Thursday 5th Apr, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
I’m not always a fan of large-scale thought leadership studies, repeated year in, year out, but the title of PwC’s 21st CEO survey caught my imagination—and, I suspect, the Zeitgeist. In The anxious optimist in the corner office, PwC argues that “despite record levels of short-term optimism in the global economy, CEOs worldwide report heightened levels of anxiety regarding the business, economic, and, particularly, the societal threats confronting their organisations.”
Thursday 8th Mar, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
You know the feeling: You’ve seen the dress online, or the fancy watch in a shop window. I’ll look so good in it, you think. It’ll be just perfect to wear to that wedding next month, you think. I’ll get compliments from strangers, you think. Life will be better.
But you try it on and it’s not quite right. It’s too big around the middle, the colour isn’t quite right. The oversized watch face makes your wrist look like an udon noodle. You really want it to be the one for you, but after standing there for a few minutes trying to persuade yourself that it’s right, you reluctantly concede that it isn’t.
Clients of consulting firms describe a similar journey with the consulting firms they encounter.
Tuesday 20th Feb, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Sixty-six million years ago. In the apocalyptical gloom, the world’s last dinosaur is dying. Snout down in the icy mud, its eyes starting to close, the dinosaur glimpses movement: A small animal, whose fur has kept it warm, is scurrying. “I wasn’t expecting that,” thinks the dinosaur as extinction finally closes around it.
The world is full of surprises.
We were interviewing a consulting firm recently that, on the cusp of winning a multi-million-dollar transformation deal, found themselves out manoeuvred by a much smaller firm, against all expectations. “We’d dismissed them,” said the partner we spoke to. “Not only had we never heard of them, but they hadn’t listened to the client’s brief, had questioned the scope of the project, and come back with a proposal that didn’t deal with the key issues.” Just a minor detail, then, that the client loved a genuinely innovative, more challenging approach.
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