Thursday 15th Mar, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
You can tell we’ve entered a new phase in the consulting industry’s perennial “war for talent” when a new term emerges.
In the heady days of the late 1990s, the talk was all about fungibility. Client demand was changing so rapidly that consulting firms were struggling to provide the capabilities the brave, new dotcom world was looking for. They couldn’t recruit fast enough, so had to find ways to re-badge people: “Re-spraying an auditor”, was how one Big Four firm partner put it to me; “lipstick on pigs”, was the rather more trenchant view of a client. “Fungibility”—the ease with which an individual could be moved from one practice to another was the rather more politically correct term that gained common currency. But in today’s consulting firm, fungibility isn’t enough. Digital transformation projects, in particular, require a wide range of skills, only some of which are visible on day one. Specialisation—indeed, hyper-specialisation—rules: Clients aren’t willing to trade quality for breadth, and they certainly don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to be a master of multiple trades.
Wednesday 22nd Nov, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Interviewed recently by the BBC on the impact automation is likely to have on the professional services sector, I was asked whether I thought that all the work done by professional service firms could be done by computers. The answer, to me at least, is clearly no.
Imagine the future of consulting—as we have in our report on the potential impact of robotic process automation and artificial intelligence—on the industry, as a partial eclipse. The sun is the work that conventional human consultants do today. It, and the rays emerging from it, represent different aspects of the consulting process: discover; predict; advise; decide; design; implement; run and report. Technology is the moon. But, even as the moon moves across the face of the sun it won’t entirely obscure the latter’s light: Around the edge, a corona of human activity will continue to shine.
Thursday 16th Nov, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
It’s decades since Theordore Levitt wrote about what he terms “marketing myopia”, the extent to which people and organisations underestimated the potential size of their market because they viewed it through a narrow, pre-determined lens. If you’re trying to sell screws, the problem is not that every solution is a screw but that you only see screw-related opportunities: there’s a bigger market out there, if only you saw it as fixture-related.
I was reminded of this idea recently when talking to a client about how the wTheordore Levittay in which they use professional services may change in the future. A wide-ranging discussion ended up with both him and me realising that we needed to see the market differently, through a different lens if you like.
Pages |
