Client-consultant relationship

“I'm 100% convinced that consulting firms could win a lot more work if they just took the trouble to ask the right questions and find out more about our business. Some of them ask some very stupid questions.”  This was the strategy director of a major financial services company in the UK speaking, and it remains one of my favourite quotes from the round of client research we’ve just carried out.

Charles Handy, the eminent business philosopher, first started writing about the switch from permanent to temporary labour thirty years ago.  By the early 1990s his predictions had started to come true, as organisations redrew their structural boundaries and triggered an explosion of growth in outsourcing.  Since then, we’ve also seen a significant rise in the level of freelance work.

Six years ago I visited India for the first time. I will never forget walking out of my hotel on to the streets of New Delhi to be confronted by the almost complete absence of everything I knew and understood. Having worked out the basics - which, for the western tourist, is largely a matter of learning how to manage an overwhelming tidal wave of demand for a share of your wallet - and figured out how to get from A to B, I quickly found myself in the position of trying to buy something . My prospective supplier, seeing me eyeing one of his cashmere sweaters, made his move.