Interviews
- »One on One with KPMG's Koecher & Rodriguez
KPMG’s Restructuring Services group just got a lot stronger. On July 16, KPMG acquired Grant Thornton’s supply chain advisory practice, effectively doubling the size of its core restructuring team and broadened its service offerings.
- »One on One with Ed Hess
Grow or Die. It’s probably the most common business axiom, and the least accurate, according to the new book “Smart Growth: Building an Enduring Business by Managing the Risks of Growth” (Columbia Business School Publishing). To better understand the book’s implications for firms, Consulting’s One-on-One sat down with the book’s author, Ed Hess, a former Arthur Andersen strategy consultant and current professor at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business.
- »One on One with Summit's David Litherland
When prospective employees interview for a job, they obsess over making a good, lasting impression. Firms should do the same. To learn how firms can avoid typical pitfalls, Consulting’s One on One sat down with David Litherland, managing partner of Summit Search Group, an executive search firm specializing in placing professionals within professional service firms.
- »One on One with PwC's Tom Craren
Senior executives are becoming immune to traditional marketing. Marketing consultants tell us that to pierce through the white noise of corporate communication, firms should consider “content marketing”. Instead of more traditional marketing, providing valuable insight and perspective in a blog or electronic newsletter can serve as a more effective door opener. One of the best examples is PricewaterhouseCoopers’ “10-Minute” series. For almost three years, PwC has boiled down complex thought leadership into small electronic pieces an executive can read in about ten minutes. To learn more about PwC’s marketing efforts, Consulting’s One-on-One sat down with Tom Craren, the firm’s brand strategy and thought leadership leader. His team of 20 writers produces between two to three 10-minute pieces each month, along with more detailed white papers.
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»Book It!
Consulting magazine's Book It! section highlights new books either written by or for those in management consulting. Each issue, editor's choose four recently released books to review.
12
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2008
»New Business in the Network of Everything
 In this fictional account by Andy Mulholland, Jane Moneymaker, the CEO of Vorpal Inc., has recently expanded her company’s Web-based sales approach, but with unforeseen consequences—the company is fragmenting along a number of fault lines. Mulholland, global chief technology officer of the Capgemini Group, first introduced Moneymaker in 2006’s Mashup Corporations. In this latest work, Mesh Collaboration: Creating New Business Value in the Network of Everything, Mulholland sets out to bring technology and business together in a new way to create powerful change. The book
“is about seeking collaboration internally and beyond the firewall in order to take advantage of the mesh of connections available via Web 2.0,” he says.
Consulting: Very few business books are fiction. Why did you go this route?
Mulholland: I made that decision before I wrote the first book, Mashup Corporation, because I was writing for a gap—the gap that exists between business and technology. Technology people didn’t know what business people wanted out of them, and business people didn’t know what technology could do for them. They both needed a middle ground. Since this was a business model change and a technology model change, I thought it best to invent a company, and have a readable story line in which people could recognize their own businesses, challenges and circumstances. I want them to feel compelled to read the whole story line and then form a picture of the entire change environment. That’s the big point of the book.
 Consulting: What do you expect readers to take away from the book?
Mulholland: Mashup Corporation was written about people’s puzzlement about how they use the Web to do business. And at the moment, there’s a lot of confused people, listening to a lot of terms they don’t understand and finding it difficult to relate to their own problems. They’ve heard that social networks are going to change their business, but they may be wondering just what is a social network and how is it going to change [their] business. The whole point of the book was for people to see the connection, to give people the context to say that now they understand what a social network does—it allows people to form networks around their own expertise or the people they need to communicate with. This is about how people in business socialize to find answers, really.
Consulting: In the book, another ficticious company Power Plus, is doing a lot of the right things around Web 2.0, but its profits are stagnant. Why?
Mulholland: The conventional business wisdom is that a company produces a product and then it optimizes around it for as long as possible. Because of that, we organize our companies around the optimization of a steady state. We organize around resources or we talk about procedures and we make assumptions that in order to do the job people have to be there from 9 to 5 or whatever combination of hours is appropriate. We assume the whole thing is a static model. But what you’re looking at in many of these models is quite the reverse. You’re actually trying to organize around people, expertise and events. That’s what happens in the book: The company is selling more, but it’s not making more money because its organizational structure is falling apart under the load. Why can’t they handle it? The conventional model might say you can train 40 people to support a product for the next four years, but what happens when you try to train 40 people every other month on a new product? It just doesn’t work.
Consulting: So, what’s the solution?
Mulholland: What you really need to do is find the four people who worked on the development of the product when you need them to answer a specific question. It all comes back to: can I find the right people at the right moment with the right expertise to answer a specific question quickly? The answer is not to set up a department for the next four years. The word “mesh” was used in the title to indicate the idea that the Internet was causing a mesh of connections between everyone and everything, and how [can] I use that mesh—the network of everything—to draw a line around the group of people and expertise that I need right now to solve a particular problem.
Consulting: Are the organizational charts at today’s companies out of date?
Mulholland: That’s certainly part of it. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we had the last round of company reorganizations. Then, the forward thinkers started to popularize the idea that we were talking about new types of technologies used for business purposes, and they called it “information technology.” The whole purpose of that was to get across that PCs, networks and client service models involved a very different role for technology and resulted in a very different organizational structure. What’s happening now is that forward thinkers are identifying something different again, and we have two popular terms: “enterprise 2.0” and “business technology.” In both, the business model and the technology model become relatively synonymous around the idea of this mass collaboration. These terms were introduced in 2006, and now we’ve got business schools teaching people that we have a new business model emerging here, an interactive or collaborative business model, and you must embrace technology in a new way.
Consulting: So, is this a bottom-up phenomenon?
Mulholland: It’s coming at us several different ways, really. CEOs are recognizing that they’re going to have to do something in the face of globalization and the credit crunch. They’re quite desperate actually to figure out ways to generate new markets and find new revenue streams. So, at the top, you’ve sort of got this strategic force that says, “I’ve got to change; I’ve got to innovate my business model; I’ve got to do some new things.” If you go to the other end, the people on the front line will tell you that circumstances are changing much quicker than ever before. But the problem is most acute for middle managers. They are the people who have been de-layered, and this is all a big shift from the command-and-control world they’ve always known. Now they need to shift more to the “how can we figure this out together” mentality. There’s a real cultural shift happening.
Consulting: What is Capgemini doing internally around this concept of business intelligence?
Mulholland: One of the best success stories I have occurred here at Capgemini. In the summer of last year, we started to look at how we were applying the knowledge of expertise internally between people and content. We had an “as good as it gets” knowledge management system in a conventional sense, but we started to build something that has come to be known as KM2.0. We were trying to figure out a way to get users to post and tag information the way you’d see it done on an external Web site—including a star-rating system for how useful the content was, how many people used it and how to associate the people using it with various communities. It launched in October of last year. We never even told people it was there or trained people on how to use it—its popularity was spread mainly by word of mouth. We didn’t say we were going to turn off the old knowledge management system and demand people use the new one. I don’t think that would’ve worked.
Instead, what happened was that people found how to use it within the context of what they needed it to do. By year’s end, four times as many people were using it than were using the legacy system. Now, whenever I produce what I think is a decent document, I upload it into whatever communities I think would benefit from it. One of the most useful things, I think, is that I can see how many stars other people in Capgemini have given the document and the number of downloads it has received. That means I can sort out very quickly which ones are deemed most useful—and you can imagine the value in that. And it’s self-regulating, which means people are joining the communities that they think will benefit them in their job function the most.
To purchase Mesh Collaboration, click here.
To purchase Mashup Corporation (digital), click here.
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