Hyperbole: the barrier to Shangri-la

By Edward Haigh

It may be a debate which has been rumbling around for some time, but it’s never been a more important question for big consulting firms to find an answer to: how do you convince clients that you’re a multi-specialist?

Because this is what they want, right? Small firms are nice to do business with because they’re stuffed full of highly-experienced people to whom you’ll really matter. You sit just below their partner and their children in their list of priorities. You might even be ranked higher than that. Added to which they don’t carry all that big firm baggage (the baggage that requires their partner and even their god – let alone their children or you – to accept subservience to the firm). But more than anything else they’re nice to do business with because they’re specialists. They’re brilliant at something. One thing.

But that’s about it. For all their talk of loving small firms, what clients really want are all the qualities they find in a small firm, in a big firm. That’s particularly true at the moment, as many clients size up which consulting firm to use for the growing number of large-scale multi-functional transformation projects that are knocking about. They want a firm big enough to be able to handle the scale of a transformation project but they need specialist consultants across a wide range of disciplines to make sure stuff actually gets transformed rather than twiddled with and powerpointed. They want a multi-specialist. It’s their Shangri-la.

Now here’s the irony: not only do clients believe that their Shangri-la exists, it actually does. No, really. The popular idea that big consulting firms are stuffed to the gunnels with nothing but generalists is, when you really think about it, laughable. How on earth would they manage that? They’d have to keep moving consultants around from one sector to the next and one service to the next with such frequency that those consultants would feel dizzy. And then, when that inevitably didn’t work and someone ended up sticking around somewhere for long enough that they started knowing a thing or two, they’d have to get rid of them.

There are specialists in big consulting firms. There are lots of them. They’re the ones that end up leaving to create the small, specialist firms because they figure they can throw off the shackles of the firm and make a ton of money doing so. But they’re there before they leave. Big firms are desperately trying to work out how to find an answer to one of the biggest challenges – and opportunities – in today’s consulting market, and the funny thing is that they’ve already got the answer. They’re already multi-specialists.

Clients know it, too. Oh sure, they’ll make sweeping generalisations about big firms, most of which have some basis in truth, but when you push them further they’re the first to admit that there’s world-class expertise in big ‘generalist’ firms. Their trouble is firstly that they can’t find it, which places a requirement on big firms to organise themselves more effectively around areas of specialism rather than increasingly arbritrary (from a client's perspective) delineations like geography.  And secondly, that when they ask big firms – these multi-specialists, these Shangri-las – what they’re really good at, they always get the same answer: 'everything'.  And if there’s one thing clients don’t believe, it’s ‘everything’.  What they hear is ‘nothing’.