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A market in transition: consulting in the GCC
Demand for consulting in the countries of the Gulf Co-Operation Council (GCC) has been growing fast since the recession, but for most consulting firms in the region this hasn’t meant a return to business as usual. That’s been confirmed by our recent round of client research, this time focusing exclusively on the views of almost 150 [...]
Looking down when we should be looking up
When my son was younger, just starting to relinquish my hand as we walked along the street and perhaps slightly intimidated by the enormous world around him, he always used to look down at the pavement. One day the inevitable happened and he crashed into a tactlessly-positioned lamp-post. This is a good analogy to the [...]
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 [...]
HR directors’ views on consulting
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 [...]
A two-horse race for the Big Four?
It’s hard to distinguish between Big Four firms – at least that’s what we thought. But our recent research with 400+ clients tells us otherwise. There are certainly areas where clients do think these firms are hard to tell apart; “they’re all much of a much-ness”, was how one of them put it. Certainly everyone [...]
BCG in pole position
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is better positioned for growth than any of its major competitors. That’s one of the findings of our new report, published yesterday, into the views of more than 400 senior end-users of consulting services across Europe and the Middle East. The idea of putting any consulting firm top of a list [...]
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 bleak mid-winter of public sector consulting
2011 turned out to be another difficult year for public sector consultants in the UK, with little improvement even on the horizon, our research shows. A “nuclear winter” was how one firm characterised it. Some money is still being spent on consultants, particularly on new technology, security and international aid, but there’s also been a [...]
Breaking the mould in manufacturing consulting
Consulting in the manufacturing sector has traditionally either been big business or virtually no business depending on the country you work in. A hugely important part of the German economy, the sector accounts for more than a quarter of all consulting there, it’s only about a tenth of the UK market where it’s dwarfed by [...]
2012: the year the consulting industry fights back?
The thing about a double, whether an espresso or a recession, is that it implies that the second experience is the same as the first – and that’s a mistake. The 2009 recession in consulting was, while shocking, not unexpected. It took a while for the full fallout from Lehman’s demise to be felt by [...]
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