Editor's Note: The Unbearable Lightness of Influence

In the world of management consulting, few words garner as great an emotional response as the word "influence."
It is at once everything a consultant desires and fears most. Desires, because, like most professionals, consultants equate influence with success; fears, because of the threat it may pose to the fragile trust clients have placed in their consultant's advice — a trust that continues to be tested as technology companies seek to draw consultants closer and leverage their influence with clients.
While influence has always occupied some portion of the profession's outlying character, never before has the consulting community felt as secure with its role as influencer than it does today. And whether you perceive the role of influencer as below or above the profession's "true calling," the growing acceptance of its double life reveals just how rapidly the nature of consulting is changing.
Today, when Andersen Consulting is identified as a client's trusted advisor, it's equally pleased to have Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer view it as an influencer. Two identities, one consultancy, and no small leap for the profession.
Not unlike the cultural leg irons that once held McKinsey and others from taking equity in clients, the stigma attached to being influential is beginning to unlock, opening the door to greater opportunities as well as risks.
Consulting's changing nature is largely due to overlapping industries, explains New Economy pundit Stan Davis in an exclusive Consulting interview in this issue. Executive search, venture capital, and application technology companies are all now blending with consulting, according to Davis, who views the overlap as a consolidation of related industries. The resemblance between the profession's consulting-for-equity strategies and those belonging to the world of venture funding is, perhaps, the most obvious outgrowth of this blending. Consultants openly leveraging their influence over Fortune 1000 technology purchases is another.
Today, numerous consultants are aggressively marketing their influence to technology vendors as they look to add technology products and build portfolios around which to wrap their consulting services. As the profession's growing influence opens new doors, so too will it raise new ethical issues.
Speaking of ethics, in this issue we introduce The Demon's Den, a new column in which you can share your career-related ethical dilemmas and receive some brash advice from the Demon himself, Lewis Pinault. Those of you familiar with Lewis may find him an odd choice to author our ethics column. As the author of the recently published Consulting Demons — Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting, Pinault has come under attack by certain consultants who believe the confessional may have damaged the reputation of the profession.
In self-defense, Pinault tells us that the book's tagline was really the work of overzealous marketers, and that demons aren't really horned creatures.
In fact, according to Greek mythology, demons are supernatural beings between gods and men. Upon greater reflection, we came to the consensus that no matter how you define it, any demon capable of triggering discussion around professional ethics is invited to occupy our den.