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Recession
Schrodinger’s cat and the consulting industry
The art of “and” is the title of an article by the Boston Consulting Group on how organisations, post-recession, need to grow revenue while simultaneously cutting costs. It’s not a question of one or the other, the article suggests: you have to do both. Our most recent quarterly survey of buying trends among clients reinforces [...]
New business models: Part 1
Recessions are extraordinarily effective tools for sorting winners from losers. Just as with retailers on the High Street, we’re seeing signs that the consulting firms with weaker business models are starting to sink to the bottom, leaving their more robust rivals bobbing around in the still choppy waters. But a problem for one set of [...]
The problem with innovation in consulting
Recessions are supposedly great times for innovation. Companies, their backs against the economic wall, are forced to be creative; those that rise to this challenge emerge stronger once the recovery comes. Is the same true of consulting? It should be. Long and deep recessions like this one create the need for new ways of managing. [...]
What shape will the recession in consulting be?
V-shaped, U-shaped, W-shaped or L-shaped? The debate about the overall trajectory of the recession in the wider economy has been growing in recent days. But what of the consulting industry? It’s now starting to look as though many countries, at least in Europe, managed low levels of growth in 2008, the first half of the [...]
The great divide?
One of the ways in which this recession is proving to be different from the last one is that demand for freelance consultants appears to have shrunk. Although there’s no hard data on the shift, anecdotal evidence from clients, consulting firms and even freelance consultants confirms it. There are several possible explanations for this. The [...]
The value of brand in a recession
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, [...]
The perfect storm?
The furore over the evil Lord of the Dark, Sir Fred, and his dastardly plan to run off with all the loot, has served to confirm one thing above all else: the average British punter now takes matters relating to our banks very personally. In the past, fat cats were mere symbols of what people [...]
How fast does the consulting market move?
It’s been widely reported that Volvo trucks suffered a potentially catastrophic fall in demand in the third quarter of 2008: from around 40,000 trucks a month, sales fell to around 100. Clearly, the owners of big fleets of trucks are trying to save money by running their vehicles for longer. Could consulting services suffer from [...]
Consultants as bellwethers for the economy?
There’s a common perception that consultants do well in a downturn. Because they sell services rather than products, consulting firms are – the argument goes – better able to adapt what they do to, to fit changing economic circumstances. Thus, in the good times, their focus is on growth and new markets; in bad times, [...]
The ripple effect
If the consulting "industry" is a collection of micro-markets, you’d expect any downturn to hit sectors and services at different times and with varying degrees of ferocity. That would certainly be borne out by the experience of niche firms in recent years: 2002-04 saw some firms powering ahead while others gave up an unequal struggle. [...]
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