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Thought leadership

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Thought leadership in the age of mass-customisation

By ⋅ 14 May 2012 ⋅ Post a comment

The narrower your focus, the bigger your audience: it doesn’t sound right, does it? Accustomed to the idea of mass-media, we assume that material with the broadest appeal will be read by the most people.  But the internet and social media may invert that relationship: because people can pick and choose what they want to [...]

Telling it like it is

By ⋅ 28 January 2012 ⋅ One comment

In the BBC’s The Life Scientific professor and physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, quizzes scientists about their backgrounds and about what spurred them on to success, often in the face of ostensibly insuperable odds.  It would have been very easy for these to be fairly anodyne conversations, but Al-Khalili doesn’t duck the difficult issues, as when he [...]

Advice from the experts

By ⋅ 19 January 2012 ⋅ Post a comment

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”, [...]

The Age of Mass Production – or what the Clangers have to teach us about thought leadership

By ⋅ 19 December 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

“Our thought leadership production process is a well-oil machine.”  It was a throwaway line someone said in early December which has been reverberating around in my head ever since, for several reasons. First off, many consulting firms wouldn’t agree.  For them, producing thought leadership continues to be a struggle to get agreement around which subjects [...]

The questionable benefits of being sociable

By ⋅ 17 October 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Leafing through IBM’s chief marketing officer study, published in the last few days, I was struck by one particular chart which compares the reasons companies think their customers follow them via social media sites and their customers’ actual reasons. Interesting in its own right, it’s also – I’d argue – directly relevant to consulting firms. [...]

Is execution the poor relation of management?

By ⋅ 19 September 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Almost every consulting firm is laying claim to the space that lies somewhere between advice and execution / implementation. Pure advice has been widely discredited by clients frustrated with the number of recommendations from consultants that are never acted on. Pure implementation would take consulting firms into outsourcing’s dangerous, low-margin territory. So most firms, like [...]

Worrying about the corporate silver

By ⋅ 28 March 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

When we measure the quality of thought leadership, we look at four dimensions (tried-and-tested with clients over many years): Appeal: A client has to believe that the material has been written with their sector, almost their individual, needs in mind. Generic thought leadership is likely to be discarded without being read. Differentiation: While relevance may [...]

Five things on our thought leadership wish-list for 2011

By ⋅ 28 February 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Our annual evaluation of the thought leadership produced by the 25 biggest consulting firms in the world revealed that 2010 was not a vintage year. We suspect that unwillingness to invest in what was expected to be a shrinking market for consulting, coupled with the challenge of dealing with new, shorter formats (particularly videos and [...]

Comparing apples and pairs in thought leadership

By ⋅ 11 October 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Having just completed our mid-year evaluation of the thought leadership produced by the world’s largest consulting firms, I’m struck with how unfair a process it is. We use a methodology, developed with clients, that rates material according to its appeal (will it get noticed?), differentiation (will it keep people’s attention by saying something new or [...]

A different way of thinking about gurus

By ⋅ 13 September 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Sex and consulting aren’t natural bedfellows, if that’s the right term to use, but a discussion over dinner with several senior marketing people in the industry suggests that might be about to change. I’m not for a second suggesting that anyone is planning to take diversification to a new level or that we have a [...]

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