Redrawing the line between thought leadership and consulting

By Fiona Czerniawska

Is powder best kept dry?  Should you hide your family silver in case your clients steal it?

Many consultants remain wary of saying too much in their thought leadership, afraid that clients will latch on to the idea and implement it themselves.  I’ve always made the case for showing more than less, because (a) the move from theory to reality is rarely straight forward and gives consultants ample opportunity to contribute, (b) the best consulting firms will have a deep well of new ideas to draw on and giving some away scarcely diminishes this, and (c) in a crowded thought leadership market consulting firms need to exploit every possible opportunity to differentiate themselves.  However, I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t something more fundamental at stake here… nothing less than the future of the entire consulting industry.

Let me explain.  Much of the business model of consulting relies on one party (the consultant) knowing more than another (the client).  Consultants win work by giving away enough of this knowledge to demonstrate that this is the case, but not so much that their client goes off and do it for themselves (that would be coaching).  However, the line between what consultants give away and what they hold back has never been set in concrete: as clients have become better educated and more experienced, often by having been consultants themselves, the amount of knowledge consultants have to demonstrate (or give away, depending on your perspective) has increased.  Some of this takes the form of free preliminary studies – many firms say they’re doing more of these – but much of it is published as thought leadership.

There are three significant implications to this, I’d argue.

The first and most obvious is that it makes free studies / thought leadership more important than ever: having insights and concrete ideas about a client’s business won’t be the preserve of a small number of high-end consulting firms but a crucial facet of any firm, large or small.  Second, it changes the balance of consulting away from thinking and towards doing.  Indeed, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg argument here: it’s hard to know whether clients’ desire for consultants to become more involved in implementation has triggered this shift, or whether that’s a symptom of it.  Finally, there’s the money angle.  While I honestly don’t think clients take the family silver and run, it’s undoubtedly the case that consultants are charging for less than they used to, so the proportion of consulting work which is potentially chargeable has shrunk.

So where does this take us eventually?  Potentially to a consulting industry in which thinking happens for free, but doing costs money.