Thursday 9th Aug, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
… But he’s not your everyday, brain-on-a-stick strategy consultant. No, he feels real empathy for the difficult situations in which clients find themselves, and is genuinely sad that they don’t have an expensive fountain pen like his. Which is why he’s finding his conversation with Carl so distressing.
Carl is a client. He’s got two decades of senior management experience under his belt, and he really couldn’t care two hoots about Martin’s fountain pen. No, he’s talking to Martin, because Martin and his team have been carrying out a refresh of Carl’s corporate strategy. Of course, they haven’t been doing that by themselves: As someone who’s used almost every major consulting firm under the sun, Carl is aware of the importance of working closely with the consulting firm. Martin calls this co-creation, but Carl simply wants to ensure that his staff pick up the skills and knowledge they need to help them do strategy work in the future. Carl is also not a fan of management speak.
“… so, this could be ground-breaking collaboration,” Martin is saying.
“Great.” Carl finds Martin faintly amusing and doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. He does, however, want to interrupt Martin’s smooth and apparently unending monologue by asking an important question. “But I’d also like to talk about how we measure the value you add.”
Wednesday 11th Apr, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
You don’t need me to tell you that digital transformation is big. It’s already a massive market ($44bn by our latest estimates), it’s growing rapidly, and it’s right at the top of the corporate agenda. What’s more, by being multidisciplinary by nature, and requiring a breadth of consulting services to be truly transformational, it’s particularly big news for big firms. Which, if anything, makes it even bigger.
But what does that mean for mid-sized strategy firms? Several barriers to these sort of firms playing in this space spring up, at least in theory: They’re not big enough to have the global reach many clients require; their breadth of services is unlikely to be as wide as the biggest firms; and they may simply not have enough people to deploy, particularly when it comes to turning strategies into action.
Thursday 8th Feb, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
At a recent event in the UK, I and my co-director, Edward Haigh, had a couple of pictures of planes, a nice little bi-plane, and a whopping great A380. We’re both closet plane-spotters, and Ed harbours a not entirely secret desire to do the public announcements on long-haul flights (“Tray tables stowed… “). But that wasn’t the point: We were actually talking about the need to base your proposition on something more than gut feel.
We were talking about transformation. We estimate that the consulting market around digital transformation was worth around $44bn in 2017. That’s considerably higher than in 2016, not because clients are spending a lot more money on consulting overall—in fact, we think that the global growth rate in 2017 will turn out, once we’ve crunched around 10m numbers, to have grown by around 7%—nor because the definition of digital transformation has suddenly changed, but because digital transformation has increased the rate at which it’s colonising other consulting services. The market is a bit bigger, but the portion of that market that’s digital transformation is much, much bigger.
So, why the planes?
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