Tuesday 8th Aug, 2017
By Edward Haigh.
I’ve spent enough time attending analyst summits and conducting telephone interviews with the Big Four in the past year, to know that ecosystems are a really big deal for them. Like, a really really big deal.
Along the way I’ve been genuinely impressed, not only by the network of relationships they’ve been building, but also by the humility they’ve shown in doing so. After all, humility may be a precondition for building a successful ecosystem in the first place, but it’s something for which the Big Four (or any big consulting firm, for that matter) haven’t hitherto been particularly famous. Frankly, trying to get a big consulting firm to admit that it doesn’t have all the capability its clients’ need in house, and might need help from someone else, has been like trying to get an alpha-male to read an instruction manual.
Tuesday 14th Mar, 2017
By Julie Ahadi.
Researching clients’ views on the consulting industry in the GCC can sometimes feel a bit like falling through a rabbit hole: We don’t claim to have encountered any rabbits in waistcoats along the way, but much like Alice in Wonderland, we have, at times, felt as though we’ve entered into an alternate reality...
That’s because clients’ opinions about consulting firms can be quite different in the GCC from those we are used to hearing in other parts of the world. It’s a phenomenon we talked about before, but just to recap, our contention is that clients here have developed their own views over a relatively short period of time, and from a blank piece of paper, about what it is consulting firms do, regardless of whether this conforms to the received wisdom about consulting firms held by those who’ve been using them for much longer.
Wednesday 1st Mar, 2017
By Edward Haigh.
“PwC, an accountancy firm with revenues of $35bn last year, couldn’t deliver accurate figures on the 5,700 votes for the Oscars when it really mattered,” quipped The Guardian in an editorial piece on Monday, following that up with the straight-faced assertion that what happened was: “Enough to make anyone wonder about the role of expertise in the world today.”
That bears spelling out a little more forcefully: Someone giving someone else the wrong envelope appears to have been enough to satisfy The Guardian--the very opiate of the liberal elite, and a staunch defender of science and reason--that the conditions had been met upon which the role of expertise in the world ought to be called into question.
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