Consulting Industry Caught in the Crossfire

Braden Kelley is an innovation and change specialist, the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, an InnovationExcellence.com co-Founder, and is the creator of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and a book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (January 2016 release).

  Consulting   Innovation  

The worlds of employment and business are becoming increasingly turbulent as the stability of the enterprise grows ever shorter, the loyalty of the enterprise to its people faces extinction and the wealthy countries of the world stand at a precipice of overhanging debt. Increasingly, intelligent digital technologies and mercurial customer expectations threaten both people and enterprise at every turn.

One would suppose that this would be an amazing time for consultancies, full of promise and opportunities. One would imagine that clients desperate for solutions that help them cope with these challenging times would be banging down the doors of consulting firms outbidding each other to the firm’s next client.

But that is not the reality…because the same forces that are causing a feeling of disequilibrium for the firms that consultancies serve are also causing the same unease, trepidation and challenge for the consulting firms themselves. The fact is that the consulting industry is being attacked on three sides:

1. Increasingly available intellectual property
2. Internal consultants
3. Artificial intelligence

Let’s look at each threat in turn…

1. Increasingly available intellectual property. I previously wrote about the importance of thought leadership in today’s digital age and its role in helping to drive inbound sales leads. Hiring…

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