Management consulting is an expert with rich theoretical knowledge and practical experience, with the close cooperation of the relevant personnel of the enterprise, using scientific methods to investigate and diagnose the enterprise, find out the existing problems, analyze the causes of the problems, and propose solutions to guide the implementation of the solutions, so as to achieve the purpose of solving the problems, realize the business objectives of the enterprise and promote the healthy and steady development of the enterprise. Then, the following is the history and significance of the management consultation I have compiled for you. Welcome to read and browse.
What is the significance of the existence of consulting companies?
Consulting companies have a long history, even hundreds of years. When a century-old industry is questioned: What is the significance of your existence? Actually, it's gonna be a little awkward. But I prefer to interpret him as: this is due to the characteristics of Party B's professional services. As a professional service organization, the emphasis is on bringing value to customers, emphasizing professionalism and confidentiality, rather than becoming a superstar before the stage. Their products or services usually face a few customers, not Facebook, Google and Tencent. As for consulting, the characteristics of its working mode have created the uncertainty of the industry. Perhaps, even their customers are not quite sure how their consulting plan came out. The working mode of consulting companies is like a black box. Several consultants who look smart enter the market, conduct research, and then come up with solutions, make reports and leave after two or three months.
When outsiders look at it, especially those who have not been exposed to consulting companies from the management point of view, they often see that they are so expensive! Just a few people for a few months! They haven't done the actual operation, how to come up with a solution and so on. Then they have questions: What is the significance of consulting companies?
To answer this question, we may need to briefly review the history of the consulting industry.
Consulting companies have emerged in the United States. With the rapid development of American economy from 65438 to 1980, the internal management of more and more enterprises has been difficult to meet the needs of business growth. At this time, the external industry legal supervision gradually became stricter, so these entrepreneurs began to seek external advice, which also gave birth to the first batch of management consulting companies, such as Arthur D. Little, A.T. Kearney, McKk and so on. Companies, etc. At that time, these companies were mainly composed of engineers, lawyers and accountants. Of course, every company will have different tendencies, which also leads to different companies and different cultures. For example, James McKinsey, the founder of McK, is an accountant. He believes that as long as practitioners can have more complex abilities through training, they can fully meet the service needs of customers. More importantly, it can bring much higher income to the company than the original business. Bruce Henderson, the founder of BCG, has a bachelor's degree in engineering background, which has brought different cultures and contributions to BCG, such as the famous engineering field? Boston experience curve? And everyone is familiar with it? Boston matrix? And so on, and all this makes BCG look academic even today, and it also has a famous nickname MengMeng:? Swallow the doctor? Consultation.
And what was the value of these consulting companies at that time?
At the beginning, the value of consulting companies is more technical consulting in a certain field. However, in the 1930s, with the intensification of market competition and government regulation, enterprises began to seek ways of self-improvement, and some enterprises began to seek strategy formulation and financial process improvement. At this time, government departments also began to hire management consulting companies to help solve some problems. For example, during World War II, the US government hired a large number of consultants to provide advice on the restructuring of the military. At this time, with the increasing number of customers, consulting companies began to expand. Slowly, this industry has formed a positive cycle. More and more customers and top employees with project experience have joined the market with good reputation and best practices. In this process, on the one hand, the industry maintains the supply of high-quality talents, on the other hand, a large number of practical project experience makes the consulting company gradually establish a set of its own knowledge system and the corresponding database with methodology as the core. Later, with the advent of the information age in the 1990s and the rise of ERP, a number of consulting companies were born, such as ABCDI (Accenture, Bearing Point, Capgemini, Deloitte, IBM).
With the Internet era of 2 1 century, especially the large-scale rise of mobile Internet and cloud computing, the value of consulting companies has been raised again. On the one hand, the whole consulting industry has not put forward the classic methodologies of Boston Matrix (proposed by Bruce Henderson) and Supply Chain Management (proposed by peter drucker and developed by Michael E. Porter). On the other hand, in terms of the supply of talents, more and more people flock to the Internet, which has brought a certain impact to the consulting industry. It seems that the information inequality advantages brought by the iconic industry best practices and industry data of consulting companies in the past are being erased by the subversive tool of the Internet. Of course, consulting companies that are transforming customers every day have long realized this and are actively transforming and accelerating their capabilities in this area, such as big data, cloud computing and so on.
So, what is the constant value of the consulting company? I think there are the following points:
1. Political factors:
This may be one of the most important values provided by consulting companies, that is, the internal resource reconfiguration initiated by external consultants. When an enterprise needs to carry out a change, especially an unpopular change, it needs the expert opinion of a reputable external professional organization. On the one hand, we can strive for resources upward, on the other hand, we can proceed smoothly downward. Therefore, for consulting companies, brand is very important, because brand means authority to some extent. Therefore, the storyline is very important for the deliverables of the consulting company, because rigorous, logical and data-supported stories can be used to demonstrate.
Of course, some people may think that this is not the same as the value of consulting companies, but in fact, the value of consulting companies should first solve the existing problems of customers, and political issues are very important and difficult to solve. From this perspective, this value is actually great. If you can help the board of directors implement unpopular resolutions smoothly, you are excellent. If you can still kill a few dissidents in the eyes of the board of directors, then you have simply overfulfilled.
2. In-depth study of phenomena/problems:
Generally speaking, it is difficult for a consultant to focus on a specific industry all the time, but he usually focuses on the solutions to one or several phenomena/problems. The team of a consulting company is usually a temporary team composed of several consultants with complementary knowledge in this field. If you are in Party A, generally speaking, you have a daily job and obvious boundaries, so it is difficult to focus on a specific problem all the time. For example, I am engaged in e-commerce transformation in the retail industry. After I finish this project, there will be another project. Maybe the industry is different. Today is home appliances, tomorrow is aviation, and the day after tomorrow is home, but they are all e-commerce transformations. But if I finish this project in Party A, it will be gone. The problems I have encountered and solved are limited to this industry and one company.
It is also for this reason that the author believes that truly high-quality boutique firms are long-term optimistic. Today's customers no longer pursue large and comprehensive consulting companies, but will find experts in this industry to solve this problem according to their own problems. At this time, the value of long-term research in a field by boutique firms is reflected.
3. Vertical cross-level information communication:
After admission, consultants usually spend a short time collecting and interviewing data at different levels (depending on the project situation), from CXO to front-line operators. We often find that cross-level information transmission usually has information distortion and invalid information, especially for giant companies with huge and complex organizational structures. However, a scalpel-like quick interview with external special forces (with relatively neutral and vague interests) can usually obtain first-line information for rapid integration and analysis, and then find problems.
4. Inter-departmental information communication:
In the process of doing the project, we can actually find that colleagues in all departments of Party A's company are very professional and generally run well when they don't encounter problems. However, once there are unexpected problems or cross-departmental projects need to be implemented, it is very difficult to communicate information between different departments. Everyone knows his part of the business, but he can't understand what others are saying. At this time, for companies with huge and complex organizational structure, cross-departmental communication has always been one of its problems.
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