Health Service. You can hate Brexit or love Brexit, but if you’ve university-aged children then you’re probably outraged at the level of debt the latter are having to live with. Similarly, the idea of healthcare, free at the point of need, is so deeply engrained in our national psyche that any government endangering it faces genuinely massed revolt.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

In 1610, after months of painstaking work grinding his own lens, Galileo Galilei finally held his new telescope up to the night sky. What he saw astonished him: instead of a few hundred stars, he could see thousands, even millions.

The consulting “universe” has long been populated by a small number of large “planets”–strategy, technology, operational improvement, and so on–but if you were to carry out an equivalent of Galileo’s exercise in today’s market, then you’d see something that looks more like the Milky Way than a simple solar system.

The consulting market is fragmenting. Centrifugal forces are breaking up our familiar planets, based on the precise expertise required, on a changing sense of what a “reasonable” price is, and on a new generation of clients who know that the way they want to buy from consulting firms isn’t necessarily how the firm wants to sell or deliver to them.