A management consultant’s day job is to help other companies transform their business. But as senior partners from many of the big consultancies gathered in the Swiss town of Davos last week to schmooze some clients and spot some trends, one thing was clear: they’re now having to practise what they preach.
“For the last seven years, McKinsey has also undergone a transformation. Literally half of what we do today we did not have the capabilities to do seven years ago,” says Oliver Tonby, the Singapore-based managing partner Asia-Pacific for McKinsey, during a typically rapid-fire coffee meeting in Davos.
It’s not enough to turn up with an MBA on your CV and the McKinsey model in your back pocket anymore, he says.
Clients’ needs have become more complex: they need help with artificial intelligence, the internet of things, customer journey design.
Alex Liu, the fast-talking, rugby-playing American global head at Kearney, tells the same story about his firm.
“We’re like any client. Our industry is changing, you need to have new skills and new capabilities: design thinking; digital; analytics; cultural sensitivity; people agenda,” he says.
“Clients don’t look at college degrees anymore, whether you have a team full of MBAs from the same school, which was what it was like when I was growing up in the business.”
The firms have responded by buying start-ups, hiring expertise, and recruiting partner agencies – so they can be what Liu calls “a concierge or navigator through our clients’ business problems”; or what Tonby describes as “a whole ecosystem of partners”.
“Twenty years ago, there was the ‘not invented here’ syndrome, and that doesn’t work anymore,” Tonby says. “Today, on the contrary, there’s an ecosystem.”
He reckons the percentage of generalists at McKinsey, the “integrators” with their MBAs, has dropped from 80 percent-plus to about 50 per cent.
“It’s still very, very important for us to have integrators. Those integrators need to know something as well about a sector, so there is some focus and specialisation there too. But the other half of it is more diverse: people with 10, 20 years’ experience we’re hiring, for different functions.”
He welcomes this diversity, the “different thinking”. But it’s a long way from the firm’s traditional model, in which it recruited the top of the crop and implanted the McKinsey chip. Has that culture survived this brush with diversity?
“Of course, the need to continue to build the McKinsey culture is absolutely critical. And there’s always tensions in this,” he says.
“So long as we’re aware, so long as we discuss, and then can do something about it, then we’re able to maintain parts of the McKinsey culture we want to continue to nurture. And there are parts of McKinsey culture we want to evolve over time.”
Liu, similarly, says there’s still that traditional role of “diagnosis”, using “intellect and frameworks”; but nowadays customers don’t want “something you gave to the competitor down the street two weeks ago”.
Consultants have had to learn not to speak with the voice of impersonal authority – “the level of fascination with elitism has disappeared” – and instead need to be “empathetic and empowering”.
“Clients don’t want already-packaged one-size-fits-all solutions, they want custom. They want the best global tools but they also want it delivered empathetically and in a bespoke service model,” he says. “The pressure is to move to that rather than living in fancy-framework land.”
It’s hard to reconcile the traditional image of secretive, insular McKinsey with the company that bought QuantumBlack and expanded it tenfold. Or the starchy world of Kearney with the 2019 acquirer of an edgy data analytics outfit, and on the hunt for more.
But it reflects consultants walking the walk, as well as talking the talk. As Liu says, with a good old-fashioned consultant’s penetrating simplicity: “Don’t have all your eggs in one basket, or you could become obsolete.”
Sourced from Financial Review - written by Hans Van Leeuwen