Introduction

Hopefully this post will not cause anyone offence.

It’s about how consulting is a great profession that has been neglected and through that has earned a tarnished name. However it remains an amazing craft and I hope this post is a call to action those that still practice and love it to make it great again. Let’s call this my Jerry Maguire moment 😃

I wrote this at the weekend and then shelved it unsure if I should post it. Then today (11th February) I kicked-off a new project with a very sharp client. In 90mins we went from strategy to task level and everything in between. It reminded me about what I love about consulting. Then over lunch my client started to talk about all the bad consultants he’d met (often from MBB, Big 4 etc.) and all the terrible things he’d seen in projects. The killer story was about a leading strategy boutique running an agile training session with his leadership team and showing how you can move post-its along the wall to create a backlog. I mean that’s a 6k-a-day billing consultant. I had to laugh and cry! And I had to post this! Thank you mister client…

“Big consulting” a business model on the brink

Seven years ago, I was standing in the lobby of a major consulting firm looking up at one of the most valued brand logos in the world. Our emblem stood for prestige, high-calibre talent, and a promise to help businesses solve their toughest challenges. It was an organization that had given me immense opportunities, a sense of camaraderie, and a platform to grow professionally.

While I had many positive experiences with this firm, I also felt a nagging sense that there was a need for things to change. There was rising client scrutiny over high fees, an overworked team working tirelessly to justify their bill-out rates, specialized start-ups carving out niches, and an obvious demand for deeper capability-building.

That firm continuously tried and continuously failed to bring real innovation to life (externally or internally). The corporate immune system of the powerful vested in the status-quo were just too much for us to break through.

The thing was that this didn’t appear to be just isolated to our firm but seemed to affect all the top consultancies. The big consulting model itself seemed to be under strain.

If you delve deeper to explore what was going on, then there was and still remains several red flags that the big consulting model is no longer up to the job…

• Utilisation over specialization. Clients bring in consultants for expertise yet the system over-values billable utilisation. This in turn incentivises and promotes those that are a one-size-fits-all, jack-of-all-trades - rather than metre-wide, mile-deep in one domain. The one-size-fits-all approach indiscriminately punishes anyone that doesn’t fit into the machine. During my time I saw several remarkable individuals leave as we didn’t reward / promote - that kind of talent.

(One example was a super-star data analytics consultant I worked with. He had the brain the size of a planet. I was so surprised and yet un-surprised when he left the firm. (He went on to build his own CPG analytics product(s) now serving Heineken, Unilever, Mars among other major companies - what a terrible loss from consulting 😞 )

• Outdated intellectual property. Traditional consulting frameworks once were scarce and magical. Now, they find their main use in management textbooks at universities. In the last decade, clients have been crying out for the new methods and insights found in successful start-ups and tech giants and distributed (relatively freely) from agile & design thinking communities. Today, the examination of the latest AI developments are best available from expert podcasts, vlogs, Substacks, and direct from the whitepapers of start-ups themselves. The innovation in business and best practices are being formed by those on the frontier and heat of battle. Not through the Powerpoint spinning wheel of the mass consulting system.
• Imbalances between value creation vs. value recognition. Clients buy consulting for the value brought by the talent and craftsmanship of individuals; and when they deliver well they even drive the sales of the business. Yet in the big consulting system the out-sized returns go to the partners at the top that may not even be involved in the quality of the work itself.
• Rising newcomers and “alternative” consulting models. Evidence of these broken system dynamics was already emerging in the growth of new consulting alternatives such as boutiques and the open talent ecosystem and over recent years we’ve seen both flourish to challenge established firms especially in domains of specialism.

A moment of choice

In today’s world, it’s easy to beat on consulting and in recent years people even make money through books and newspaper articles on the topic (by the way - the broad sentiment I recognise but especially in the media the critique can be confused and unfair. Consulting is a real craft and to do it well takes years of practice, learning, gaining experience and honing skills.)

Yet seven years ago you could already see all the red flags in the consulting system that we were not respecting our craft. It wasn’t that consulting was inherently evil or bound to fail; it was simply that the market was changing faster than the traditional model was prepared to adapt. Like the clunky phones before the truly smart iPhone, the old model wasn’t built for the new era.

Nevertheless, somehow the old consulting model refuses to budge. There's a vitrol response from those in the old halls of power. And when I made my own choice to attempt some kind of leap in progress and innovation, I heard some such people defensively shouting "charlatan" and "snake oil". I must say that hurt.

(In my lunchtime conversation, my client reflected that some of his peers also play a part in this lack of movement. Cronyism, incompetence and sometimes plain negligence mean that incumbents are sustained with extreme fees on the merit of their logo as they deliver poor quality work. Meanwhile, newcomers are treated with risk-averse cynicism and attacked on their fees -because they lack a logo- as they climb the huge hill of gaining trust and traction where their competitors have had relationships and economies of scale and brand power for several decades.)

The AI ultimatum

So how far will it ever really change? Well with the “emergence” of AI we enter the final chapter.

There’s so much to write about what is happening in AI and I hope I will get another evening very soon to write about it. The moment GPT 3.5 was launched heralded a paradigm shift from what went before. This is not the same as early AI hype (what we now call machine-learning) and it’s not the same as the early bitcoin hype (by the way crypto seems pretty legit by now :)). This is a fundamental wave and I think we all now know it. (Although strangely, we all still walk around like it will have no impact).

For now, let’s say if any of you have tried Deep Seek R1 or o1 Pro then you will understand when I say that I believe it is the final nail in the coffin on old consulting model. No longer will the labour leverage model of big consulting be expected or accepted when for $200 per month you can have much more expertise to hand. We need to pivot our model and transform and I imagine that in every major consulting boardroom they are right now at battle stations (that is if they’ve actually personally tried any of the AI they are selling).

Every cloud has a silver-lining and where one could see danger, I believe we can also see opportunity. A chance to re-invent what consulting means.

• Creating Change: through action not Powerpoints of thinking;
• Building Teams - growing client capabilities not delivering projects;
• Augmenting Intelligence real efficiency and effectiveness through intelligent technology
• Leading courageously - not capitulating to a sponsored status quo.

Ironically, it’s with the advent of AI that rare human skills in consulting will be worth more than ever.

Empathy to listen and diagnose, ethical judgement to decide amidst complex options and courageous leadership to steer us through wild uncertainty.

Lets bring consulting back to that craft it once was and make it great again. 🎉

PS. In case you’re wondering. Yes - I used GPT4o to first write this article. Then I spent two evenings re-writing it. Yes AI isn’t there yet. And it reminds me exactly like working with some of my consultants back in the day 🙂