Strategy consulting

There was a big fuss in the UK last year when the findings of a report by McKinsey on cutting costs in the National Health Service were leaked to the press. It was proposed that 137,000 clinical and admin posts would be cut in order to save £20bn by 2014. Vilified by the press, the government announced that it had rejected the report’s recommendations.

Interviewing people for our recent report on strategy consulting, I was struck by this phrase. Coined by Muir Sanderson at Booz in London, he was referring to the way in which consulting firms, particularly strategy ones, have been escalating their attempts to build and keep client relationships in recent years.

Many of you will have noticed that there’s a boom in strategy consulting going on.

Having hunkered down for the duration of the (private sector) recession, companies are looking to see how to respond to the recovery. What has changed? How do they need to adapt? Not surprisingly, this leads to increased demand for strategy consulting: that’s happening at the moment, just as it happened after the last downturns in 1997 and 2002.