Nordic consulting: nobody panic!

Contrary to how it seemed to be reported in Norway's leading daily business publication, Dagens Naeringsliv, my opinion of the Nordic consulting market is not that it's locked in a hideous death spiral as clients swing the axe at the heads of the merciless money-grabbing consultants who want to bleed them, and their businesses, dry.

In fact my view is that the Nordic consulting market, relative to most other European consulting markets at the moment, is actually doing rather well. Growth of about 8% across the region (between 2010 and 2011) means it's outperforming virtually every market outside Switzerland, and probably even makes it a faster-growing market than India. That's not a consistent situation in every country (Sweden grew at about twice the rate of the Nordic average during the same period while Denmark remained flat) but the average still makes it one of the most attractive places to do business at the moment.

I'm not saying that the Nordic consulting market doesn't face its challenges, of course, so much as I'm saying that those challenges don't really merit the use of the word crisis, or advice for everyone to try to remain calm and warm, and look after their neighbours as the known world collapses around them.

In fact while some challenges are new - the centre of the European economic storm may lie distantly south, but its effects are still felt in the north - others have been around for a long time. Nordic culture, manifest in the region's labour market policies, has long tried to promote stability and equality by protecting full-time workers from economic volatility and the whims of effiency-hungry management. It's noble work, even if it has its detractors, but it's not the sort of work that makes for a natural consulting environment. They may be prized for their brains above all else but the reality is that a large chunk of the consulting market has always been about gap-filling (our research tells us that contingent labour accounts for about a third of the entire consulting market) and fewer gaps appear in less flexible labour markets. What's more, if Londoners are used to the idea that the person sitting next to them works for someone else and earns double what they do, then their counterparts in, say, Oslo, are likely to be less accomodating.

All of which acts as a brake on a market that's doing well nevertheless. Perhaps that's just as well: release the brake and we'd only start to see headlines about the threat to national security posed by a terrifying and rampant monster of a consulting market. And I might have more people to answer to then.

With apologies to the good people of Dagens Naeringsliv whose opinions I have, with contemptuous disregard, blown out of all proportion and twisted to suit my own agenda.