Stuart Jackson, recently named President of North America for L.E.K. Consulting, has been with the firm for 25 years, and watched it grow from a young yet capable firm brimming with confidence to a proven entity with 20 offices around the world. L.E.K. is focused on helping clients find something that has eluded even successful companies: growth. As the world gets, in Jackson's words, "Tougher", and competition becomes more fierce, companies that are able to take advantage of new growth opportunities will be the most successful. The question Jackson and the rest of L.E.K. seek to answer for their clients is, how do you evolve a business and continue to grow in a world that is changing and becoming tougher? Consulting One on One sat down with Jackson to discuss the firm, his role and marketplace.
Consulting: What has been keeping you busy so far in your new role?
Jackson: The first priority has been keeping everything that's working well continuing to work well. We've got a strong head of steam and have been gaining market share over the last 10 years. We've got a strong governance system with a very engaged set of partners, have been doing very well financially in terms of revenue growth and strong operating performance. Let's keep it working, don't mess it up. Having said that there are some things we can do better, make sure we've got best-in-class systems and infrastructure. We just moved to new offices in New York and Boston in the last three months, which was a major upgrade from the infrastructure we had before, we're rolling out new systems in terms of mobile computing and more access to everything everywhere. I think we've made good progress there we've still got work to do to get it even better.
Consulting: How is 2012 so far shaping up for the firm and what are some of the major growth areas?
Jackson: This year is shaping up to be a pretty good one. January was OK, but February through April are looking extremely strong. I think April was our best April on record, so we're feeling pretty positive. I think the business community and the economy is facing challenges, but our mix of business is more oriented toward helping companies grow rather than helping the existing business. We do some of that but the weight of our work is much more around helping to grow the top line, find new growth opportunities, new sources of growth, finding resources of growth internationally, trying to expand brands into new applications and customer groups. I think that's fundamentally what a lot of organizations are struggling with. I think you can look at some of the recent data, many corporations are doing very well, but what they're struggling with is finding growth. Many very successful companies are looking at single-digit or even low single-digit growth, particularly in the U.S. and European operations, and that's not enough to satisfy the shareholders so they're looking for help to drive growth to their business.
Consulting: What are some of the other challenges and opportunities facing the industry?
Jackson: The world constantly gets more demanding. That's just a natural fact of life. I was working with a major pharmaceutical company that is looking at launching a number of cancer drugs in development. In order to succeed in that you either have to find ways to improve the success rate for the drugs that you're taking through development, or find ways to fail things early, because if something fails in the early stages, it costs a lot less in investment than if it fails in the later stages. You have to get better about spotting winners. So the company says, "Does this mean we shouldn't invest in oncology drugs, that it's a bad investment?" I said, of course not, because the projection is that the world will probably spend between 50 to 100 percent more on oncology drugs 10 years from now than it does today, so yes, it will be more competitive.
The market's growing, it just means you've got to get better and smarter. If you said to Apple 10 years ago, "In order to have any kind of computing product it's going to have to be twice as efficient and do three times as much for half the price, that's going to be tough so give up on the computing business", it wouldn't make any sense. The world is getting tougher, some parts of the economy are used to that, semiconductor and high tech industry is used to the fact that things have to be that much better this year than last year or two years ago. I think other sectors of the economy—healthcare for example—hasn't had to have quite that discipline. That's something they're going to have to grapple with, but that's not to say it's not an area where a lot of organizations can make a lot of money and many firms can be extremely successful.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.