Tuesday 8th Dec, 2009
Recessions are supposedly great times for innovation. Companies, their backs against the economic wall, are forced to be creative; those that rise to this challenge emerge stronger once the recovery comes.
Is the same true of consulting?
It should be. Long and deep recessions like this one create the need for new ways of managing. Post-recession, buyers of consulting want different services: the recession has changed them and they want it to have changed their suppliers as well.
So why does innovation always seem to be such a challenge for consulting firms?
Friday 27th Nov, 2009
People have been advising each other since the dawn of time, but it was only in the early twentieth century that they felt the need to band together into firms. The shift was a testimony to the broadening role of the consultants and the size of organisations they were dealing with: individuals were no longer enough. But almost a century later, freelance consultants now occupy as much as 20% of the market.
Saturday 9th May, 2009
Client-side or supply-side? It seems such a simple question, but in practice the response is much more complicated.
Consulting firms can be notionally divided into those that offer independent advice and those which have obvious ties, perhaps to a specific vendor if they’re an IT consultancy or to a parent company in the case of the consulting arm of an outsourcing company. In theory “tied” firms have a vested interest in selling the services of their partners or parents and therefore cannot be trusted to act in their clients’ best interests.
Friday 6th Mar, 2009
One of the points often made about the consulting industry is that barriers to entry are low. But this isn't strictly true. They're low in theory (there's no regulation to keep new entrants out, for example) but history suggests they're high in practice. Over the last 30 years there are remarkably few firms which have entered the market and achieved sustainable growth. Why is it so difficult for small firms to become mid-sized firms, and for mid-sized firms to become large ones?
Tuesday 23rd Dec, 2008
Second tier. Middle tier. Neither term is particularly flattering. Both inherently suggest the existence of a first tier or a top tier, which in turn suggest that the distinction between the two tiers is one of quality. And with the ‘third’ tier cornering the ‘specialist’ tag, that one’s out of the question, too.
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