This phrase, at the bottom of an empty page, perfectly sums up my memories of the quality management systems which invaded consulting firms in the mid-1990s. It is stating the obvious; it has no proper verb (no action....); and it treats us as though we’re stupid. Fortunately, they didn’t last long, at least outside some very specific areas of the public sector. The invasion of the initiative-snatchers evaporated, leaving only shelves of decaying ring-binders and process checklists as a sign that it had ever existed.

Interviewing people for our recent report on strategy consulting, I was struck by this phrase. Coined by Muir Sanderson at Booz in London, he was referring to the way in which consulting firms, particularly strategy ones, have been escalating their attempts to build and keep client relationships in recent years.

That is the question.

Since the 1930s, when Marvin Bower refused to rename McKinsey and Co Bower and Co because he wanted clients to buy the firm, not him, it has been accepted thinking in consulting firms that the individual is subservient to the firm. From the partnership structure which promoted collective stewardship to corporate advertising campaigns, it has been the firm that matters.

Let me propose what might at first seem like a slightly odd analogy. I'd like you to imagine that your marketing agenda is a little rowing boat, floating (with you in it) on a gently-flowing river. You have a decent set of oars and sufficient strength to row either with or against the flow. You can furnish the river-banks with wild-flowers and whispering willows if you like, but they're not going to play a part in our story. Nor are ducks.

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.

Many of you will have noticed that there’s a boom in strategy consulting going on.

Having hunkered down for the duration of the (private sector) recession, companies are looking to see how to respond to the recovery. What has changed? How do they need to adapt? Not surprisingly, this leads to increased demand for strategy consulting: that’s happening at the moment, just as it happened after the last downturns in 1997 and 2002.

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:

Consultants really don’t help themselves sometimes.

The word “product” is one most firms would like to steer clear of. They think it smacks of a supermarket approach: put a standardised consulting process in a box, pile it high and sell it cheap. But this is a very narrow-minded way of thinking about it. Sure, you can productise a process in such a way that anyone can do it, destroying value to the client and consulting firm alike. But you can also take a more Lego-like approach, either:

January is one of the high points of the consultant's year so far as business planning is concerned. For the firms whose financial year starts in the summer, the New Year is a good time to check progress against assumptions; for those whose financial years start in the next couple of months, it is the last chance to take stock.

Two things are striking this year.