IBM comes out every other year with its highly regarded survey of CEOs. The biennial effort codifies chief executives' current concerns and allows them to postulate on future implications.
Big Blue's 2012 survey and analysis is actually a better-evolved model of similar research conducted by PwC (then PricewaterhouseCoopers) consulting prior to IBM's acquisition of that business more than 10 years ago. And even earlier, when PwC was PriceWaterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand, PW, in particular, regularly plumbed CEOs' psyche and published the findings.
My point: consultancies of all stripes continually probe CEO's minds to lay the foundation for future services. Wrapping academic rigor around such activities lends an air of authority for resulting observations.
Now having worked with academia in my past and current life, I appreciate that scientific methods are necessary to prove the obvious. So I don't roll my eyes when some research study finds that overeating is unhealthy. But with research that drives consulting services, there can be a few head-scratching moments.
For example, one of IBM's major findings: for the first time since IBM launched these biennial studies in 2004, CEOs identified "technology" as the most important of nine external forces impacting their organizations (it was sixth in 2004). This fit with IBM's overall 2012 theme of "Embracing Connectedness."
Another finding from the IBM study bolsters this point. Today, CEOs consider "social media" a marginally important mechanism for engaging with customers (second- to-last ahead of traditional media). Yet in 3 to 5 years, CEOs believe social media will be the second-most important mechanism for engaging with customers, ranking just behind face-to-face meetings.
The previous four IBM CEO Surveys provided similar head-snapping distillations: from "Responsiveness is a Key Competency" in 2004; to "Capitalizing on Complexity" two years ago. These earlier surveys posited that companies' could/should hone inward processes to seize opportunities created by external forces. This time around, I—along with many CEOs apparently—believe that "connectedness" and "technology" have totally unpredictable implications.
I'm not begrudging IBM for licking CEOs fingers and holding them up to the wind. In fact, IBM's research forces CEOs to look a bit further out than the next quarter.
It's both valuable and necessary. The consulting industry usually reacts to such revelations of corporate chaos and confusion with a bevy of new offerings. Viewed one way, consultants are steadying hands on the tiller, helping guide SS Corporate Tanker through choppy seas. From a cynic's standpoint, consultants can be perceived as opportunists who bring aboard myriad deckhands and churn the waters.
I was reminded of the latter when Deloitte unveiled its new Deloitte Digital offering last month. The holistic approach wraps Deloitte's lifecycle of digital services under one umbrella. It makes perfect sense … but at first blush, it only makes sense to those clients who can purchase complete design-engineer-build-support services.
While Deloitte Digital can and will unbundle services to address down-market clients, Deloitte must create "big" solutions to address overwhelming problems, and grow its own business.
It used to be the lag between emerging client concerns afforded consultancies time to fine-tune consulting opportunities. Nowadays, speed-of-change and extreme variability means both consultants and clients are wading into the unknown hand-in-hand. The summary effect is that consultants probably share the same view as CEOs: We don't know what we don't know… but we know it's important.
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