Market conditions

When my son was younger, just starting to relinquish my hand as we walked along the street and perhaps slightly intimidated by the enormous world around him, he always used to look down at the pavement.  One day the inevitable happened and he crashed into a tactlessly-positioned lamp-post.

This is a good analogy to the predicament the consulting industry finds itself in today.

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.

It’s hard to distinguish between Big Four firms – at least that’s what we thought.  But our recent research with 400+ clients tells us otherwise.

There are certainly areas where clients do think these firms are hard to tell apart; “they’re all much of a much-ness”, was how one of them put it.  Certainly everyone associates them with financial management and regulatory-driven work: no surprise there.  And almost everyone says their people are “good”, though rarely anything more than good, even if their knowledge of specific industries tends to be rated highly.