Thursday 22nd Sep, 2016
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Once upon a time a group of consultants came up with a whizz-bang idea. “Let’s help cut clients’ procurement costs,” they said, ricocheting off the walls of their meeting room in an excitable fashion. Over the years that followed they criss-crossed the world doing just that: replacing distributed, uncontrolled purchasing with formal, centralised processes that scrutinised, then slashed, hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure. Happy, even smug, the consultants retired to their luxury penthouses delighted to have added value in such a concrete, measurable fashion. So imagine their surprise when they found themselves some years later subject to these same controls. Go through procurement? Eugh! E-auctions? Eek! Meanwhile the new breed of chief procurement officers rubbed their bureaucratic hands with glee: yet more savings for the corporate coffers.
Monday 9th May, 2016
By Edward Haigh.
Stockholm’s much vaunted start-up scene is having little direct effect on the fortunes of Swedish consultants, but its indirect effect could yet prove significant.
Not that Sweden’s consultants need much of a leg up at the moment: The Swedish consulting market, already the Nordic region’s largest, grew by a respectable 4.9% in 2015 and shows few signs of slowing. Cross the Oresund, Svinesund or Torne river bridges (connecting Sweden respectively to Denmark, Norway and Finland) and you find a starkly different situation.
But the presence of what many are calling Europe’s Silicon Valley within their midst raises interesting questions for consultants in Stockholm because of what it says about the willingness (or not) of a new breed of digital businesses to turn to them for help.
Wednesday 2nd Sep, 2015
By Fiona Czerniawska Nothing lasts for ever, certainly not upswings in the economic cycle. Yet the US consulting market, despite its size and maturity, has been growing faster than the average global rate for the last five years – and looks set to exceed the latter again in 2015 (our latest report on the US market predicts 10% growth, led by risk and regulation, and technology).
Tuesday 14th Jul, 2015
By Fiona Czerniawska It was an innocuous question, the kind we ask clients every day: which firms did you consider for this project? The project was digital transformation – the kind of project we hear about every day, but the answer made me sit up and pay attention: “We’d invited a range of strategy and technology firms to bid, but in the end it was Accenture versus BCG.”
Thursday 7th May, 2015
By Zoe Stumpf We’ve spent the last few weeks in the Benelux region – not literally, you understand, but speaking to consultants and senior clients about the state of the market. Doubtless to the great relief of all concerned, the conclusion of our newly-published Benelux consulting market report is that the market has at last returned to growth in 2014, albeit at a very modest level.
Wednesday 16th Jul, 2014
By Edward Haigh My frequent trips across the North Atlantic over the last year or so have served to illustrate many things: it really ought to be simpler, by now, to get from Kennedy airport into Manhattan; Texas has more private medical centres than cowboys; you don’t need a whole Chicago deep-pan pizza to yourself; technology rules.
Tuesday 26th Jun, 2012
A packed train from Manchester to London and no room to type, an iPad stowed in my bag (carefully sneaked out of the house before the children awoke) and an email alerting me to the arrival of a new edition of a business magazine meant I spent over an hour last week (once I’d cleaned off the sticky fingerprints) browsing the latest thinking at McKinsey Quarterly.
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