Sep 9th 2010
All consulting firms seek to provide what they annoyingly call “thought
leadership”. McKinsey's rival, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), became
well known in part by distributing its ideas freely. Consultancies now
put out short opinionated papers as well as data-laden reports such as
BCG's recent one on wind power in China or PricewaterhouseCooper's on
electronic health records. Fiona Czerniawska of Sourceforconsulting.com
says the number of such reports from the top 25 firms has quintupled
since 2004. Free reports are expensive to produce: Tom Rodenhauser of
Kennedy Information, a firm that monitors consultancies, reckons they
cost up to 5% of gross revenues. Are they worth it?
--
Clients rarely say they hire a firm on the strength of its free
publications. But the firms nonetheless defend the growing practice as a
form of marketing.
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Spots for year-long stays at the consultancies' in-house think-tanks
such as the McKinsey Global Institute, BCG's Strategy Institute and the
IBM Institute for Business Value are fought over fiercely.
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The effect of putting out free reports may be hard to measure, but
Lenny Mendonca, McKinsey's head of knowledge development, is not about
to stop. “We only worry if we're spending enough,” he says.
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