| Consultants News, Consulting
Ten years ago at this time, the financial meltdown started sucking the consulting industry down a vortex from which it took almost four years to recover. The industry has been strong for the last half-decade and the general consensus is that consulting’s boat has risen with the economic tide. The Wall Street Journal reported this week on the Big 4’s collective earnings reports by observing: “The 10.4% combined revenue growth was the firms’ strongest since at least the 2008 financial crisis.”
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| Consultants News, Consulting
Branding consulting firms has always been a tricky proposition. The industry’s stalwarts all followed the values-driven underpinnings of their founders. McKinsey, Bowers, Kearney, Henderson, Bain were the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Carnegies of consulting.
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| Consultants News, Consulting
Three seemingly unrelated events within the consulting world add credence to the industry’s altering landscape.
First, LEK, the highly respected strategy boutique, filed its inaugural annual report, which detailed its restructuring from a partnership into a corporate group. The rationale was “based on a desire to grow and develop the business through greater investment.” Translation: partners’ own money probably couldn’t underwrite the business enough to keep pace with larger players.
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| Consultants News, Consulting
A recent Financial Times article compared consultants to rats -- the hypothesis being that both are plentiful and both are able to sniff out plentiful food sources.
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| Consultants News, Consulting
“Fee fungibility” is a term I’ve used quite often to describe how management consultants approach pricing. Yes, all firms have rate cards that show hourly/daily rates by various staff levels. Those rate sheets hark back to a simpler time, when consulting’s time-and-materials approach resembled genteel country lawyers or green-shaded accountants.
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| Consultants News, Consulting
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us, and consulting firms are no exception in their need to adapt. The World Economic Forum said that, “The Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.”
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| Consultants News, Consulting
Henry Winkler’s recent Emmy win (finally!) reminded me of his contribution to our modern lexicon. It was as star of the seminal TV show Happy Days some 40 ago when Winkler’s character, Arthur “the Fonz” Fonzarelli, jumped over a shark on water skis.
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| Consultants News, Consulting
I had the chance to address graduate students earlier this week on careers in consulting. These forums are always one of the more enjoyable parts of my job, primarily because I’m interacting with newcomers who have yet to be jaded by consulting’s harsher realities.
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| Consultants News, Consulting
Ask consultants about their “industry” and you’re often corrected that management consulting is a “profession.” Much like doctors, scientists, and the clergy, many career consultants view their endeavor as a calling rather than a job.
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| Consultants News, Consulting
Although it's a cyclical industry, the state of the consulting market seems unusually positive these days. The bullishness on growth seems directly connected to the plethora of buzzwords driving change. Digital … Block-chain … Analytics … every utterance in every market points to consultants as client-whisperers — sage advisors who can make sense out of these chaos-inducing disruptors.
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