Talent

By Fiona Czerniawska.

You can tell we’ve entered a new phase in the consulting industry’s perennial “war for talent” when a new term emerges.

In the heady days of the late 1990s, the talk was all about fungibility. Client demand was changing so rapidly that consulting firms were struggling to provide the capabilities the brave, new dotcom world was looking for. They couldn’t recruit fast enough, so had to find ways to re-badge people: “Re-spraying an auditor”, was how one Big Four firm partner put it to me; “lipstick on pigs”, was the rather more trenchant view of a client. “Fungibility”—the ease with which an individual could be moved from one practice to another was the rather more politically correct term that gained common currency. But in today’s consulting firm, fungibility isn’t enough. Digital transformation projects, in particular, require a wide range of skills, only some of which are visible on day one. Specialisation—indeed, hyper-specialisation—rules: Clients aren’t willing to trade quality for breadth, and they certainly don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to be a master of multiple trades.

By Alison Huntington.

Over the course of 2017, we’ve interviewed almost 400 senior consulting leaders around the world, usually the most senior person in a territory or industry, picking their brains about the trends shaping their clients’ businesses and the pressures being placed on the consulting model. 

Having spent a lot of time writing about women in consulting—why so few make it to the top, the barriers to their progression, and what firms can do to change things—I thought it would be interesting to look at the gender balance of the consulting leaders we speak to.

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.