For your amusement

The MCA’s ‘Are you worth your weight in gold?’ campaign for the 2011 industry awards has struck a chord with me. At a time when the value that consultants deliver is coming under increasing scrutiny it seems like a really appropriate question for the industry to ask itself. It’s also a nice reminder that – now more than ever – clients are looking for something more than standardised process and methodologies from consulting firms to help them solve their problems.

Whenever an economy / sector / organisation has been through a period of turmoil as the consulting industry has over the last year, it’s good practice to look back at the lessons learned. How, the regulators and politicians are asking themselves, can we avoid similar meltdown in the future?

But is the consulting industry asking this? I’m not convinced. Instead, I see a tendency (and I’ve noticed this before, in the aftermath of other downturns) to heave a collective sigh of relief and return to business-as-usual.

It came as something of a shock to me, as I was reading our recently published report on HR Consulting this afternoon, to discover the following two sentences: