Wednesday 29th Mar, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
We’re only three months into 2017, but it’s already clear that the word of the year in consulting will be robotics.
It’s rapidly becoming—some would say has become—the catch-all phrase for the use of new digital technologies, including cognitive computing and artificial intelligence, to automate parts of the consulting process. It’s a huge opportunity: as a previous article on this blog argued, there are aspects of strategy consulting—to name just one example—that could be done better and more quickly by machines, leaving people to spend more time analysing and interpreting the data. But inevitably it’s also a challenge—or rather two challenges.
Friday 17th Mar, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
A recent article in The Economist argued that globalisation was already “in retreat” before politicians started talking about the need for greater protectionism. In 1990, when McDonald’s opened its first branch in Moscow, the firm “embodied an idea that would become incredibly powerful: global firms, run by global managers and owned by global shareholders, should sell global products to global customers”. But the return on equity of the top 700 multinationals has fallen to 11%, down from a peak of 18% ten years ago; moreover, if we compare the ROE of multinational firms with that of their local competitors, the latter often do better. “Global reach has become a burden, not an advantage”, The Economist concludes.
Thursday 22nd Sep, 2016
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Once upon a time a group of consultants came up with a whizz-bang idea. “Let’s help cut clients’ procurement costs,” they said, ricocheting off the walls of their meeting room in an excitable fashion. Over the years that followed they criss-crossed the world doing just that: replacing distributed, uncontrolled purchasing with formal, centralised processes that scrutinised, then slashed, hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure. Happy, even smug, the consultants retired to their luxury penthouses delighted to have added value in such a concrete, measurable fashion. So imagine their surprise when they found themselves some years later subject to these same controls. Go through procurement? Eugh! E-auctions? Eek! Meanwhile the new breed of chief procurement officers rubbed their bureaucratic hands with glee: yet more savings for the corporate coffers.
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