Thursday 11th Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
“Transformation is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think strategy consulting is a big deal, but that’s just peanuts to transformation."
If Douglas Adams was alive and well today, and writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Consulting, he’d probably have said this. Indeed, one of Adams’ most brilliant ideas, the infinite improbability drive—a faster-than-light drive based on quantum theory—would almost certainly have been deployed whizzing consultants from one side of the transformation universe to another*.
We’ve written before on this blog about the dangers posed by the extent to which transformation, like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal—another Adams invention—has been gobbling up traditional consulting services.
Tuesday 19th Jun, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
In 1610, after months of painstaking work grinding his own lens, Galileo Galilei finally held his new telescope up to the night sky. What he saw astonished him: instead of a few hundred stars, he could see thousands, even millions.
The consulting “universe” has long been populated by a small number of large “planets”–strategy, technology, operational improvement, and so on–but if you were to carry out an equivalent of Galileo’s exercise in today’s market, then you’d see something that looks more like the Milky Way than a simple solar system.
The consulting market is fragmenting. Centrifugal forces are breaking up our familiar planets, based on the precise expertise required, on a changing sense of what a “reasonable” price is, and on a new generation of clients who know that the way they want to buy from consulting firms isn’t necessarily how the firm wants to sell or deliver to them.
Thursday 17th Sep, 2015
By Fiona Czerniawska Consulting firms have made huge efforts over the last decade to increase the proportion of women in their businesses. By the standards of most industries they’ve been highly successful, but there’s still a big disparity between men and women when we look at the top of most firms.
Thursday 2nd Jul, 2015
By Alison Huntington The ‘bromance’ may be a fading Hollywood genre, but it’s alive and well in the world of consulting. Having been kindly invited to several analyst days with consulting firms, it struck me that the clients wheeled out to sing a firm’s praises are always men. And then I noticed that it’s always men introducing them. No, I lie – I heard one female partner speak at a tech firm once, and her specialism was (you guessed it) HR.
Wednesday 18th Jun, 2014
By Fiona Czerniawska It’s not quite the story arc of a Hollywood blockbuster, but it’s a realistic enough prospect to make many a managing partner quake in their boots. Forget massive explosions levelling cities; forget aliens abducting large swathes of Americans: this is where the action is.
Sunday 9th Mar, 2014
By Fiona Czerniawska Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
Wednesday 11th Apr, 2012
Joe (let’s call him) is good at making presentations. A highly-experienced consultant, he’s knows how to project his voice, read his audience, put just the right amount of content on his slides and not fiddle with the loose change in his pockets while he talks. People are nice enough to say that he says interesting things in an engaging way. But how much does this positive feedback stem from the fact he’s told them what they want to hear?
Tuesday 6th Dec, 2011
There's a growing consensus amongst consulting firms that the pyramid model, around which their industry has so far shaped itself, might have had its day. Geared towards the idea of a nice shiny partner selling in his formidable knowledge before deploying legions of fresh-faced young guns with intellects the size of Massachusetts to mop up margin, clients are starting to question whose interests the model serves best. Few are concluding that it's theirs.
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