Growth

With a rapidly maturing market—corners of which are already growing by double digits year on year—you’ll be hard pressed to find a consultant in Africa who doubts the continent’s long-term potential. But those actually living and working on the ground often find they have an uphill task in convincing their bosses back home to make the investments that will have them in pole position when that promised future finally arrives.

I was recently on a plane with a big group of Italian tourists. We all duly read our magazines, ate our peanuts and landed safely – to a huge round of applause and whooping for joy from the Italian tour party. It is perhaps this delight in simply staying alive which explains the sanguine nature of the Italian response to yet another year of a consulting market which is not growing at all.

By Alison Huntington

No, this isn’t another article about why French women are so thin compared with us frites-loving Brits. Or about the ever-expanding waistline of Gérard Depardieu. It’s about how size matters when looking at the 2.4% growth notched up by the French consulting market in 2014. And it matters in several ways.