To guru or not to guru

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.

Bower wasn’t just simply making a statement about culture. He recognised the sound economic sense of building a client base which was loyal to the brand even when individuals left, and of creating a flexible organisation. Gurus are only good at one thing: they can be independent consultants – and many are – but emotionally and logistically they’re hard to accommodate in a consulting firm. Consulting firms need flexibility, the ability to re-deploy their staff from one sector or service to another in response to changing market conditions; otherwise they end up with pockets of under-utilised people and low margins. Not surprisingly, team-work, collaboration and knowledge sharing are all phrases that occur repeatedly when consulting firms talk about themselves. No one wants to return to the world of 20 years ago when partners, even if they weren’t gurus, “owned” clients and refused to share information.

But the pendulum may have swung too much in the opposite direction. Can you name a single person that stands out in the industry in the way that Jack Welch did at General Electric or Richard Branson still does at Virgin? Other industries have their lions, not consulting. Gurus aren’t important only because they know stuff, but because they humanise it. They attract attention; they inspire. And you don’t get to be a guru by being just a little bit different: you need something genuinely insightful and interesting to say.

These are exactly the qualities the consulting industry needs at the moment. As our recent report on marketing consulting services argues, too much marketing effort is going into articulating why one firm is different to another, and not enough into actually finding the points of difference. In a consulting firm, those points are, of course, people. This means that marketeers need to jettison the habits of the last two decades and start finding their hidden gurus.