Thursday 25th Jan, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
Consultants are supposed to tell clients what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. If a client wants to grow into a new market, but isn’t investing enough in its infrastructure there to succeed, the role of the consultant is to make that clear. Likewise, if a client thinks a flashy new digital system will solve all his woes when it actually won’t, the consultant who puts her clients’ interests first tells him to stop. Trusted advisors tell it like it is.
It seems only fair, then, that when clients are asked for feedback about the work of consultants they should be able to do the same. The absence of this option in the FT’s ranking of consulting firms in the UK published this week is one reason why it’s a limited measure of client satisfaction and brand impact.
Friday 19th Jan, 2018
By Alison Huntington. This week the Financial Times published its ranking of management consulting firms in the UK, in partnership with Statista. It’s based on a survey of both senior executives in industry and management consultants themselves, and covers 15 sectors and 14 different consulting services. The top-ranked firms are the ones with the highest number of recommendations across different categories.
Thursday 9th Nov, 2017
By Alison Huntington.
Our recent report into digital transformation laid out some compelling reasons why strategy firms should be ideally positioned to win in this market. Clients say they want to use digital transformation to grow their businesses, and to do that, their investment is starting to shift away from using digital to facilitate and accelerate existing business priorities, and towards more fundamental change to their business model. This sort of existential, burning platform-type of issue is exactly what you’d want some of the world’s cleverest people working on; indeed, over half of respondents at the largest companies we surveyed* say they plan to use strategy firms for this type of work.
Thursday 5th Oct, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice the snobbish Miss Bingley criticises rural Hertfordshire for being home to so few real ladies. Elizabeth tartly replies that she’s not at all surprised that there are so few, given Miss Bingley’s long and stringent set of requirements, but that there is one.
Thursday 28th Sep, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
It’s June 2022. Aileen catches sight of her reflection by the elevator. She frowns slightly, then reaches down to brush the dusty mark off her new Prada bag. She hadn’t been exactly surprised when the courier dropped it off last night, though the cheery ‘See you tomorrow!’ card lowered the tone somewhat. It was, after, all the right size to carry the new iPad another firm had sent her ahead of today’s beauty parade. Never mind the PowerPoint, she thinks, you can tell a firm by the quality of its product placement.
Or can you?
Wednesday 6th Sep, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Clients, faced with global economic uncertainty and political meltdown, know they can’t rely on cost cutting to survive. Yes, there’s always more that can be done, but most have spent decades doing so much that most future gains will be incremental. Yes, digital–and now robotics and artificial intelligence–promise more significant improvement, but depend on changing behaviours as much as systems. At the end of the day, surviving will depend on thriving, which in turn will depend on growth. According to our recent survey, 52% of clients say that the need for growth is driving their investment in digital transformation, compared to 47% who say that’s being triggered by the desire for productivity improvements.
Wednesday 30th Aug, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Probably the single most terrifying taxi ride I’ve ever had was in Macau about 20 years ago. With traffic lights in short supply (I spotted just the one set while I was there), the strategy when approaching any junction was to drive as fast as possible in the hope that other drivers would give way…
Thursday 24th Aug, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
There’s no gain without pain, apparently. But the level of pain clients are willing to put up with to transform their organisations seems to be changing.
We all know that digital transformation is big business. No right-minded client would contemplate such a large-scale programme without thinking carefully about the potential barriers and risks involved. But their attitude has been positive, their assumption being that the barriers can be overcome and the risks solved. Moreover, the size of the prize justifies pushing through strategies that may worry some. If an initiative isn’t outside your comfort zone then it’s probably not transformational.
Thursday 17th Aug, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Lots of consulting firms get very excited by the proportion of their work that’s repeat business. Obviously, they say, it’s because we’ve done such a good piece of work that they keep asking us to come back and do more. And at a common-sense level that’s obviously true: no one would buy twice from a duff supplier. But firms shouldn’t lull themselves into a false sense of security.
Wednesday 9th Aug, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
The Power of the Placebo was a fascinating BBC documentary on something we’re all familiar with, the placebo effect. The conclusions were anything but familiar, however. It turns out that placebos don’t fool us into thinking we’ll get better: it’s possible for people to take pills they know to be fake, even undergo fake operations, and still experience a positive impact. The placebo effect, the programme argues, comes down to the relationship someone has with their doctor: when a physician spends longer talking to a patient, they’re more likely to respond to treatment.
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