Thursday 15th Feb, 2018
By Rachel Ainsworth
Have you heard: The average attention span is down from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to eight seconds now? That is less than the nine-second attention span of your average goldfish.
The dissemination of this somewhat alarming data can be tracked back to a Microsoft report published in 2015 which has been the catalyst for articles in a range of illustrious publications including Time magazine, The Telegraph, and The New York Times, and continues to be quoted. The falling attention span sounds intuitively correct. And the comparison with the lowly goldfish makes for an attention-grabbing and memorable statistic.
Some professional services firms appear to have responded to the falling attention span, shifting some—if not all—thought leadership from chunky publications to much lighter articles online. See, for example, EY’s Building a better working world, or The Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG’s) much greater use of short pieces on BCG.com compared to its portfolio of content previously published on BCG Perspectives.
Thursday 8th Feb, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
At a recent event in the UK, I and my co-director, Edward Haigh, had a couple of pictures of planes, a nice little bi-plane, and a whopping great A380. We’re both closet plane-spotters, and Ed harbours a not entirely secret desire to do the public announcements on long-haul flights (“Tray tables stowed… “). But that wasn’t the point: We were actually talking about the need to base your proposition on something more than gut feel.
We were talking about transformation. We estimate that the consulting market around digital transformation was worth around $44bn in 2017. That’s considerably higher than in 2016, not because clients are spending a lot more money on consulting overall—in fact, we think that the global growth rate in 2017 will turn out, once we’ve crunched around 10m numbers, to have grown by around 7%—nor because the definition of digital transformation has suddenly changed, but because digital transformation has increased the rate at which it’s colonising other consulting services. The market is a bit bigger, but the portion of that market that’s digital transformation is much, much bigger.
So, why the planes?
Wednesday 31st Jan, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
Conventional wisdom tells us that McKinsey, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain only really compete with each other.
But as the tectonic plates of the consulting industry are shifting, there’s mounting evidence that this is simply no longer true. Sure, the MBB firms might still retain an aura of differentiation through the prestige of their brands, but as client demand changes, and as firms of all stripes converge around digital transformation, there’s a serious danger that McKinsey, BCG, and Bain’s obsession with each other is blinding them to other threats.
Take McKinsey’s clients. We asked current users of McKinsey which firm they’d pick as their first choice in a range of consulting services, if they were given free reign*. Unsurprisingly, large proportions of its clients are loyal--on average, 20% say they’d pick McKinsey as their first choice firm regardless of service. But, looking at the table below, we can see that their loyalty varies considerably depending on which service they’re thinking about. And the arms into which they’re likely to drift are anything but the familiar foes.
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