Management Consulting 2.0
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An inch deeper on some of my observations on the impact of Web 2.0 on law and other professional service firms in yesterday's post on the new Facebook. Herewith a Powerpoint presentation courtesy of Slideshare, on how Web 2.0 is changing management consulting.
The punchlines:
1. Management consultants are used to defining themselves as the kings of strategy
2. The internet has opened up research that was once the domain of the consulting firms
3. The modern consulting model no longer relies on copious research and thick reports but on consulting services where solutions are delivered in real time by:
- Leveraging existing management knowledge
- Developing an interactive engagement
- Valuing discovery in the consulting process, and
- Operating collaboratively with the client, rather than delivering ivory tower, dictatorial advice
In other words: Faster, more hands-on, greater action orientation and by deduction far better likelihood of execution. Probably less expensive too.
How does this relate to the services that you deliver to clients?
September 2008 Newsletter - Killing a Strategy
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Herewith our Edge International September 2008 Law Firm Strategy Newsletter
We have two items for you this month. Firstly, some tips on how to execute (as in kill-off, annihilate and utterly destroy) a firm’s strategy. Secondly, news about and an invitation to participate in an exciting new research project on globalization and its likely impact on the US legal profession.
We hope that you find them both diverting and useful. Feedback, as always, is most welcome.
Our best regards,
Rob Millard & Gerry Riskin
Scenario Planning - The Case of Saudi Arabia
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The World Economic Forum has just published a series of scenarios titled The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the World: Scenarios to 2025. The link gives an overview of the study, a link to the executive summary and a link to a video interview with Nicholas Davis, one of the scenario planning experts involved in the study. (Hat tip to The Bayesian Heresy.)
Scenarios are a vastly underrated tool in the strategist's toolbox. Clifford Chance went through a widely publicized scenario planning exercise in 2005 but beyond that, they are not very widely used in professional service firm strategic planning processes. This is a pity, especially in today's highly dynamic and rapidly evolving markets, and firm's would do well to consider their use more closely.
Scenarios are very useful tools for looking at what may happen. Firms almost always tend to base their strategies on a fixed view, or at least a narrow forecast of what may occur in the future. Their strategic planning processes are also not generally good at considering cause-and-effect more than superficially, or just into the immediate future. As we all know, this raises the danger of unanticipated consequences or a strategy that does not fit with alternative futures that may emerge.
On the other hand, scenario planning really casts the net wide; to explore many different possible futures. Firms can use then use scenarios to test their strategies against this range of alternative futures, some of which they may not even have considered when crafting their strategy.
Scenarios can also make it easier to have uncomfortable discussions about difficult topics. This is because they aim to explore possibilities around those difficult topics, rather than being prescriptive about their solutions. They are really more about exploring the future; not about telling anyone what should or will happen.
Careful: SWOT Analysis can be harmful to your [firm's] health!
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Further to my blog posting earlier this week ago calling for a more sophisticated approach to the tools that firms employ to craft strategy, herewith an article to be published in December this year in the Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences. Titled Neurocognitive Inefficacy of the Strategy Process , it holds back no punches when attacking either Michael Porter's 'Five Forces' for that ubiquitous old faithful, the SWOT analysis. Thanks to Stephanie West-Allen for the pointer! Click the title above for a PDF of the unedited manuscript, or click below for a brief summary courtesy of yours truly.
Here's a 'sound byte' :
"The application of purportedly “rational” tools or techniques or protocols or models or frameworks to the problem of new strategy formation appears overwhelmingly ineffectual. Few, if any, organizations actually obtain new or revised strategy from such efforts. When the genesis of a dramatic change in an organization’s objectives and strategies finally is tracked down, it invariably is the result of an “informal” process, more often than not unrelated to the formal planning effort itself."
Fighting talk, indeed!!! I'm pleased to find yet another person pointing out that the strategic planning emperor has no clothes, though! There is just too much at stake for the firms that we serve for the smoke and mirrors that so often masquerades for a strategy process.
The authors of the paper are Harold E. Klein of the Department of General & Strategic Management at the Fox School of Business and Management at Temple University and Mark D'Esposito who is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Continue Reading
Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure
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Guy Kawasaki has a very thoughtful post on his blog How to Change the World, about a new book by Michael Raynor titled The Strategy Paradox : Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (and what to do about it.)
If you are in any way involved with strategy or strategic planning, then you need to read it. (But then you probably know that because you probably subscribe to Guy's blog, anyway.)
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The 5 "P's" of Strategy
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Henry Mintzberg (pictured above,) Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampell, in their 2005 book Strategy Bites Back, present 5 "P's" as a way to define strategy. Each "P" shines a spotlight on what strategy is / means / encompasses from a different angle, to provide a comprehensive overview that is probably more useful that definitions that try to fit all into a couple of sentences.
The 5 "P's," adjusted where necessary to fit into the professional service firm universe, are as follows:
Continue ReadingThe BCG Growth / Market Share Portfolio Matrix
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This is another posting of the Strategy 101 kind, in this case to introduce another of the basic tools that professional service firm strategists need to have in their toolboxes. This tool was first mentioned on this blog in my previous posting Love Your Dogs?
Only firms that have superior market share that can grow their business and develop the organizational learning capabilities to really capitalize on their experience. Empirical studies by the Harvard Business School in the 1970s first confirmed the basis for this assumption, leading the way to the development of the Boston Consulting Group's (BCG) Growth / Market Share Portfolio Matrix.
In the professional service firm context, the BCG matrix is a tool to determine the attractiveness of a service or practice area, based on the service life cycle and the experience curve. In other words, it provides critical information that strategists need, to help decide where the firm should be focusing resources over the next strategy cycle.
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