By Tom Rodenhhauser, Managing Director, Advisory Services
As we all know, the consulting industry is rife with buzzwords. TQM begat BPR. Lean Supply Chains spawned Innovative Growth. Dilbert popularized the consultant-pinhead characterization, and numerous websites perpetuate the industry's own propensity for puffery by allowing one to select nonsensical phrases and obvious assertions to create pompous proposals.
The result? Consulting is often viewed as a world of Ron Burgundy wannabes: "I have many leather-bound books, and my apartment smells of rich mahogany." This self-grandeur is exacerbated because many business buzzwords popularized by consultants can't be applied to the consulting industry itself. Take "globalization," for example. Certainly the world is interconnected these days. Products produced in one time zone arrive the next day halfway around the world. Transactions occur in nanoseconds with a few keystrokes. Further, social media has created the illusion that our "close personal friends" can encompass hundreds of people.
In other words, globalization is a very real phenomenon in the real world. But specific to the consulting industry, globalization is a concept that contradicts the "singularity of culture" promoted by so many firms.
Now before readers Twitter the efficacy of such a statement, consider the context. Virtually every consulting firm that maintains a presence outside of its home country characterizes itself as "global." Many one-office operations use the term as well to reflect the stature of their Fortune 500 clients.
Kennedy Information tracks many thousands of consultancies. From this vast and ever-changing pool, our research analyzes providers by size and specialty. We further assess their capabilities and identify the strongest providers in any particular segment. We know the majority of these players are multinational in their operations.
But what does global really mean in consulting? A partner told me years ago: "demand for consulting services is practically unlimited because clients are always going to have problems that need solving." Strip away the braggadocio of that statement, and it reveals a simple truth: growing a consultancy does not follow the traditional business dictums of supply and demand. Consultancies that succeed create their own demand. Consultancies that grow to worldwide stature generate demand across multiple fronts for myriad clients.
What's interesting is that many of these global consultancies point to their singular and distinctive culture as fundamental to their growth. Now unlike hard-data attributes, such as revenues or headcount, culture is a fairly ephemeral concept. Truly global firms tout their UN-like professional staff, but at the same time, while heritage is championed among the individuals, these same consultancies promote a purposefully homogeneous face to the marketplace.
Back in the day when Andersen Consulting was dominant, one was "Andersenized" by the firm's rigid and ongoing training for all consulting staff. Much like the U.S. Marine Corps, Andersen deconstructed the individual to build a cohesive unit of interchangeable parts. Marines stormed the enemy's fortified bunker, Andersen challenged the client's entrenched processes.
When it became publicly owned Accenture, the company re-cast its training around technology solutions. The emphasis shifted more to transposable skills, not exchangeable people.
We raise this point because it speaks to the growth prospects for many of the industry's best-known brands. Every global firm is comprised of dozens of different practices and 5 to 10 times that number of offices in far-flung locales. Yet every consulting practice—whether by region, country, service, or client industry—is comprised of individual consultants who work for individual clients.
Seven of the world's largest nine consultancies are privately held partnerships. The very foundation of the term alludes to individuals who "partner" in both philosophy and practice. Yet these partnerships rent multi-thousand-room resorts for their annual meetings. So no matter how fervently these firms champion their unanimity of beliefs, they really operate as a collection of mini nation-states.
So this brings us back to globalization in consulting. Though many try, no one firm can claim superiority across the entire landscape. We recognize the distinctiveness of culture among the global firms. But rather than continue the myth that a singular culture constitutes a global consultancy, we advise clients to measure their consulting providers against another clich
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