Tuesday 6th Nov, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
“Shaping a better world” is what Arup says it does, in words that are curiously reminiscent of EY’s “Building a better working world”. It’s ironic that EY is talking about building, while Arup, which began life as an architectural firm, is talking about shaping, but perhaps it’s not surprising. There’s always been something of an overlap between civil engineering and consulting. Many of the first management consultants were engineers by training, and engineers, in my opinion, make some of the best consultants because their ability to decompose problems in order to solve them is just as useful in a business context as it is in building.
But the extent of that overlap has changed over time.
Tuesday 7th Jun, 2016
I’m back to my piece of string.
For those of you who are new to this idea, we’ve been talking a lot about how client perceptions are reshaping the consulting industry, essentially pulling it into two distinct markets. Low-cost consulting that, while it’s highly specialised, is familiar, repeatable and theoretically widely available; success here depends on depth of knowledge and efficiency. High-value consulting is far closer to traditional management consulting and depends of the ability to think and act in a creative and informed way about complex issues. The first market is by far the biggest, but it’s currently growing much more slowly than the second.
Tuesday 5th Jan, 2016
By Fiona Czerniawska Clients love a specialist. In a previous article on this blog I’ve discussed how the extent to which clients’ rating of the quality of consulting work is very influenced by whether they see the firm concerned as a specialist. The more specialised a firm is seen to be, the higher the quality of its work is rated.
Tuesday 2nd Jun, 2015
By Alison Huntington No, this isn’t another article about why French women are so thin compared with us frites-loving Brits. Or about the ever-expanding waistline of Gérard Depardieu. It’s about how size matters when looking at the 2.4% growth notched up by the French consulting market in 2014. And it matters in several ways.
Thursday 22nd Nov, 2012
Could a need for specialism be pushing clients into the arms of academics? Something has cropped up in a number of conversations with clients recently: the use of academics in place of consultants. It's a bit early to tell just how widespread the trend is (if it is, we'll report on it when we publish our next round of client research in 2013) but it seems worth mentioning because it's consistent with a number of other trends we've been observing for some time.
Wednesday 27th Jun, 2012
For some time now one of the truisms of consulting has been that you can either be a (big) brand or a (small) specialist; anyone in the middle ground will either be absorbed by a bigger player or dispersed among smaller ones.
Monday 19th Mar, 2012
Around a quarter of the 400+ clients we questioned recently were HR directors; most were significant buyers of consulting services. The striking thing about talking to so many of them is how rarely they voluntarily talk about the big HR consulting firms, even though many use their services. This paradox appears to stem from the fact that they think of these firms primarily in terms of administration rather than “consulting”. “We don’t use any of the big HR firms except on payroll and remuneration issues,” was one, typical comment.
Wednesday 28th Sep, 2011
I’ve written a lot in this blog about specialisation, particularly clients’ relentless quest for expertise in a world that has become increasingly flat from a skills point of view. But a recent article in the Harvard Business Review had made me wonder how far it will all go, or – less positively – where it might all end.
Wednesday 4th Aug, 2010
What on earth does the consulting industry have in common with the golden age of Hollywood? Quite a lot, I think.
Monday 2nd Aug, 2010
It is tempting for large consulting firms to think they are immune from competition from independent consultants. The idea that a firm such as McKinsey might be threatened by a freelancer seems as laughable as a cartoon elephant standing on a chair above a tiny mouse.
But the truth is that competition has a domino effect – two domino effects, actually, depending on whether demand for consulting is growing or falling.
Let’s divide consulting firms into four groups:
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