Firm Snapshot: Monitor Networks

Mobilizing Human Capital

Employees: 10
Headquarters: Cambridge, MA

Late last year, Chris Meyer gave himself a hefty goal: To describe his new firm's mission using 10 percent less time with each successive month. For Meyer, such a goal is hardly new because as one of the consulting world's regaled big thinkers, the seasoned consultant has spent the balance of his career chipping away at excess verbiage — the kind that clings to new ideas and prevents them from taking flight.

"The bad news is that I have succeeded — and it's still too long," says Meyer, who is today CEO of Monitor Networks, one of a number of distinct firms that belong to the Monitor Group's family of "action companies." For its part, Monitor appears to be less a parent company than it is a new home or perhaps community for Meyer's small clan of consulting professionals to inhabit. And it's doubtful that Meyer could have come upon more suitable surroundings than those of Monitor Group — a family of professional services linked by shared ownership and values and the fruits of collective wisdom. It's just such wisdom that Monitor Networks now aspires to tap into on a scale many times larger than Monitor's family tree. "One of the big opportunities, we believe, is to be good at the process of bringing to bear talent that doesn't work for Monitor or its clients," says Meyer, who suggests that true innovation or new thinking advances best from experienced, diverse, creative teams. "You don't want a group of people all working for the same firm because it reduces their collective creativity," he says, while touting the creation of teams and design boards as one of his firm's primary client offerings. Made up of outside experienced talent, the creative boards can add deep expertise as well as experienced business skepticism, says Meyer, whose consulting career spans multiple consulting firms and books, including Blur (Harvard Business School Press,1998) and Future Wealth (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), both co-authored with Stan Davis. Before establishing Monitor Networks, Meyer was the director of Ernst & Young's Center of Business Innovation in Cambridge, MA, a research unit that first introduced the concept of applied innovation to many of E&Y's consulting clients. At Monitor Networks, Meyer now hopes to apply innovation beyond his firm's immediate client work. A grand mission appears to have already taken shape, and the innovation Monitor Networks now seeks to bring forth stands to benefit not just any one client, but the business world at large. To better illuminate his firm's goals, Meyer borrows a quote from Harvard Business School professor William Sahlman, who has frequently stated: "The greatest innovation of the Industrial Revolution was limited liability, because that mobilized the flow of capital." Likewise, Monitor Networks is now determined to do what it takes to mobilize the flow of human capital, and nowhere is this innovation more welcome, Meyer contends, than inside today's $200 billion consulting marketplace, where corporate clients routinely open their wallets for objective advice and deep expertise.

In the world of Monitor Networks, such innovation requires harnessing the power of networks. "We think that networks can make everything better, faster, and cheaper, much in the same way computers have," explains Meyer, as he begins a shorthand description of what his firm calls WorkNets. However, far from anything the consulting world has seen thus far, Monitor Networks aspires to create an online forum capable of sourcing and deploying world-class talent from the far reaches of the world.

According to Meyer, the profession's future talent model has already been made visible by multiple innovations already at work on the Web, not the least of which is currently being deployed by InnoCentive, a Web-based community that has succeeded in matching top scientists to R&D challenges. Monitor Networks now aspires to bring forth similar innovation through which a network of top consultants could address client challenges.

"I think that Chris is on the right track. It makes a whole lot of sense. The extended network is where you're going to have a greater diversity of ideas, and it can be self-correcting — plus, it's a model where you can involve your customer," says John Clippinger, senior fellow, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at Harvard Law School. Having been engaged in the design of network-based organizations, Clippinger believes that the first step in creating a talent network for consultants involves leadership.

"We saw the first instance of this in eBay, where you had someone who was a community leader who said, 'Okay, I take ownership of forming this group.' They then established a reputation system for community members, as well as a sanctioning system, where people sort of identified themselves as power users and developed reputations," says Clippinger, whose work at Harvard's Berkman Center recently led the center to become part of an initiative (along with IBM and Novell) to develop software for "user-centric identity management." "When you think of consulting and highly specialized expertise, this takes identity management to a new level," Clippinger adds. He shares Meyer's view that the success of human networks or communities on the Web is largely tied to individual transparency, trust, and reputation.

"Networks are like computers in that they need applications software or a design of how to use them to be productive, and to do this we begin with the work and not the technology," says Meyer, who says that to date, people have too often begun with the Web and quickly abandoned it because it fails to perform useful work. WorkNets, according to Meyer, are designed first with the work in mind, a notion that Monitor Network echoes with the word-of-mouth slogan, "Five steps to designing a human network to do your job."

The firm's most ambitious WorkNet is being completed in collaboration with The Financial Times. Dubbed Future Monitor, the WorkNet is tasked with populating a global community of seasoned talent and teeing up what Meyer calls a rolling two-year forecast. This past March, Future Monitor launched its maiden voyage on the Web after inviting 10,000 community member prospects to join a daylong discussion.

As the community's de facto leader, Meyer never loses sight of his first order of business. "We're building a firm here that builds on the consulting content to build many value-adding businesses around it," he says — and then suddenly falls silent, perhaps to chip away at another 10 percent.