Thursday 2nd Aug, 2012
Relationships are the currency of power in consulting. Even in these days of professionalised procurement, who you know and how well you know them still matters; and knowing who you know and how well you know them can be a competitive advantage.
Thursday 5th Jul, 2012
What do folding sweaters and writing proposals for consulting work have in common?
Monday 11th Jun, 2012
“I'm 100% convinced that consulting firms could win a lot more work if they just took the trouble to ask the right questions and find out more about our business. Some of them ask some very stupid questions.” This was the strategy director of a major financial services company in the UK speaking, and it remains one of my favourite quotes from the round of client research we’ve just carried out.
Monday 26th Mar, 2012
Charles Handy, the eminent business philosopher, first started writing about the switch from permanent to temporary labour thirty years ago. By the early 1990s his predictions had started to come true, as organisations redrew their structural boundaries and triggered an explosion of growth in outsourcing. Since then, we’ve also seen a significant rise in the level of freelance work.
Friday 23rd Mar, 2012
Six years ago I visited India for the first time. I will never forget walking out of my hotel on to the streets of New Delhi to be confronted by the almost complete absence of everything I knew and understood. Having worked out the basics - which, for the western tourist, is largely a matter of learning how to manage an overwhelming tidal wave of demand for a share of your wallet - and figured out how to get from A to B, I quickly found myself in the position of trying to buy something . My prospective supplier, seeing me eyeing one of his cashmere sweaters, made his move.
Wednesday 14th Mar, 2012
We’ve spent the last three months finding out what senior executives think about consulting, both the industry in broad terms and the specific firms they work with.
Thursday 1st Mar, 2012
In the course of researching our 2012 Management Consulting Market report we've been asking consulting firms how the competitive landscape has changed for them. Specifically, we've been asking whether they're coming up against competitors they haven't encountered before. In all the conversations I've had so far only one consulting firm has ever been mentioned in response to that question: McKinsey.
Friday 3rd Feb, 2012
A recent article in Booz & Company’s strategy + business magazine draws attention to some fascinating academic research on how power affects decision-making. We already know (from other research) that the quality of decision-making declines when people depend on their own beliefs and ignore the advice of others: “outside information helps ‘average out’ the distortions that can result when people give a great deal of weight to their own opinions and first impressions,” observes Booz.
Tuesday 15th Nov, 2011
Call me harsh, but I don’t think it’s the role of parents to be liked by their children. Loved? One would hope so. But liked? Like is for friends, for the people who share your interests and experiences. Like is for those you want to be with but are afraid you might lose. Parents may not be liked, but they are for life: it falls to us to tell our children what they need to know, not what they want to hear.
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