Jak cię złapią, to znaczy, że oszukiwałeś. Jak nie, to znaczy, że posłużyłeś się odpowiednią taktyką.
And thirdly, many of the products we had been selling, like Business Process Reengineering, Balanced Scorecard and Business Transformation had begun to lose more than a little of their lustre. However, there were now hundreds of thousands of management consultants who needed a place to bill their time or else they were out of a job and their bosses would miss their bonus targets. Basically, we moved into a position where there were probably too many consultants now chasing too little business. Unlike the growing market we had enjoyed for the last twenty years or more, the new conditions meant that the pressure on us to sell warm bodies became enormous, irrespective of whether our clients actually had a need for consultancy help or not. Naturally this led to a decline in standards of work and a decline in the value provided by consultancies to their clients – if you manage, for example, to sell a client a million dollar project they don’t need, however successful the project, you’re not going to provide much value by delivering it. For some consultancies just surviving started to become an issue. W H Y I T U S U A L L Y E N D S I N T E A R S Having seen so many management consultancies, both from the outside and the inside at all stages of their development, you start to see a pattern emerging of how consultancies are formed, grow and then often decline. There are times when you can expect a consultancy to give you true dedication and great work and others when you should be prepared to be taken to the cleaners time and time again, if you’re not extremely careful. There are probably three main driving forces behind the formation of most management consultancies: 114 1. Get rich quick 2. Jump on the band-wagon 3. New service offering 1. GET RICH QUICK There are consultancies that are born when their founder just steals a client or two from his previous employer. Usually they also steal a few consultants and electronic copies of all their previous employer’s training materials to assist their start-up. They then regurgitate their previous employer’s approach without the slightest change or innovation. Sometimes, as we saw with The Plagiarists (Chapter 3 Baby Butchers – cost-cutting continued) they even steal client reference letters and photocopy them on to their own company paper. The founder(s) then becomes disgustingly and undeservedly rich, without having created anything new or having had a single idea of their own – apart from how to rapidly inflate their own bank balance. If one of these consultancies comes knocking at your door, then beware. They were conceived from stealing someone else’s ideas. They have become rich from endlessly reapplying a well-worn approach created by someone else. Unless you are absolutely sure that you want to buy second or third hand ideas mechanically reapplied with only the slightest customisation to your unique organisational situation – then don’t go near these consultancies. They will serve you badly because they only know how to do one or two things and those things are not even new or original, they are borrowed or stolen from someone else. Like The Butchers, they may do them well. But it is unlikely to be exactly what you really need. And in these consultancies, with their tried and tested business model for making money, innovation and creative thinking about a client’s business issues are generally not encouraged. Only very weak managers employ consultants who just regurgitate and mechanically implement ideas that were becoming old and stale even as the consultancies were first being formed. Fortunately for such consultancies, there are many very weak managers in the world. 2. JUMP ON THE BANDW AGON Every few years, there comes a new management fad which sells so well that a huge market is created for people who claim to be able to supply something that looks like, tastes like or slightly smells like the original version. Nature abhors a vacuum. And there’s nothing like an enormous unsatisfied market in something our clients don’t understand to fuel the formation of a myriad of new management consultancies and boost extraordinarily rapid growth for any incumbents fast enough on their feet to jump in front of the new parade. The last big seller was ‘e-business’ when loads of self -serving experts told us that all organisations would suddenly do most of their business over the Internet. Those, which didn’t adapt, the gurus threatened, would die. Billions were spent on organisations becoming ‘e-enabled’. There was a feeding frenzy for management consultants. Loads of new ones appeared with trendy names which reflected how amazingly different they were to the boring and greedy major players. And the major players desperately scrambled to develop their own e-offering. Salaries for anyone who could spell the word ‘Internet’ soared and people became multi-millionaires overnight. Then the bubble burst, Internet company stocks collapsed and bankruptcies were widespread amongst the fashionable new consultancies with the trendy names. Meanwhile most of the majors, who had failed dismally 115 to exploit the e-wave, breathed a collective sigh of relief as their new competition was decimated and frightened clients came running back to safer pairs of hands. Before that, there was the Business Process Reengineering (BPR) craze. However, whereas e-business led to the rise and fall of many new consultancies, BPR led to the explosive growth of many previously fringe players in the consultancy market. For years the major accountancies had been prevented from growing due to a finite number of organisations to audit. Many had envied the huge fees and seemingly unlimited growth of management consultancies. So to get their part of the consultancy cake, most of the larger accountancies had set up management consulting divisions. But these lacked a compelling product to sell and so tended to be small compared to their auditing business. This usually left the consulting partners as very much barely tolerated newcomers and clearly second-class citizens, always under the thumb of the well-established audit partners. BPR
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