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Client-consultant relationship
The Shamrock organisation revisited, but by whom?
Charles Handy, the eminent business philosopher, first started writing about the switch from permanent to temporary labour thirty years ago. By the early 1990s his predictions had started to come true, as organisations redrew their structural boundaries and triggered an explosion of growth in outsourcing. Since then, we’ve also seen a significant rise in the [...]
What price a price? (Or what clients really think about price and value)
Six years ago I visited India for the first time. I will never forget walking out of my hotel on to the streets of New Delhi to be confronted by the almost complete absence of everything I knew and understood. Having worked out the basics – which, for the western tourist, is largely a matter of [...]
What do 400+ clients have to say about consultants?
We’ve spent the last three months finding out what senior executives think about consulting, both the industry in broad terms and the specific firms they work with. Almost all were from the private sector and the vast majority were from multinational organisations with a turnover in excess of €500 million a year (what we term [...]
The power law in consulting
A recent article in Booz & Company’s strategy + business magazine draws attention to some fascinating academic research on how power affects decision-making. We already know (from other research) that the quality of decision-making declines when people depend on their own beliefs and ignore the advice of others: “outside information helps ‘average out’ the distortions [...]
Consulting, fast and slow
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow isn’t about consulting, but it could be. The Nobel prize-winning economist takes ideas he developed with Amos Tversky on behavioural economics and decision-making and examines the psychology that may help explain why we all – contrary to what economists used to think – make irrational choices. His focus is [...]
Why consultants shouldn’t want to be liked
Call me harsh, but I don’t think it’s the role of parents to be liked by their children. Loved? One would hope so. But liked? Like is for friends, for the people who share your interests and experiences. Like is for those you want to be with but are afraid you might lose. Parents may [...]
A listening post
Among my holiday reading was Russell T Davies’ The Writer’s Tale, one of the best books I’ve ever read on the process of writing. It’s a hefty tome, but one comment has lodged in my memory. In writing dialogue, says Davies, the key to realism is the recognition that a conversation is not a sequence [...]
Consultant-managers: something else to worry about
If you talk to consultants in Germany one of the post-recession trends they’re most likely to mention is the rise of in-house consulting units in multinational companies. Driven by a desire to build internal skills as much as cut the amount of money spent on consultants, these units pose a genuine threat to consulting firms [...]
The three-dimensional space between consultants and clients
I know: it goes against the grain to suggest that there should be any space at all. But, as I’ve mentioned before, one of the problems the consulting industry faces is how to re-establish a difference between themselves and clients that’s big and important enough to be worth paying money for. One in two consulting [...]
The un-changing face of consulting
It’s funny how things sometimes come together. Earlier this week I was chatting to someone who buys a lot of consulting services and has done for many years. Asked what had changed over that time, he said he was sometimes far more struck by what hadn’t. Today’s consulting industry may be vastly bigger and clients [...]
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