Innovation

By Alison Huntington. 

What drives a great client experience? You’d be forgiven for thinking that there was one rule that applied to everyone. After all, we’ve written extensively about convergence in the consulting market, and how clients struggle to see much difference between firms, which kind of suggests that everyone has figured out the same winning formula.

But our data paints a more nuanced picture than that—the drivers of high scores (by which we mean a high proportion of people speaking positively in our client survey) can vary significantly from one firm to the next. Let’s take firms that people often lump together—McKinsey and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG hereafter)—and look at the drivers of positive perceptions about their digital transformation work. 

The greatest driver of high scores for McKinsey is the extent to which it’s seen to have an innovative approach to its work.

By Rachel Duk.

If our analyst team could earn a pound each time we heard from consulting leaders that “talent is a big challenge”, we’d all have taken early retirement by now, spending our days swilling Dom Perignon on our superyacht. Unfortunately for all involved, we’re still locked away in a dark basement frenetically examining the consulting industry, while firms are no closer to solving the talent conundrum. We all know the drill: Great people are in short supply, the much-maligned Millennial generation are less committed than Leonardo DiCaprio in a new relationship, and those blasted start-ups are, mysteriously, more alluring to young professionals than the concept of process-mapping in the back-end of nowhere. And while some consulting firms are developing retention strategies for their flighty talent pool, many more accept this situation as the new status quo.

Yet as a Big Four graduate myself, I’m convinced there’s a better way. 

By Fiona Czerniawska.

If the consulting industry has been really good at one thing, then it’s at taking perfectly decent words and loading them up with so much promise and ambition that they crack under the strain. “Transformation” is teetering dangerously close to the edge of this at the moment: Digital technology offers so much in terms of potential impact on organisations’ top and bottom lines, but clients are increasingly demanding proof, evidence that work is, in fact, being transformed.

Another such word is innovation. As a concept it’s of critical importance to the consulting industry. Our data has repeatedly highlighted not only the extent to which a firm can demonstrate how an innovative approach will determine whether it will be short-listed for work, but also the significant shortfall between the level of innovation clients are looking for and what firms are delivering in practice. One of the most important factors in deciding which firm to use, innovation is also one of the areas where consulting firms perform worst. In fact, there are only three areas in which firms are perceived to be even weaker: price (which we’ll discount for present purposes—we’ve never met a client who didn’t want a reduction in fee rates); responsiveness and flexibility; and speed of delivery. Those latter two are interesting because we think they link to innovation. Most clients we speak to aren’t interested in blue-sky thinking: When they write in the RFP that they’re looking for an innovative approach, they’re really saying that they want a firm that can bring fresh ideas from other industries and/or countries, one that isn’t so hide-bound by process and organisational baggage that it can’t change the way it works to accommodate a client’s unique set of circumstances and deliver tangible improvements more quickly than clients can do by themselves.