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Skills and development

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Changing minds

By ⋅ 11 April 2012 ⋅ Post a comment

Joe (let’s call him) is good at making presentations.  A highly-experienced consultant, he’s knows how to project his voice, read his audience, put just the right amount of content on his slides and not fiddle with the loose change in his pockets while he talks. People are nice enough to say that he says interesting [...]

Shaping the future of consulting

By ⋅ 6 December 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

There’s a growing consensus amongst consulting firms that the pyramid model, around which their industry has so far shaped itself, might have had its day. Geared towards the idea of a nice shiny partner selling in his formidable knowledge before deploying legions of fresh-faced young guns with intellects the size of Massachusetts to mop up margin, clients are starting to question whose interests the model serves best. Few are concluding that it’s theirs. [...]

The question every consultant should be able to answer

By ⋅ 30 September 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Being an extraordinarily sad person, I spent part of my vacation reading Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. I normally give self-help books a wide berth, but Vanderkam is a journalist, more interested in interviewing people who squeeze a lot out of their week (all 168 hours of it) than [...]

A listening post

By ⋅ 30 August 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

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 [...]

A tipping point in the structure of the firm

By ⋅ 24 January 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Our report, “The balancing act: trends in consulting firm recruitment”, published last week, argues that, if current trends continue, consulting firms could look very different in the future. Almost every firm is built around the pyramid model in which the limited and expensive time of a small number of senior people at the apex of [...]

Judgement Day

By ⋅ 22 November 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

What do a pen and a children’s playground have in common? A couple of weeks ago, I was in Copenhagen with a Danish consultancy, Valcon. It’s an unusual firm, employing mechanical engineers and product designers alongside more traditional management consultants. “A lot of consulting is about process,” said one of the directors, “checking off that [...]

Working in partnership: three words to avoid

By ⋅ 16 November 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

What is it about the consulting industry? It picks up harmless, unassuming phrases and converts them into linguistic behemoths. “Working in partnership” is now so ubiquitous it’s become the equivalent of an “um” or “er” in a firm’s marketing material, filling the gap when it can’t think of anything else to say. Ten years ago [...]

The case for selective education

By ⋅ 27 September 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

I was speaking at a conference on consulting organised by the Danish Chamber of Commerce (Dansk Erhverv) a couple of weeks ago. You can find my presentation on the future shape of consulting here. One of the points I tried to make was the extent to which the difference between client and consultant has been [...]

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