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HR directors’ views on consulting

By ⋅ 19 March 2012 ⋅ One comment

Around a quarter of the 400+ clients we questioned recently were HR directors; most were significant buyers of consulting services.  The striking thing about talking to so many of them is how rarely they voluntarily talk about the big HR consulting firms, even though many use their services. This paradox appears to stem from the [...]

Sit back and enjoy the ride

By ⋅ 19 May 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Here at Source we like to entertain ourselves with finding parallels between consulting and other industries. I’ve talked before about the similarities with phrama (R&D a challenge) and the film industry (specialisation a must), but until I spoke to Torsten Oltmanns at Roland Berger, it hadn’t occurred to me that we were like the car [...]

Colour-coordinated consulting

By ⋅ 9 March 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Carrying out some research recently, I suddenly realised that each of the Big Four firms have now taken ‘ownership’ (in that special marketers meaning of the word) of one of the major colours. Was this deliberate? Suddenly I’ve got a picture in my mind of the Chief Marketing Officers from each firm sitting round a [...]

Shrinking preferred supplier lists and growing brands

By ⋅ 29 November 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

We seem to be entering a new stage in the evolution of the preferred supplier list. In its first guise – let’s call it Ardipithecus Ramidus, after the most primitive hominid yet found by palaeontologists – the PSL was a sad and solitary figure, wandering the corporate plains. It had little intelligence, preferring to bludgeon [...]

The value of brand in a recession

By ⋅ 16 March 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Most people would agree that the recession has so far produced a flight to brand in the consulting market. But will this continue to be the case? There are two forces acting here. The first, pulling clients towards familiar firms, is security. Of course, this has always been important to some extent, especially where high-profile, [...]

Consulting brands: what’s in a name?

By ⋅ 23 December 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

  We all know that the big, branded firms boasting global reach are the most expensive.  But what are you actually getting for your money?  Users of consulting are increasingly trying to answer that question because the difference in fees can run into millions of dollars.  It’s not that they don’t want to pay these [...]

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