Thursday 3rd Aug, 2017
By Alison Huntington.
There’s much that’s admired by people around the world about life in the Nordics: minimalist design, hygge, and societies that regularly rank as some of the most equal in the world. While workers in London sweat their way to and from the office on the Underground, working all hours and barely seeing daylight, some in Sweden enjoy a six hour working day. Cafes are stuffed with “latte papas”, and enjoying life outside work is taken very seriously (with beautiful scenery, fresh air, and decent snow to enjoy for half the year, it’s little wonder why).
Thursday 29th Jun, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
There’s a lot of talk about client centricity in the consulting industry–and rightly so. Consulting firms may be brimming over with transformation opportunities, new technology solutions, platforms and the like, but it always behoves us to remember that clients, not consultants, are in the driving seat.
Tuesday 6th Jun, 2017
By Alison Huntington.
Youngme Moon’s book, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, came to mind when writing up our most recent research into clients’ perceptions of leading consulting firms in the US. In it, Moon makes the case that in trying to differentiate in so many ways—adding product here, bolting on something else there—companies have actually ended up doing the opposite. Instead of coming up with something truly different, they follow what others have done, and ultimately, end up looking more and more like the rest of the competition.
I think we’re seeing something similar in the US consulting market. Every year, we ask senior end-users of consulting to tell us about three firms that they either work with or know by reputation, asking them to rate firms for the quality of their work. What’s striking this year is just how little perceptions vary from firm to firm.
Thursday 11th May, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
One of the unexpected results of our recent research into client perceptions in the US consulting market was was how well HR firms appear to be doing in the digital transformation space.
Let’s take Korn Ferry as an example: more than 90% of US clients who’d worked with the firm (as opposed to those who know it based on reputation) had positive things to say about the quality of its work in this area. The issue, though, is that there aren’t many of these people, certainly far fewer than would rate the digital transformation services of IBM, PwC, or even McKinsey, for example. On sheer numbers, it’s possible to argue that this is a bit of a blip—yet we see other HR firms doing comparatively well. So what’s going on?
Thursday 23rd Feb, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
I’m not generally prone to nostalgia, but trying to analyse trends in the consulting industry is sometimes enough to make me yearn after a quieter life.
Forecasting demand trends used to be very simple. Back in the heady 1990s, it was just a question of how big you thought the growth figure should be. You could, for example, assume that all banks would behave in the same way. Want to know the size of the consulting market there? Easy: 3% of costs across the board. Want to know what it would be the next year? No problem: take the last five year’s growth and draw a straight line. The global financial crisis came as fairly rude wake-up call to all that, but at least the consulting world could comfort itself that, if they got it wrong, then so did just about every major financial institution and government on the planet. Since then, we’ve all learnt to forecast at a more granular level, to be circumspect about our predictions, and to spend more time talking to clients, who after all will be the ultimate arbiters.
Tuesday 7th Feb, 2017
By Zoë Stumpf
When we carried out our global survey of clients in December last year, we had a good idea that we knew what they would say. With the world looking like a less certain place than it did only a few short months ago, we thought that they would be more tentative about increasing consulting spend, and less likely to be committing to new projects.
It’s a good job that we didn't put any money on the outcome, because we were quite wrong. Clients were overwhelmingly positive–more so than they have been for the last few years–both in terms of their plans to kick off new initiatives and to use consultants to help them.
Friday 27th Jan, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Clients always tell us they want to work with specialists. After all, if the expertise they seek is commonplace, they wouldn’t need to look outside their own organisation for it. Specialists are scarce, and it’s scarcity—always in consulting—that fuels demand. But that doesn’t mean that clients are consistent about what they mean by specialisation.
Thursday 1st Dec, 2016
By Alison Huntington.
There’s much to like about the German consulting market: high average revenues, greater availability of talent relative to other markets, and, at this time of year, the promise of glühwein and Christmas markets. OK, that last point isn’t one of the criteria in our market attractiveness index, but the DACH region (of which Germany is by far the largest part) has topped our ranking for two years running without even taking mulled wine into account
Monday 28th Nov, 2016
By Fiona Czerniawska.
We estimate that financial management and risk consulting, including all the work that’s done around regulation, accounted for around 23% of the global consulting industry in 2015. Of this, the risk and regulation part was the faster growing: 8%, compared to 6% for financial management. And of course some areas of risk, notably cybersecurity consulting, are growing at 2-3 times that rate. More than its past performance, though, risk consulting is important for its future potential, which is huge. In the course of the last 10 years, risk has gone from being a specialist topic to something that sits squarely in the middle of the boardroom table: an area of concern to senior executives right across the business.
Tuesday 22nd Nov, 2016
By Julie Ahadi
One of my less glamourous jobs post-uni was working as a temp for an advertising agency (I believe that’s how they thought of themselves), cutting and pasting classified dating ads into a Word template. I really have no idea what the purpose of that was–I was saving up to go to Israel at the time and didn’t feel like asking questions. That was until I started reading the content. Some of the things people disclosed about themselves really were quite odd.
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