Tuesday 22nd Apr, 2014
By Fiona Czerniawska “We’ve got a new approach to cost-cutting,” I’ll always remember one bank telling us back at the start of the financial crisis. “We used to cut budgets for travel, biscuits in meetings and consulting in that order, but now we cut consulting first.”
Wednesday 19th Mar, 2014
By Edward Haigh I hate to be the prophet of doom, but... According to our new report, the UK's consulting market surged forward in 2013, growing an impressive 4.8% to a value of just under £5.6bn. That means the UK is almost certainly the second largest consulting market in the world, despite the UK economy being a few places further down the list.
Wednesday 12th Feb, 2014
By Fiona Czerniawska This isn’t a question about whether we need consulting as a service – I, for one, can’t envisage a world in which organisations don’t look for some type of help from the outside. It’s one about whether such services need to be delivered by the collective entity of people which constitutes a consulting firm.
Monday 20th Jan, 2014
By B.J. Richards In the course of researching our report on the 2013 Brazil consulting market, we stumbled upon (and immediately fell in love with) the term “chicken flight” – an evocative little phrase Brazilians use to describe their economy’s unfortunate cycle of noisy take-offs followed by clumsy crashes. There’s just so much in it, from the truly winning visual to the realization that, wow, it really must happen a lot if they have a name for it. It’s certainly some of the best economic shorthand we’ve heard.
Friday 17th Jan, 2014
By Edward Haigh For consulting firms, the question of where in the world to invest in their own businesses must have felt like a game of snakes and ladders in recent years. Come to think of it, there must have been times when it felt like a game of snakes and snakes.
Wednesday 4th Dec, 2013
By B.J. Richards Talking about the Brazilian consulting market over the last few months, one particular set of questions has come up time and again: What about the World Cup next summer? What about the 2016 Olympics? Just how much of a consulting boom can we expect off the backs of these two gargantuan events?
Wednesday 13th Nov, 2013
In a recent interview with the BBC, the Vice President of Mozambique likened investors in the country to big game hunters: brash and brave in the daytime pursuit of their quarry, but huddled around the fire, afraid of the dark and the howl of not-too-distant hyenas, at night. It explains, he suggests why so much investment is focused around the airport, a place of comparative security.
Monday 11th Nov, 2013
By Fiona Czerniawska “I’d like to speak to Vasily Speransky.” “I’m sorry,” says the heavily-accented Russian voice on the other end of the line, “he’s busy. Phone back later.” I call again: “He’s left the building,” says the voice. “Call tomorrow.” I do so: the voice sighs, weighed down – I fondly imagine– by the melancholia of countless generations of Russian writers and poets: “He’s left the company. Don’t call back.”
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