Editor's Note: Replacing Strategy's Vacuum

When Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen is asked whether the business practices of top management consultancies are today vulnerable to smaller innovative rivals, he can't resist talking about vacuum tubes.

Back in the late 1950s, Christensen explains, a portable TV without vacuum tubes existed only in one's imagination. In an effort to better size up the market for such a product, General Electric enlisted Arthur D. Little to complete an intensive data-driven study involving thousands of consumer interviews. The painstaking study would ultimately reveal little demand for such a product. A month after ADL shared its findings with GE, Sony introduced its own solid-state (no vacuum tubes) portable to the U.S. market, and later sold 4 million units in the first year. Or so the professor's anecdote goes.

Chistensen's point is clear: The data-driven analytical approach to strategy that has long been the bedrock of consulting is of little value when it comes to measuring yet-to-be-established businesses. The implications of strategy's alleged shortcoming grow in magnitude when you consider that this is an age when established business models are now beset by armies of untested digital upstarts.

It is also an age when clients, fearful of their rivals' fast-developing e-business capabilities, have little patience for six-month strategy studies. It is just this fear that led us to select a strategy-related cover story for this, our fifth issue of Consulting.

Our intention, at first, was to look at how growing demand for e-business solutions was impacting the strategy practices of major firms. However, our reporting quickly revealed that one factor more than any other was responsible for driving change: speed. We found that a growing demand for speed in the delivery of strategy offerings is now forcing even the most data-driven firms to enhance their approaches.

In our cover feature entitled "The Strategist's Dilemma," we ask a mix of traditional strategy, Big Five, and New Age digital consultancies to explain how strategy is changing and what career opportunities those changes may trigger for you.

As in every issue of Consulting, our selection of feature articles includes a variety of work/life topics. For those of you who would never consider a flextime work arrangement, our article examining the lives of flextime consultants deserves a careful read. In her article "Flextime Goes Real-time," Consulting associate editor Mina Landriscina reveals how the consulting profession is far from being a passive participant in the movement toward innovative flextime work arrangements.

Also in this issue, you'll learn how to better manage your performance gaps, and receive some brash advice on how to polish up your image.

And finally, for those of you interested in examining further the dilemma strategists now face in the Digital Age, you'll enjoy reading our exclusive interview with Professor Christensen. Forty years after ADL delivered its data-rich study to GE, it's time to replace strategy's vacuum tubes with the speedier covert transistors of the Digital Age. And stand back.