Wednesday 8th May, 2013
The UK consulting market, still the biggest in Europe, grew by just over two per cent between 2011 and 2012. Recovery (if you can call it that) came in the form of a surprisingly resurgent financial services sector and a public sector which, though greatly reduced from its size a few years ago, was nevertheless fairly bouyant and...yadda yadda yadda. Up a bit, down a bit. A few per cent here, a few per cent there.
Monday 25th Mar, 2013
Every now and then we talk to someone who, in the course of a single interview, perfectly encapsulates the opportunities and challenges of an entire market.
Tuesday 12th Mar, 2013
Segmenting the consulting market is a bit like skinning a cat: there are many ways to do it. Size is a useful way of thinking about it: small and medium-sized businesses don’t buy much consulting and, when they do, they buy it from their auditor or from freelance consultants. Sector is much less reliable as an indicator of difference: at the moment, you can take two banks of a broadly similar profile and find that one is buying a lot of consulting services while the other is buying virtually none.
Tuesday 5th Feb, 2013
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the shadow
Tuesday 8th Jan, 2013
This is Laurie Young, a widely-acclaimed expert and the author of many books on marketing: “As a young teenager I’d visit my older cousins who had one fault: all of them were ‘petrol heads’ ... Now that’s part of the male psyche that missed me and I had to stand around while they, beer in hand, would talk endlessly about speed and new models in mind numbing detail. But it taught me to communicate.
Monday 10th Dec, 2012
If you haven’t already seen it, you might want to read Steve Denning’s article in Forbes about the rise and fall of Monitor. How, the author asks, could a firm renowned for helping its clients exploit their competitive advantage fail so dramatically to exploit its own? He lays the blame for Monitor’s demise firmly at the door of Michael Porter’s Five Forces strategy, probably one of the most famous conceptual models and certainly one o
Tuesday 13th Nov, 2012
This is the fifth in my series of blogs looking at the prospects for different segments within the consulting industry. “To generalise is to be an idiot,” wrote the 18th century poet and visionary, William Blake. “To particularlise is the alone distinction of merit. General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.”
Monday 22nd Oct, 2012
This is the fourth in my series of blogs looking at the prospects for different segments within the consulting industry. Engineering consultancies are the new kids on the block where management consulting is concerned, certainly still new enough for some consultants to be surprised when we include them in our analysis.
Tuesday 16th Oct, 2012
In The Big Short, Michael Lewis sets out to understand why, in the run up to the sub-prime crisis, a tiny minority of investment funds went against the prevailing sentiment and actually bet on the bubble bursting. Were they run by geniuses? Was there some clever bit of analysis that they did, but everyone else missed? Were their financial models better than their rivals’?
Monday 8th Oct, 2012
This is the second in a series of blogs I’m doing which look at the prospects for different segments within the consulting industry.
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