Market conditions

By Alison Huntington

What’s the difference between TMT and financial services clients? There are the obvious things: the jeans and lumberjack shirts versus the sharp suits; the seemingly impenetrable language of technology versus the dictionary of complex financial products; sunshine-soaked Silicon Valley versus the imposing skyscrapers of New York.

But there are less obvious things, and the one we uncovered is that clients in these two sectors have very different opinions of the value added by consultants.

By Alison Huntington

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.