Consulting Magazine - March 2014

Each issue, Kennedy Consulting Research & Advisory (KCRA) offers a take on the current state of the consulting profession

Liz DeVito is an Associate Director, HR Consulting at Kennedy Consulting Research & Advisory. For more information, visit Kennedyinfo.com/ consulting.

Consultants are always looking for the next big thing, the innovation that will see clients storming through their gates, bypassing pesky procurement departments, and writing blank checks for the magic mousetrap that whitens and brightens and cleans windows, too. I would like to propose that the next big thing in consulting is not a thing at all, but a “how”, that is, how consulting services are delivered.

The idea emerged as I was researching the consulting market in Asia and realized I was hearing themes from consultants and clients alike that were consistent with what I had been hearing throughout the year on other projects. These themes condense around four trends that appear to be reshaping how consulting is delivered by firms of all sizes—speed, innovation, ecosystem, and strategy.

That they converge in Asia is not surprising. Asia is a diverse and complex market that is rapidly transitioning. There is greater understanding and adoption of consulting in the emerging markets, at the same time that consulting to mature markets is responding to changing demands.

As Robert Zampetti of Towers Watson
put it, “Operating in Asia forces you to
think differently. The cultural and com-
petitive drivers are different, as well as
the pace of change. We have to adapt our
methodologies.”
Take leadership development, as an ex-
ample. In Asia, the Western timetable of
giving a leader three to five years for job
rotations and advancement is collapsed
into one year.

The pressure on consultants to design
and deliver accelerated leadership devel-
opment programs is intense and they have
stepped up to the plate, creating programs
that are later exported successfully to cli-
ents outside of Asia. After all, the need for
speed is a hallmark of doing business in
the digital economy and not limited to a
specific market.

Speed and innovation are driving an increase in ecosystem consulting, in which providers partner with vendors, clients, academia, and others to solve client issues. Leadership development, again, provides a model for how this works. I heard repeatedly that clients do not look to one consulting firm to answer all of their needs, as there are so few that provide the full range of services.

They prefer instead to work with best practice providers across the value chain,

and they also expect these providers to
work together. There are, in fact, consul-
tancies that have embraced this model and
differentiate on their ability to leverage
the ecosystem for their client’s good.
The strategy consulting trend seems
counterintuitive in this context. Speed, in-
novation, and ecosystem consulting are,
after all, largely about implementation
and specialization.
And yet, the message is clear that strat-
egy consulting is a consistent client demand
and increasingly a component of providers’
value propositions across consulting sec-
tors. Strategy is not dead, as some pundits
would have you believe. It’s integrated into
every aspect of consulting engagements.

These forces are redirecting attention from the “things” that consultants provide—things that can so easily be copied, commoditized, and assetized—to how services are delivered in a high-speed, hypercompetitive world.