By Joseph Kornik
Here was a typical day in mid-February for myself and a few others tasked with the sometimes difficult, always inspiring, job of selecting the 2014 Top 25 Consultants: Read a few dozen nominations; take a break.
Read a few dozen more; take a break.
Read, a few dozen more. Repeat this process for several days in a row. Take notes. Gather your thoughts. Discuss with others. Convene and start narrowing down the selections to the Top 100,… the Top 75, the Top 50, the Top 40, the Top 30. And narrowing from 30 to 25 might be more difficult than getting to 100 from 400, but that's the way this goes.
Of course, all that nomination reading has its advantages. For one, it's refreshing to see in black and white the impact that consultants are having day after day with clients. It really puts into perspective the power of the profession to impact business in a very profound way.
But here's the frustrating part. There's too much of it—most of it actually, that I can not share with you, or anyone other than the selection committee. And that's a shame. It's like leaving the most powerful parts of the film on the cutting room floor. It's Psycho without the shower or Titanic without the iceberg. Well, maybe not exactly, but you get the idea. Even when clients nominate consultants for the award, the great majority of the time we can't use the client, or the anecdote, or the result.
Here's what we can tell you. The Top 25 Consultants articles can be found in a special, 36-page section beginning on page 10. Even without all the specific detail, there are powerful stories to tell. Perhaps more telling is what we didn't see: belt-tightening, layoffs, a lack of recruiting, drastic cost cutting measures, retrenching, and a paralyzing fear of investing.
Firms, for sure, are still being ultra cautious as they probably should be. But clients, it appears, are back in the game in a big way. There's much work to be done, and we've got just the folks to do it. Twenty-five of them, to be exact.
Joseph Kornik
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
jkornik@consultingmag.com
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