Steve Shu's Blog

A Perspective On Client Facilitation Skills

When I first started as a management consultant back at Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath, one of the hardest things for me to grasp was the concept of "client facilitation". Many of the consultants I knew where eager to apply standard MBA frameworks like Five Forces (for competitive and profitability analysis), NPV and financial analysis tool, statistical regression, and the marketing 3Cs/STP/4Ps, but few talked about client facilitation in explicit terms.

In my mind, client facilitation refers to the processes (and skills) that a consultant uses to get a client organization to critical decision points, deep understanding, and committment to move forward or redirect.

A master of client facilitation is a person that can:

• Master analysis skills of the trade: use top-down logical reasoning, use many analytical frameworks, work analyses from multiple directions
• Communicate well: whether it be via face-to-face conversation, writing, phone, or instant messaging (yikes)
• Teach and frame things properly: because interactions with parties may be varied, quick and because parties may have varying levels of knowledge, one must be able to ramp-up conversation levels quickly and put them in the proper context
• Recognize where the organization is at and how decisions are made: is the marketing department behind in their understanding? who does the CEO look to as his/her right hand? if so, what are the steps to getting the right hand on-board or up-to-speed? how do we get things to tip? can we get there in one step or will it take two steps?
• Lead people *without formal authority*: can you educate people, empathize with the organization, get the organization to trust you, and pave a vision and/or outline a set of tradeoffs with such clarity that motion must happen?

In my opinion, the last skill is probably the most important aspect to master regarding client facilitation. I daresay it is the essence of client facilitation, but I am pretty damn close to it. Client facilitation skills are specialized leadership skills which are all about leading people without formally being in charge.

Update 2/20/08: Gautam Ghosh points me to one of his posts that does an excellent job of discriminating between other types of "consulting" and "facilitative consulting". Again, this topic is not one that I've seen many people write about outside of more terse, academically-oriented publications. That said, the subject of facilitation is a very, very important aspect of management consuting and in my mind applies to more than 90% (just to pull a number out of the air) of the engagements I have ever been on or run.

The Kellogg Post MBA Program

I just ran across Kellogg's Post MBA Program, which is targeted at people that have MBAs that have aged more than ten years. This is an interesting market to target, and not one that I've seen before.

A more detailed curricula is outlined in their brochure, which is prefaced by text including the following:

The curriculum for the Kellogg Post-MBA Program has been created for executives who already have earned an MBA degree and want to gain a fresh perspective on leadership. The first two weeks of the program address a broad range of recent management developments such as globalization, hyper-competition, outsourcing, the shift to a knowledge-based economy, the growth of innovative financial instruments, the appearance of truly global capital markets, distributed information processing capabilities, and new communications technologies. Five months later, participants return for a leadership week that focuses on developing one’s own personal leadership capacity while also equipping people to lead change in today’s complex environment.

What is interesting to me is the characterization of recent developments. As time passes and if people don't adapt, it can be easy for workers to get stuck in old ways, whether that be having historical prejudices, using traditional management styles, or carrying about old conceptual models on how things work.

The spirit of the Kellogg program seems good. It is great to reflect on how things have changed over the years and how one needs to adapt continuously.

Of course seeing the first curriculum item of "The Sarbanes-Oxley Act" nearly made me pass out ...

Videos That Make Me Smile

Here Comes Another Bubble (for the entrepreneurial startup types)

Evolution of Dance (I wish I could dance like this)

Interesting Post On Whether Selling Is Practicing One's Profession

Ford Harding has an interesting post entitled, "Is Selling Practicing Your Profession?" He takes the side of the argument that those who sell (e.g., partners in professional services firms, senior engineers) are indeed practicing their profession. But there are those that may argue (e.g., in the case of an engineer) that such and such a person is no longer an engineer because he or she now sells.

I tend to agree with the spirit of Ford's argument - that those who sell are practicing their profession. In management consulting firms, it may be more obvious in some of the small- to mid-sized firms where consultants get involved in sales processes as early as the manager-level (this is in contrast to principals and partners I've interviewed at some of the big, well-known firms where sales experience is very limited to partner-levels). In management consulting, the product is complex, and one really has to understand all aspects in order to sell. One needs to understand the methodologies that can be used, the importance of engagement structure, the value propositions, all the potential variations of situations, the client organization and capability to change, potential pitfalls, what's going on in the industry, etc. The best people in selling consulting engagements are those that have been consultants, done many engagements, currently involved in engagements, and understand when and why a client should or should not use a consultant.

That said, I have found that many people have a hard time shifting gears from delivering engagements to selling engagements. For example during the sales process, consultants newer to sales will want to ask about a lot of details, in effect trying to solve the client's problem during the presales process. But the purpose of the presales process is to establish credibility and rapport, identify the problems to be solved, create the link between the problem and the consulting engagement that will solve the problem, and sell the engagement. The presales process is not about solving the customer's problem in a couple of meeting sessions. Granted it is important to offer perspectives, opinions, industry data, case studies, etc. during presales meetings, but those that have spent lots of time in delivery and little time in sales can lose sight of where one is in the sales process with a customer prospect and what questions absolutely need to be answered for the consultant to propose a scope of work and engagement structure.

Shifting focus from a delivery role to a sales role takes work. I never really appreciated the investment required until having to step into a sales role out of necessity in a startup. Of all of the sales books and sites I've seen and read, Ford Harding's blog and books are some of the best things to check out if you are looking at professional services sales.

Illusion

A wild illusion. The spinning silhouette mostly starts up clockwise for me.

Update (10/14/07): Lots of comments over here at Marginal Revolution. There is a reference to left brain versus right brain dominance, etc., but I'm not too sure ... I like the comment about the person that tried filming it backwards ... then when played backwards, the person still saw things going in the same direction.  :)

For My Diary: eBay Impairs Its Skype And Pays Founders

Close to two years ago eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion. Today I read the news that the synergies are not playing out (surprise, surprise) and eBay will take charges of $1.4 billion, most of which is attributed to the acquisition writedown. From Bloomberg.com:

EBay, acknowledging that Skype hasn't performed as expected since acquiring it for $2.6 billion in October 2005, said in a statement today that it will write down the value of Skype by $900 million in the third quarter, as well as take an additional charge of $533 million to pay former shareholders under a provision of the takeover agreement.

To put things in some perspective though, Skype's second quarter revenue is at $90 million. If you read through my past notes, 2004 revenue was $7M and 2005 revenue was projected (near time of acquisition) to be $60M+.

The Internet serves as a great record for these case studies. It it interesting to read some of stuff bloggers wrote two years ago about this deal. And bloggers like Paul Kedrosky (who seems to tip that the impairment may not be enough) and Om Malik are writing again today.

To digress a bit, I can imagine the discussions that are going on about whether the strategy was flawed or whether there was a failure to execute. I don't know what the case was here, but I can almost hear chanting from my past colleagues and mentors that there was a failure to execute. Seems like execution failures are blamed more often than strategic failures (for better or worse).

Delaying Decisions As Opposed To Being Indecisive

My family's vacation was marked by an incident that led to my first 911 call in my life. I have reflected upon this incident for many days with a mixture of thankfulness for the safety of my family  (and others on the boat) and personal anguish that I could not have done more.

We were on a whale watching cruise miles off the coast of Monterey with about 40 other people on a 50-foot some boat. On the return trip back to shore, there was a malfunction that caused the exhaust pipes and roof to catch on fire. The engine was cut by the captain as it seemed it might have been a driver for the fire coming out of the exhaust. Life boats were on top of the cabin on fire. Life preservers were all in the cabin on fire (with the exception of the two preservers my two kids were wearing who had put some on at the beginning of the trip). All the fire extinguishers were spent quickly, and the flames just got worse as time passed. Shore seemed to be a long ways away, but at least we were not out 30+ miles (I'm guessing) from where we started. There were very few boats that we could see, and there was a lot of smoke coming off our boat. A 911 call was made from my mobile phone, and I handed the phone to the naturalist on the boat who was (potentially) better equipped to identify our location and condition. A number of people were panicking, and many gathered in the very back of the boat to distance themselves as much as possible from the fire and smoke. Things did not look good by any measure.

I had been in the water a few days before. The temperature was not too discernible from ice water from my perspective. I had seen seals, so I was hoping that there were not any sharks in the water.

A question raced through my mind a number of times. Was the situation bad enough that I should I pitch my kids into the water? Then there were intervening questions entering my mind ... what happens if something explodes before I make a decision? The boat is rocking pretty violently ... can I actually pitch them far enough from the boat that they won't get walloped by the swaying boat? Would they survive long enough in the cold water? The questions going through my mind were endless.

I chose to delay my decision to throw them into the water. (After the trip, I realized my wife had the same thoughts going through her mind)

The fire continued to spread. Eventually the life boats were released. No sign of the Coast Guard. A small boat came alongside and threw us two fire extinguishers. The other boat was too small to take many people, and very soon the new extinguishers were exhausted. Smoke got worse. Maybe five minutes passed.

What to do?

At some point, the captain decided to restart the engine. Though I didn't speak with her after the trip, I presume that she decided our chances were better if we tried to gun it to shore (even though speeding up the engine could have increased the fire). We gunned it towards the nearest point on shore. The increased exhaust may have served to cut some of the flames, but who knows.

We made it to shore to be greeted by the fire department and the local news (the incident was the lead story on the news that day and made the front page of the paper the next day). Coast Guard arrived 10-20 minutes later. Everyone was safe. No one needed to go into the drink.

Did I make the right decision to delay throwing my kids in the water? Was I indecisive? Did the captain make the right decision to take command and gun it to shore?

In my opinion, the captain made the right choice. We were out of options to put out the fire, and it was not clear that we were going to get any help in the near term.

As for whether I should have delayed my decision to throw my kids in the water, I am still at odds with that. True they are safe, and the direct threat at the time may not have been imminent, but in reality, I am a layman about boats, and the threat could have been imminent for all I knew. But delaying the decision to throw them in the water allowed me time to gather additional information, such as whether some other boat might come to our aid, whether the fire was spreading, or whether we would get feedback from the crew about our distress calls.

In numerous business settings, I have found that delaying decisions can be beneficial, more often in cases when one is trying to gather additional information that will make subsequent decisions more informed and definitive (e.g., you should posture yourself as ready to make a decision once information comes in as opposed to just being indecisive). Sometimes this can be counterintuitive to those in the business world, where things seem to be driven by a culture of being decisive and making decisions with whatever information is on hand.

University of Chicago MBA Applicants Must Submit Powerpoint Charts

From an article at OrlandoSentinel.com:

At business meetings the world over, PowerPoint-style presentations are often met with yawns and glazed eyes.

At one of the world's top business schools, though, such slide shows are an entrance requirement. In a first, the University of Chicago will begin requiring prospective students to submit four pages of PowerPoint-like slides with their applications this fall.

Why I Dislike Microsoft Project for Management Consulting

Sort of as a follow-on to the post about project management and b-schools, I thought that I would post something (a bit one-sided) about the use of Microsoft Project in management consulting projects. I dislike the tool and sometimes even discourage the use of the tool by consultants running projects. Here's some reasons why:

1. While project management is a function that moves things ahead, Microsoft Project as a tool can create barriers to communication. For the average user, there's generally not enough flexibility to do things like highlight workstreams in an engagement, create a view of danger/risk points in a project, show progress to plan plainly, and summarize a project plan on one chart.
2. Because the tool is not part of everyone's basic software configuration, there are additional barriers to communication because the native file format often cannot be easily exchanged with clients, colleagues, etc. who need to work and update things in real-time. Project plans in Microsoft Project need to get exported to things like PDF files, etc.
3. Updating the project plan can become a project in of itself and prevent the project manager from doing other important things like communicating with stakeholders, managing risks, working to solve problems, and completing tasks.

Getting the theme behind my dislike for the software?

I much prefer using something like Powerpoint or Excel for developing project plans. I like Powerpoint because of its visual nature (which can be helpful in managing projects and leading people). I like Excel because of its greater structure over Powerpoint and ubiquitous availability to business people.

Am I right? Probably not entirely, but I have definitely seen the types of recurring problems described above in many engagements. The negatives often outweigh the benefits of using a more structured tool fit for purpose.

For My Blog Diary: Whirlwind Notes On Blogs In 2007

For a snapshot of what I am sensing in 2007:

• Growth in blogs slowing, growth in blog posts slowing (and mainstream media more in balance and cognizant of blogs)
• Corporate blogs growing, but many companies still on the fence with no plans to use blogs (and even if they did would they be effective?)
• Companies seem much more aware of monitoring blog frenzies (e.g., iPhone, Sprint)
• Newer web constructs like Squidoo growing (but does the average person have a clue about this?)
• Personal attention crash looming (if not already here)

Compare this to what we saw in 2003-2004 and the rise of the blog in 2004.

The Downside of Saving for That Perfect Occasion

My wife is quoted in a recent U.S. News and World Report feature on credit cards where she talks about a quirky aspect of consumer behavior:

Suzanne Shu, assistant professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University, says rewarding people with luxury experiences gives them permission to indulge in splurges that they might otherwise feel guilty about buying. The risk, she says, is when the experience seems so special that people wait to schedule it and end up putting it off into the future indefinitely.

"People get into the problem where no occasion is quite special enough where they feel like they've earned the right to use the reward," she says, whether it's an expensive bottle of wine or a gift certificate to a high-end restaurant. Her advice is to set a specific date for the reward and then use it. "It's the drive for the perfect occasion that really throws people off."

Note to self: Companies that can better understand systemic quirks and biases related to consumer behavior can apply such learnings to improve their sales and marketing programs.

In Consulting The Process Is An Essential Part Of The Deliverable

Situation for consultant #1:

• Client needs help in determining business strategy and writing business plan for its Board
• Consultant follows traditional MBA frameworks by performing 3Cs (Customer, Competition, Company), Porter's Five Forces and competitive advantage, etc. to research and analyze the best way for client to move forward
• Consultant uses structured frameworks for outlining and documenting the tactics and logistics for pursuing the business (e.g., marketing 4Ps, traditional business plan outlines)
• Consultant prepares full financial proformas (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, and notes)
• Consultant writes business plan to spec
• Consultant delivers written business plan to client
• Consultant invoices $40,000
• Client ends up being lukewarm about the deliverable.

Situation for consultant #2 (differences in bold):

• Client needs help in determining business strategy and writing business plan for its Board
• Consultant sets up engagement timeframe and governance structure with consulting team and client leads, extended resources for all key workstreams, and steering/approval committee
• Consultant follows traditional MBA frameworks by performing 3Cs (Customer, Competition, Company), Porter's Five Forces and competitive advantage, etc. to research and analyze the best way for client to move forward
• Consultant sets up workshops and strategy sessions with the executive team, key functional managers, etc.
• Consultant uses structured frameworks for outlining and documenting the tactics and logistics for pursuing the business (e.g., marketing 4Ps, traditional business plan outlines)
• Consultant sets up regular review meetings and working sessions with client to review best practices, evaluate options, and refine and revise strategy
• Consultant prepares full financial proformas (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, and notes)
• Consultant sets up working sessions to familiarize client with models, align financials with chart of accounts for client, get client input, and educate client about industry benchmarks
• Consultant writes business plan to spec
• Consultant involves client with interim drafts and presentations and gets organizational buy-in
• Consultant delivers written business plan to client (largely same as before)
• Consultant invoices $250,000
• Client is very happy and ends up getting multimillion dollar business moving forward through Board and project launched.

Vanilla business plan $40,000. Client buy-in ... priceless.

Update (3/5/08): Find more interesting papers on Management Consulting.

Interesting Observation That Project Management Is Something You Won't Learn In Business School

First saw this post at Virginia Postrel's site. The originally referenced post is by her other half, Dr. Steven Postrel here. Dr. Postrel writes:

A peculiar fact about business schools (at least in the USA) is that project management is not part of the regular MBA curriculum. Why is this peculiar? Only because a huge percentage of the work managers do is organized into projects, the success or failure of strategies often rests on the quality of execution of projects, and many of the principles and techniques of good project management are not immediately obvious. But hey, if anyone needs to know about this trivial stuff they can always go to a two-day workshop and get a certificate (probably from an engineering department). Or learn it on the job, which in this context often means screwing things up and trying to guess what you did wrong.

I guess on the one hand, I would agree that core management "science" topics (a bucket in which project management perhaps fits into) should be covered in business schools. That said, similar to a somewhat controversial post I wrote here on ethics courses in business schools, my perspective (from the vantage point of an MBA alum rolling back time and putting himself in an MBA student's shoes) would be that I would not have wanted to shovel out top dollar for that type of course as a customer of the business school product. Project management is a knowledge base and skill set that many people pick up on the job, regardless of whether effectiveness of process, tools, and outcomes are measured systematically. At least I would not have wanted to pay for a project management course in a naked form. The topic could be combined with some other product, such as a product development/management, consulting methods, change management, operations, or governance course. Although I am clearly biased, I think it could play well in a consulting course, especially since projects and engagements are related (but different animals).

Where The Engagement Manager Position Embodies The Essence of Management Consulting

Between different consulting firms and practices, the job responsibilities and experience levels of engagement managers vary widely, but there is one characteristic of the position that I like because it captures the essence of management consulting better than do characteristics of other typical consulting positions (e.g., principal, partner, director, associate, manager). By understanding the central function of "engagement management", one can better understand the essence of management consulting.

Engagement managers own the problem statement from the perspective of the customer, and thus, have the responsibilities to ensure that consulting team both structures the problem solving methodology correctly and executes on the problem solving methodology.

Thus as an example, a problem statement may be to help figure out whether a client should enter a wireless business, identify under what circumstances it makes sense, define the strategy and plan for how it should be done, and get cross-functional buy-in from the management team and Board of Directors. In this case, the engagement manager may need to work with the consulting team to synthesize primary and secondary marketing research from end users and distributors, construct financial analyses, develop technology scenarios and architectures, conduct client workshops on various subjects to gain insights and share best practice perspectives, perform gap analyses between present methods of operations and desired future states, or perform competitive analyses and forecasting.

Another problem statement might be, "figure out the root cause of declining customer satisfaction and fix it because my internal management team is giving me mixed messages". Yet another one might be, "how do I transform my business from doing lots of low margin X to doing more high margin Y". (As a quick digression, one should note that setting up the problem statement properly is very key to selling consulting engagements and solving them - do not take it for granted that the problem statement is articulated properly).

In essence, the role of the engagement manager is to help the client to solving their problems by synthesizing the work of smart people and subject matter experts in different functions and areas from throughout the firm.

In closing, I find that people frequently confuse the role of project managers with that of engagement managers. There are definitely some overlapping functions, but the essence of project management is more to ensure that things are accomplished on time, on budget, and according to customer specifications. On the other hand, the role of the engagement manager is to own the client problem statement as if it were their own. At risk of sounding like I am diminishing the importance of the function, project management becomes more of an execution detail in the greater scheme of things.

Thoughts On Job Changes And Job Interviews

There are many variations on interviewing people, but practically across all methods I have used whether case study or more traditional "walk me through your resume" style, I find myself examining two areas very closely. I don't know if they match up with other interviewers' experiences, but in any case here are the two areas:

• Has the person succeeded in the past with skills and responsibilities that are needed for this job, and how many degrees of separation are there between the old job and the new job? For example, a person that needs both sales and consulting skills for a new job and comes from a sales background may only have one (potentially large) degree of separation from a new job. On the other hand, someone that has performed sales in one job and consulting in a separate job, well in that case, the degrees of separation may be viewed as smaller. It may not be too hard for the interviewer to envision the person being able to handle a new job that incorporates both functions. On the other hand, someone that has a background in R&D only, well there may be at least two degrees of separation from the new job because that person may neither have sales, consulting, nor extensive customer-facing experience.

Just because someone has greater degrees of separation from the job they are applying for does not mean that they should be precluded from being hired. However, when that person is selling me on whether they are appropriate for the job, they need to recognize that they may need to either sell me on other skills that I value or try to frame their background in such a way so that the degrees of separation seem as small as possible. Drawing similarities between work done in the past with work needed for the new job is one potential way of doing this (e.g., "I performed competitive analysis of product offerings as a product manager - these types of tasks likely share a number of similarities with competitive analysis performed by consultants").

As another approach, some people may want to view career changes as a continuum. If the degrees of separation for one job change are too large, then perhaps that person should seek an immediate job position that is closer. Such a step may make it easier to change to the other job at a later point in time.

• What is the overall career path that this person is seeking? It is nice to see some logic behind why a person changed jobs, in a large part to figure out whether the new job fits into a logical pattern that is aligned with both the candidate and company (hiring people can be an expensive proposition and mistakes are not good). Although somewhat of a contradiction to my first point above where I like to see how a person's past experiences can map into those required for a new job, I am not a big fan of functional resumes that organize a person's job experiences into skill clusters but that cut across individual jobs and timeframes such that chronology is convoluted. I have seen some people use this resume style to grab people's attention, but I think there are better ways of driving home the point of skill match while still preserving the importance of chronology of job experiences. One method that I prefer to see is a one-line blurb that paints a picture of how one's past experiences together match a new job's requirements in a deft way. For example, the blurb might be "experienced sales executive and consultant seeking consulting practice leadership role" or "experienced telecom product line manager seeking wireless strategy consultant role".

In closing, I will say that have deviated from these two frames in some circumstances because there are blind spots. For example, it is possible to simply wind up finding someone that is energetic and can excel at the job. Some people may simply want it enough. In these cases, I may prefer to set up some sort of trial environment, inspect past deliverables/work products, and/or do deeper digging with background checks (e.g., checking customer references).

On "Busyness" In An Increasingly Global And Technology-Oriented World

It's results that matter - not activities.

That statement encapsulates a "widely-held" management perspective that managers should evaluate workers based on the effectiveness of output produced and not by how much they are working. But is it such a widely-held belief? Dr. Andrew McAfee writes in an older post (and in the context of E2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, etc.):

Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don't want to be seen as not busy enough.

Dr. McAfee's post made me back up and think more generally about busyness and cases such as the following:

• where managers use instant messaging and presence to monitor whether employees are at their computers (as a proxy for work activity)
• how those in Western cultures may tend view someone just sitting at their desk and thinking as being lazy and unproductive whereas those in Eastern cultures may potentially view such people as being productive
• where consultants or analysts generate tons of paper or analyses (and which may vary by geography), but fail to tie things together into a set of cohesive key learnings or recommendations
• how some workaholics may criticize or think less of the Levis 501 worker types (those that line up at 5:00pm and leave at 5:01pm)
• where salespeople are viewed as wasting their time by sending cute emails to people or talking constantly about non-work matters with colleagues in their network

So I dunno. It seems plausible that busyness might be valued both to the detriment of productivity and with insufficient respect for technology limitations and global cultures. Are times and contexts changing?

Professional Services and Consulting Sales

Ford Harding has some of the best sales books I have ever seen for those in professional services and consulting. I find that many other books in the marketplace focus either too much on product-oriented businesses or sales attitude to the exclusion of understanding why certain sales and marketing processes work for some business situations but not for others.

Ford's books are especially a must-read for management consultants with traditional firms and independents. Ford recently started a blog, and he's got an excellent post on cross markets and cross selling here.

Article On Wealth, Income, and IQ

Folks may have seen this already, but I saw this article in The Times while on assignment in London last week. My very loose takeaways at the time were that that IQ and income are somewhat correlated but that IQ and wealth are not (may need to check out links below and trace academic paper[s] to find the precise statistical findings). Also interesting was this piece of text from The Times article:

Most of the richest people in Britain, for example, are not salaried, but rather have amassed their fortunes as entrepreneurs or by inheritance.

Related posts: Paul Kedrosky via Paul Brown hat tip.

An Illustration Of Where Clients Look To Management Consultants For Value-Add: Quantitative Analysis and Polish

I've seen a number of posts around the internet that question the value of management consultants and really beg the question of in what situations can consultants add value better than managers within a company. Rather than answer that broad question, I thought that I would take an opportunity to illustrate an area where I have seen a lot of clients get value and where they would have struggled to structure the analysis given the resources they had available. The gap area is quantitative analysis.

Such a gap is often related to organizational structure. Companies often organize themselves to produce products and services efficiently. One company may be organized to produce PCs at the lowest cost while another may provide construction services with high customer satisfaction rates. Such companies may not always be optimized for solving specific problems related to entering new lines of business, making strategic shifts, etc. Additionally, in many companies there is a limited number of either finance people, financially-trained managers in non-financial roles, project-based financial analysts, database analysts, or statistics specialists. And in cases where such skilled people are more numerous, often they are either unavailable or essentially unavailable to focus on solving specific problems raised by the business.

Management consulting firms often have a lot of financial and numerically-trained people - it would not be unusual for every consultant assigned to a project to have in-depth quantitative skills. At risk of sounding like I am drinking my own Kool Aid, some gap-plugging and value-add consulting exampes I have seen include:

• providing not only an qualitative assessment of offering a new set of telecom services but also a quantitative assessment of how much shareholder value is built by offering the services (e.g., NPV analysis) and a quantitative rank ordering of cost areas that affect each service (e.g., NPV waterfall analysis)
• constructing a business plan to enter a new market and also providing full financial statement benchmarking against publically available financial statements of existing pure players and multiplayers within the industry to shed light on the business economics required to succeed (or fail) in the current world
• providing both a qualitative assessment of why backoffice clearinghouse started to slip on their service level agreements with customers and a quantitative analysis of how more than 70% of the problem statistically had to do with Little's Law in operations where increases in inventory mapped directly into average cycle time (and then showing how the components of operations throughput failed and could be made more fault-tolerant for the future)
• providing a operations process flow for renegotiating commercial real estate properties and also a per property financial analysis template coupled to a real estate database to identify the most important negotiating parameters and the money at stake for each parameter.

So I guess my observation would be that the areas of financial and numerical analysis are commonly recurring patterns where consultants provide value-add (or at least polish and high-touch) to solving client problems. Often the quantitative analysis goes even one step further, e.g., to help the client build committment and resolve to either enter the new business, take on the development project, or move on to something else with no regrets.

McKinsey Says Companies Are Wary Of Web 2.0

See the article over at BusinessWeek. Hat tip to Steve Rubel who comments, "The enterprise is afraid of letting go of the command and control structure."

Those interested in what another leading strategy consulting firm (Bain) is saying about blogs and use by companies may want to refer to my prior post on corporate blogs being added to Bain's 2007 list of management tools.

Related link: Update On Management Consulting Blogs