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Strategic planning
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 [...]
Doubts and certainties
“If you insist on beginning only with certainties, you shall end in doubts,” wrote Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, “but if you will be content to begin with doubts you shall end up in certainties.” It is advice, we feel, consulting firms would do well to listen to. In not a few consulting firms, [...]
Can you cross-sell consulting services?
It really is a billion dollar question. One of the most important strategic choices a consulting firm has to make is whether to specialise or diversify. Conventionally, the decision has been driven by size (small firms specialise, big firms diversify): the point at a firm crosses from the first to the second signals its transition [...]
Advice from the experts
For a while now we’ve been sending out summaries of what we think is the best thought leadership on a given subject. Leafing the newest selection, I was struck by material which, although aimed at client organisations, should also be required reading for consulting firms themselves. In “Managing the global enterprise in today’s bipolar word”, [...]
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 [...]
Five options for growth in 2012
Today sees the launch of our short report, Planning for Growth in an Uncertain Market, which looks at the main five options consulting firms have to grow their businesses and at which segments of the industry are likely to gain or lose ground in 2012. Unquestionably, 2012 is going to be a challenging year, much [...]
The four business models of the future
I wrote at the end of last week about how Dutch consulting firms are in the forefront of pioneering new consulting organisational models and that we expect to see firms in other countries follow suit. Although conventional thinking about how consulting firms are structured has focused on the continuum from generalist to specialist, a more [...]
Where is the growth in growth?
The growth agenda: it’s on the lips of virtually every consulting firm at the moment. Private sector clients, blinking in the macro-economic daylight, want to develop new products and launch them into new markets. They want to know how to innovate, how to recruit the best people from emerging markets and how to re-engage consumers [...]
Business analytics: the next big thing?
Business analytics is, of course, nothing new. Big Four firms and engineering consultancies have long retained small groups of economists to analyse the macro-economic environment; strategy firms have typically taken an analytical approach to assessing – say – the attractiveness of a new market. However, in all such cases, business analytics has been a back-office [...]
Understanding demand, not supply
“The 20th century was about sorting out supply. The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand. The internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers.” This is what a good friend of mine, Gavin Potter, said a year or so ago, interviewed by Wired. [...]
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