Mariana Mazzucato: ‘The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in the areas that they’re advising in.’ When a niche consultancy might be best.

It’s difficult or uncomfortable to blow your own trumpet. ‘Self-praise is no praise’, as the saying goes.
But my (our) experience in consultancy has led to certain insights. Like that there are things that the big boys can do, that we either can’t match, or would struggle to match.
This particularly applies to activities where scale has advantages. For example, a client recently employed one of the big five consultancies to carry out a project that involved a huge, in-depth electronic survey activity. The consultancy in question had invested millions in the software to carry out this exercise - something we simply couldn’t do.
But when it came to the outputs of this huge data gathering exercise, when it came to drawing conclusions and devising a strategic route forward, hindsight kind of suggests that the familiar options were placed on the table, with no really fresh insight.
In this article, Mariana Mazzucato questions what hiring the big consultancies actually achieves

Good consultancy is modest, careful where it treads, and develops capability, not dependency.
It asks questions, leads to insight, and leaves the client well-placed to move forward under their own steam.
Yes, data and evidence are needed for decision-making. But so are vision, clarity, the ability to support the client cognitively and sub-cognitively through a ‘brave’ process. One might genuinely ask what kind of a consultant is best-placed to offer this support? Maybe a small consultancy with expertise, rather than a large one with a broad palette and a huge infrastructure, but limited by an ancient, moribund culture and a fear of the new if it might harbour risk of being judged internally. (A consultant of a large firm’s first priority is probably to avoid being fired, to play safe with their bosses, who have probably become part of the furniture in a titanic organisation.)
If you really want new thinking, to develop genuine insight, to put yourself in a new place for moving forward, think about contacting us.