Consulting News

With all the collaborative juices they can muster, the titans of the Industrial Age are gearing up to mount a Web crusade destined to dwarf the dot-com antics of their New Economy predecessors, and open new doors for their consultancy partners.

Editor's Note: Consulting's interview with Professor Pfeffer took place prior to last month's tragic events in New York and Washington. CM: Are there…

Hospitals are choking on paper. The endless trail of treatment orders, signatures, prescriptions, and yet more signatures can force a physician, it often…

wanted to respond to your interview with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, "Larry Ties the Knot" (July, p. 18), and say that inevitably both sides are right. However, Oracle's claim seems somewhat self-serving. Of course, they want to move out of being a consulting company and move to being a pervasive enterprise-wide product vendor — the margins are much higher. Also, the collaboration between companies like Oracle and Bain is suspect for the reason that it is self-serving and takes away the objectivity of the strategy company.

For an industry built on the concept of strategic change, consulting hasn’t changed much since Marvin Bower took the reins at McKinsey & Co. back in 1937. Now, as then, consultants talk about working cases, as if we are defense lawyers distancing ourselves from an unsavory client. Like the early acolytes of time-and-motion studies, we profess a detached, scientific objectivity, analyzing our corporate specimens the way entomologists pin butterfly wings to a board. And we still communicate in our own Esperanto, only now it’s written in Power- Point. Worst of all, we’re still brains for hire. Have contract, will travel — expenses reimbursable, of course.

Wireless, the eight-letter modifier carrying powerful new meaning in the consulting world, now describes an escalating cluster of client opportunities looming on the horizon. But just how far away those opportunities lie remains anyone’s guess.