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feel that by not using their services the clients’ businesses are being deprived of something special. Powerful advertising tools are too costly to be used by small and new consultants looking for new clients. Thus advertising serves mainly to strengthen the position of a small group of already very powerful and successful players, since they are the only ones who can afford enough of it to make an impact, when in fact they need it least. One can only hope that the growing sophistication of clients will mean that they do not believe everything in the advertising that some consultancies have been producing.

Of course, publicity and advertising are standard and perfectly correct tools for marketing and promoting professional services, including consulting. The question is how they are used. The limits of professionalism and taste have been reached, and probably crossed, in some cases, thus shifting the balance between the professional and commercial sides of consulting towards the commercial. Some consultants do not hesitate to promise the moon to potential clients. Writing about the Big Six and the changes in their attitudes since the 1980s, Mark Stevens pointed out that “for generations, members of these huge influential practices considered themselves professionals who happened to be in business. But beginning in the 1980s, this view flip-flopped: increasingly they saw themselves as businessmen who happened to be professionals. The distinction is critical.”4 The same could be written today about quite a few firms in consulting and other professions.

38.2 Your profession

The comment by Mark Stevens may be regarded as irrelevant and unfair by some professionals. They will argue that, in their firms, there has never been the slightest danger of misrepresentation, conflict of interest or sacrificing of clients’ interests and service quality to earnings and profits. Yet it is useful to keep constantly in mind the delicate balance between professional and commercial objectives in operating any professional firm and planning its future.

The current international climate in business and society is most favourable to those who provide businessand management-related professional services. As mentioned elsewhere, there are more and more issues in which industrial and service firms, governments and even social and voluntary not-for-profit organizations will need advice and help from independent professionals. The trend towards treating knowledge as a commodity and an object of business is fairly pronounced, although in some fields the limits to trading in knowledge and making profit from it have yet to be negotiated, fine-tuned and codified by legal texts and ethical rules.

However, the future will belong to true professionals, not to instant experts willing to promise and sell anything to uninformed clients without worrying about the outcome. Professional culture and responsibility are not dead concepts and if in some professional firms they have given way to the get-rich-quick culture, these firms would be well advised to reconsider their long-term

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objectives and value systems. The professional service sector enjoys considerable clout with business and government clients, who recognize it as a source of useful knowledge and experience that they themselves lack. More and more clients realize that, to stay competitive and meet the expectations of their own stakeholders, they must buy and apply this knowledge. It would be a great disservice to the consulting profession if this advantageous position should be wasted because of some consultants who accept assignments they are not qualified for, or leave clients with costly systems that will never attain the promised parameters.

Balancing the professional and the commercial sides of consulting, or any other professional service, is an extremely delicate issue when demand for services is high, change fast, time pressure strong, competition severe but not always orthodox in its approach, markets liberal and temptation to reduce standards difficult to resist. Yet from a long-term perspective there is no alternative.

Profound and far-reaching structural changes in the professional service sectors have commenced and their end is not in sight.5 The partition and dismantling of the largest accounting and other professional service empires is on the way. Some of these firms are facing a crisis of credibility, confidence and even identity. Simultaneously, new integrated and multiservice giants are being created through acquisitions of management consultancies by IT service firms, or vice versa. Further spectacular changes can be expected and some may be very surprising. Where there are minimal legal and regulatory barriers, anyone can acquire an established professional service firm, especially if that firm has been restructured as a joint stock company and its shares are traded on the stock markets. Some mergers and acquisitions may create new kinds of innovative providers integrated along the value chain, combing specific sector products or services with IT, business, management, and other professional systems and services. Conversely, other mergers and acquisitions may be opportunistic, creating clumsy conglomerates and having a short life.

Where is the client in this process? Serving clients’ evolving interests in the best and most effective ways is the credo of all consultants. However, in referring to clients and their interests, many consultants’ mission statements and advertisements contain a mix of rhetoric and reality. Professional firms that merge, split, buy other firms, or expand operations with sometimes astronomic speed will always argue that it is in their clients’ interest, and point to benefits, such as better service for global clients, systems integration, caring for cultural diversity, quality assurance, or getting closer and giving a faster response to the client. And they will be right – from a certain perspective and within certain limits. Other issues may be overlooked or suppressed, such as growing conflict of interests and loss of objectivity, painful and uncertain harmonization of incompatible cultures, the danger of turning a personalized and fine professional service into an anonymous mass-market process, and the levelling – and in some instances even lowering – of individual consultant competencies.

Clients, however, are not passive observers of the consulting scene. They have become more sophisticated in selecting and using consultants. More and

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more of them are able to insist on getting tangible and measurable results from their consultants, and value for money. Consultant–client collaboration and transfer of knowledge are already quite intensive in many assignments and will become more intensive and versatile in the future. These relationships will increasingly influence the development of consulting and other professions alike. Clients have a role in shaping the professions. In restructuring and redesigning their services and products, and adopting new business models, consultants will have to listen more to clients, dialogue with them, give priority to client-friendly models and approaches, and scrupulously avoid behaviour that irritates and repulses clients. After all, consulting and other professional services can only exist if there are clients who believe in their value, and are willing to pay for them.

38.3 Your self-development

A consultant who wants to invest in self-develoment to prepare for the future can seek inspiration in the overall development and structural changes of the markets for professional services and of the professions themselves. He or she will need to keep abreast of developments, not only in management consulting, but in IT and other professional and business services. A broad understanding of the ongoing and expected changes in technology, business and society is necessary. An ability to view narrow and special technical issues from a wider business and societal perspective has traditionally been a major asset of consulting professionals, and remains important, not only to the generalist but also to the specialist. Without this ability, management consultants would be IT, quality or other systems technicians, probably providing a useful technical service within narrow limits, but missing the view of the total enterprise and its complex human and business fabric.

Against this background, you can assess both your current competencies and your future potential. Being a consultant, you are probably objective, critical and realistic enough in judging yourself. You are able to compare and judge, using the right benchmarks. You are aware of your strengths and weaknesses. Discussing these issues with colleagues and with management helps, but eventually every consultant has to take full responsibility for decisions on his or her future, especially if considerable time and energy are to be invested in learning, and strong personal commitment will be necessary. This is not only every consultant’s right, but also a matter of a developed sense of responsibility to oneself, the clients, the firm and the whole profession. Not only organizations need to “reinvent themselves”; management and business consultants have to reinvent themselves even more courageously and more frequently than any of their clients.

An individual’s vision of the future and of personal capabilities and goals may not always coincide with that of his or her firm. In some firms, there is a discrepancy between policy statements on learning and development, and current reality. The firm may realize that its future depends on the skills of its

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staff remaining up to date. But it may strongly prioritize current incomegenerating client work, even if this is routine and repetitive and offers no learning opportunities to the consultants. These issues need to be discussed, and solutions adopted and implemented. If management does not take the initiative and is reluctant to invest in human capital, individual consultants employed by the firm should not hesitate to do so. After all, an individual, not the firm, is the primary owner of his or her intellectual capital.

38.4 Conclusion

Consulting to management is a fascinating profession. While consultants may feel threatened and constrained by competition from other service sectors, new regulations and various other forces, new trends and changes keep opening new horizons for them. Currently the main business, social, technological and other trends are creating more opportunities and more demand for consulting than in the past. In professional service sectors we have witnessed a great deal of restructuring, and further structural changes are likely to be forthcoming, as indicated by the performance record, growth pattern, restructuring experience, visibility and social prestige of leading consulting firms. Consulting is in a delicate equilibrium between the professional service approach and objectives, and the commercial approach and objectives, in all respects, including strategy, firm management, individual assignment design and execution, knowledgesharing with clients and people development. The leading consultants have always exhibited a remarkable capacity to understand and maintain this equilibrium, restore it when it is disrupted, adapt to the changing needs of their clients, and pursue excellence both professionally and as businesses. This capacity is the best safeguard of the future of consulting.

1See, e.g., F. Czerniawska: Management consultancy in the 21st century (Basingstoke, Hampshire, Macmillan, 1999), and R. Dawson: Developing knowledge-based client relationships: The future of professional services (Boston, MA, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000). See also

E-business consulting: After the shakeout; The global consulting marketplace: Key data, forecasts

&trends; and other reports on the consulting industry produced by the Kennedy Information Research Group and available from Kennedy Information.

2It is useful to follow sources focused on recent development and trends, such as M. Porter: “Strategy and the Internet”, in Harvard Business Review, Mar. 2001, pp. 62–78; J. Hagel and J. Seely Brown: “Your next IT strategy”, ibid., Oct. 2001, pp. 105–113; “Ten smart moves – corporate IT that’s worth a closer look”, at www.ebusinessforum.com of the Economist Intelligence Unit, 7 Dec. 2001; or “How about now? A survey of the real-time economy”, in The Economist, 2 Feb. 2002.

3P. Drucker: “Why management consultants?”, in Perspectives No. 234 (Boston, MA, The Boston Consulting Group, 1981).

4M. Stevens: The Big Six: The selling out of America’s top accounting firms (New York, Simon

&Schuster, 1991), p. 22.

5See also “Spoilt for choice” (special report on professional service firms), in The Economist, 7 July 2001.

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