Dodging the Economic Bullet

Trying to figure out how your professional services firm can dodge the economic meltdown bullet? (Sorry to mix metaphors.)

The only thing that matters is what your clients need right now. Not what you think they need or might need.

And what your clients need is help in two areas:

1. Cutting costs, fast.

2. Boosting the productivity and effectiveness of key operations, fast.

That’s it.

Don’t pitch them services that do something else. “We help you achieve best-practice in managing employee retention.” Forget it. In a recession, most employees don’t jump ship (unless pushed).

And if you have services that achieve those two goals, speak clearly about how you achieve them, with proof points to validate your claims (i.e., client examples in which you name names and quantify results).

How many of you are doing this? What’s been the result?

If you aren’t doing this, why not? What stands in the way?

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Thought Leadership Lessons from the Recession of 1990-91

Recession. Accelerating layoffs. Postponements of capital equipment purchases (especially information technology). Cutbacks in consultants, IT services firms, legal advice, and training. Worries about survival and staving off bankruptcy. Fears about the onset of another Great Depression.

Thought I was talking about today? I'm remembering the acute U.S. recession of 1990-1991. But there are many lessons for professional services, IT and other firms to learn from those grim years. The recession of nearly 20 years ago provides a number of pertinent lessons on what it took for the consulting, IT and IT services sectors to survive and actually thrive.

In a phrase, it was this: rally behind reengineering.

From July 1990 to March 1991, the U.S. economy was in the grips of a deep recession. Economic growth hadn’t been as slow since the Great Depression. American companies severely cut spending on consulting, information technology and IT services – except in one area: on firms that could help them reengineer their operations.

Reengineering was powerful in showing how companies used IT to make dramatic productivity improvements. But it also demonstrated to consulting, IT, and IT services firms how they could greatly increase demand for their offerings: by creating thought leadership. In the consulting and IT industries, reengineering was the blockbuster management concept of the 1990s.

My firm, The Bloom Group, is extremely excited to announce the launch a multi-company sponsored study that we believe couldn’t come at a better time for the IT, IT services and management consulting sectors. Our study is called “How Big Management Ideas Move Technology Markets.” The topic is about understanding why the most successful thought leadership initiatives of the last 20 years worked – and more important, their lessons for creating demand in today’s economic downturn. Read more about the study here.

Consider how reengineering pulled the consulting and IT industry out of a severe tailspin in the early 1990s. The market embrace of reengineering fueled rapid growth of consulting firms, IT service companies, and technology firms (such as SAP and other ERP software firms) that had positioned their offerings as part of the reengineering solution. According to Gartner, companies in the 1990s spent billions on reengineering consulting services and the technology they required.

“How Big Management Ideas Move Technology Markets” will examine how business reengineering and a number of other management concepts became big successes, while other concepts were ignored.

Rob Leavitt (formerly a senior executive at the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) and I will lead the research. Three of my Bloom Group comrades will participate as well.

Let me know what management concepts you’d like us to research – both those have and have not moved technology markets.

And, overall, what do you think makes for a management concept that sticks -- or sinks?

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Thought Leadership Beyond Professional Services

Rob Leavitt (a Bloom Group affiliate) and I gave a presentation this morning to the Boston chapter of Sales and Marketing Executives International (SMEI), a professional group that assembles people from two camps, one of whom is often from Mars (sales) and the other from Venus (marketing).

The topic was thought leadership marketing outside of professional services -- in companies that sell products (e.g., software) and services (e.g., telecommunications) to other companies.

It was a small group. But our message seemed to resonate. We explained how showing customers that you know a great deal about a problem of theirs that your offering addresses wins many points -- especially if you can show how you solved the problem at other companies, with big ROI.

Despite the current hype, I don't see thought leadership as a panacea for all marketers -- only those whose customers are desperate for insights on issues that the marketer can address. I don't expect Dell or Lenovo to give me advice on how to write better articles on their laptop computers (nor would I listen to them if they did). I wouldn't expect a payroll service to advise me on how to structure pay packages for my employees. Those problems are just too far afield from what these companies do.

But I would listen to Dell or Lenovo advise my company on how to protect the security of my firm's laptops. And I would read advice from ADP or Paychex on how to make sure my firm is never out of compliance with payroll regulations.

At the same time, those firms still need good, old-fashioned marketing to tell me why their laptops are of better quality and why their payroll services are more cost effective. That marketing isn't thought leadership marketing.

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Time to Scour for Your Online Op-Ed Opportunities

One of the newest and best opportunities for thought leaders in professional firms to get their views in front of clients and prospects is the online world – specifically, the digital space that an increasing number of top-tier business and trade press now provide to outside columnists.

For many years, the print side of such business publications as The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week and the dozens of top-tier trade press offered scant opportunities for op-eds and columns by people who weren’t on staff. Consultants, lawyers, accountants and the like had to focus their pens on academic journals in their fields (Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, etc.) and their firms’ own publications.

No longer. Both general business and trade publications have woken up to the fact that their online publications have unlimited news space – and that attracting thought leaders can be a good way to build online traffic.

Just look at the range of columnists at the websites of Business Week and Forbes:

• Business Week. Features such outside columnists as Dov Seidman (CEO of a consulting firm called LRN), Paul Bennett (creative director at design consultancy IDEO), Jim Champy of Perot Systems, Ram Charan, and many others. Take a look here.

• Forbes: Harvard Business School innovation professor Clayton Christensen is among the outsiders showcased here. Looks like Forbes.com is serious about attracting other Christensens. The online publication just hired Tunku Varadarajan (former Wall Street Journal editorial features/op-ed editor) to attract top-flight columnists. He has already landed 16 authors.
  

Many trade publications are doing similar things.

Publications are watching their print circulations plummet and online viewership rise. Needing to generate even more traffic to the websites to generate online ads, many publications are hungry for good online content.

I’ve wondered for awhile why business publications weren’t more aggressive at getting outside experts to write for them. They don’t have to pay them anything. They only need to ensure the quality of their columns is high, and that their columns don’t become thinly disguised sales pitches.

Every marketing department in a professional firm should devote significant time developing relationships with the key online publications in their fields and getting their thought leaders’ articles in there.

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From “The More You Sell, the Less They Buy” Department

I just became aware of a 2007 Economist Intelligence Unit survey of 141 executives on marketing at companies that sell products and services to other businesses, so-called B2B firms. (I hoped that dot-com era term would have gone away like the thousands of Internet businesses that flamed out, but it obviously didn’t. I guess the term "industrial marketing" was just too 20^th century.) The survey respondents apparently were not just professional services firms, although I couldn’t immediately find a breakdown by industry.

The EIU report made a number of interesting points. Thought leadership had become a highly favored marketing technique of business marketers. After “building new business,” survey respondents ranked “positioning our company as a thought leader” as their second most important marketing objective over the next three to five years. Another recent EIU survey of more than 800 buyers of business services (including professional services) found that the three most effective marketing techniques were thought leadership techniques: conferences, original research and surveys/white papers.

The report also took advertising and PR firms to task (read page 17), saying those firms know little about thought leadership.

All well and good. (Whew, I think I’m in the right business.) But here’s where the EIU’s research report goes wrong: It turns into a sales brochure halfway through, on page 12. It thus erodes the credibility it created in the first 11 pages. On page 12, EIU shifts gears and discusses why it should be your “360 degree thought leadership partner.” Page 13 then tells you how good EIU is as a thought leadership partner. By page 14, they’re back to the survey statistics, which indeed are interesting.

My point is this: By inserting in a direct sales pitch in the middle of a research-based white paper, EIU committed one of my top 10 sins of thought leadership: Shifting too soon from an educational message to a sales message. Thought leadership marketing (when done well) lures prospects to you because it demonstrates your mastery of an issue they care about deeply.

Let your display of knowledge on an issue do your selling.

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Understanding the Ecosystem in Which Thought Leadership Creates Demand for IT

The growth of the consulting industry is flat. Many IT service and technology companies are reporting slackening sales. Even the white-hot expansion of the Indian outsourcing firms has softened.

Yet businesses need productivity improvements more than ever. The need for breakthrough ideas about how to make business more efficient is even greater today. But if the demand for consulting and technology industries is slack, doesn’t that suggest, as a whole, that the consulting and technology industries are having a hard time convincing customers they have what industry needs to become more productive?

I say this because during the early days of business reengineering (early 1990s), we saw the same dynamic going on: the U.S. was in a deep recession, the consulting and IT industries were in the tank – except for reengineering (and the demand for information systems that reengineering generated). Reengineering spread like wildfire, and the consulting firm (Index Group) I worked for grew rapidly.

So why was reengineering hot when many other consulting services were not? And why was there strong demand for the technologies that were often critical to reengineering (e.g., SAP's enterprise resource planning software) when demand for many other technologies was tepid?

It's because the "IT ecosystem" in which reengineering operated was firing on all cylinders. What do I mean by IT ecosystem? There are four elements:

• The business gurus who create management concepts that implore managers to make business process changes that require new technology (e.g., the late Michael Hammer, Tom Davenport, etc.) ;
• The consulting firms that create services that execute the concepts in corporations (i.e., help design the business process changes);
• The IT services firms which install the computer technology that the new business processes require; and
• The technology vendors that make that software and hardware, and which magically see demand for their offerings accelerating.

My firm is launching a study on this next week to shed light on this phenomenon (“How Big Management Ideas Move Technology Markets”). Bloom Group affiliate Rob Leavitt (ex-ITSMA), who is working on the study, and I see the research helping consulting, IT services and IT firms work better together to create the next blockbuster concept.

We’ll be looking for sponsors among the consulting, IT services and technology world starting next week. We’re aiming to begin the research in November.

What aspect of this issue would interest you? What would you like to know about such an IT ecosystem? Let me know.

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Michael Hammer, R.I.P., But His Impact (and Reengineering) Live On

It is hard to believe that Michael Hammer, Mr. Reengineering, is gone. Yes, I knew he was in serious condition the last two weeks after an accident while vacationing in the Berkshires. (His website had posted such a note since Aug. 25.) But today’s death notice was still shocking.

He was only 60, and he had many more years to contribute to his calling since the mid-1980s: teaching businesses how to become far more productive through process change and information technology. More important, he was a devoted family man, and his wife and four kids have suffered an enormous loss.

Mike taught many of those who had the fortune to know him (including me) the importance of relentless questioning of conventional wisdom, deep research of innovative practices in businesses to understand what really works (rather than research by literature search or shallow survey instruments), crystal clear communication, and personal integrity.

Michael Hammer was the most brilliant consultant and best business speaker I have ever met. To my knowledge, his approach to researching and developing management concepts – which enabled him to become the thought leader of the business world in the first half of the 1990s -- has never been studied. It needs to be, for two reasons. First, because his impact on the business world has been immense. Second, because I have not seen any professional services firm come anywhere near to replicating his approach to thought leadership R&D (which, in short, was in-depth, case study research comparing leaders and laggards on a very specific business issue). (Mike’s approach to thought leadership will be studied very soon; check back with this blog space in the next week.)

I started to get to know Mike when I joined Index Group in June 1987. (To be sure, I was not close to Mike then or since, but we probably met 20-30 times over the last 20 years to discuss marketing issues. I am honored to say I ghostwrote a couple of articles for him in his early consulting years.)

In his days with Index, he had his own company, Hammer & Co., which was basically Mike and a couple of assistants to run his conferences and book his speeches. His office was located within the offices of Index at 5 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, Mass. He and Index were partners in a research business called PRISM (Partnership for Research in Information Systems Management), which was sponsored by more than 100 companies at its apex around 1993.

It’s actually unfair of me to call Mike “Mr. Reengineering,” even though I believe the concept is largely what he’ll be known for. It’s unfair because reengineering was only part of Mike’s thought leadership portfolio. To be sure, it was his blockbuster. But he had many other intriguing ideas that I saw during his research partnership with Index Group. Even still, reengineering does – and will – live on. Whether it’s called reengineering or another name, many companies worldwide continue to apply Hammer’s principles of cross-functional, IT-enabled process change.

My memories of working with Mike as a ghostwriter will never leave me. He was the only consultant I know who could sit down with you for 30 minutes, tell you the article he wanted you to ghostwrite for him, talk the piece out, and have the thinking nearly 90% polished while he was telling it to you. That is, a transcript of the discussion was nearly ready to publish. Not an extraneous thought, no ideas out of order, no debatable assertions unsupported. Uncanny.

If there is ever an award for thought leadership in the 20^th century consulting world, Michael Hammer would have to be among the finalists. My deepest sympathies to his family and friends. Rest in peace, Mike. You will truly be missed.

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The Coup at Booz

I just read that Tom Stewart, who has been editor in chief at Harvard Business Review for the last six years, has joined Booz & Company to lead its marketing, intellectual capital and knowledge management activities. Here's the press release.

This is a coup for Booz. Tom is one of the best around at helping experts nurture and package their ideas, and at nurturing and packaging his own ideas.

But from reading about his responsibilities, I believe the job will not be easy. The greatest challenge for CMOs in professional services firms is one that many CMOs view as beyond their control: how to help the professionals in their firms produce great content – big ideas that turn into bestselling books, Harvard Business Review articles, captivating public speaking presentations, and so on.

Many CMOs I have talked to see themselves “stuck” with the content of the consultants, lawyers, accountants or other professionals in their firm. If that content is mediocre, not much can be done about it, in their view.

I see that as an unnecessary diminution of marketing’s responsibilities in a professional firm. Somewhere in the firm – and there is no reason it can’t be done in marketing – there needs to be an intellectual capital and service R&D function.

Given the description of Stewart’s role in the Booz press release, it appears he will own IC R&D. Now comes the hard part: figuring out how that R&D arm should operate – i.e., what business issues it should research, how it should research those issues and how it should develop ideas to solve them. The next big part is determining how R&D should work with the people at Booz who develop methodology and conduct training & development. A great idea that isn’t scaled up for wide-scale delivery in a professional firm means that only a limited number of professionals will be able to practice and master it.

When he was a Fortune magazine writer in the 1990s, Stewart was one of the sharpest journalists I had ever met. I know he will be up to the challenge at Booz.

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Why “Increasing Marketing in a Downturn” is So Much Blather

Unlike most marketers, I don’t take it on faith that the best time to increase the marketing budget is during an economic downturn. I say that because too many chief marketing officers use that line to protect their budgets from the budget hackers.

In fact, many marketing programs in professional services should get hacked because they are ill-conceived. (Example: Fancy publications that don’t focus on a professional firm’s ideas, much image advertising, and most trade show booths.) Other undeserving programs may be worthy but are badly executed. Unless they are executed better, there’s no point in doing them.

In a downturn, marketing should scrutinize its programs and get rid of ones that aren’t working – i.e., aren’t generating real leads, market awareness (which can be measured in terms of press mentions, website visitors, white paper downloads and other metrics), or prospect inquiries. At the same time, marketing should then determine which programs are working.

Then marketing should increase its investments in the programs that work by reinvesting the dollars from the programs it killed.

Stop trying to defend your budget. Instead, determine what’s generating leads, market awareness, and prospect inquiries – and do more of it.

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Putting Our Thoughts in a Book (Sorry in Advance About the Shameless Plug)

A lot of our business is ghostwriting for professional firms. So a lot of the satisfaction we get is vicarious, from seeing our clients’ names in print. But I must admit to a special feeling from seeing my name in print, especially on the cover of a book. (I thought I had gotten over the thrill of the byline when I left journalism 21 years ago. Guess not.)

Three fellow Bloom Groupers (Bernie Thiel, Susan Buddenbaum and Tim Parker) and I have just published a book that collects newsletter articles our firm has written since our launch in 1998. The book bears the same name as our newsletter, Thoughts on Thought Leadership. You can buy the book on Amazon here.

This will sound like a plug (and it is), but I think book is a good way to get your boss, practice heads, managing partner or others in your firm behind thought leadership marketing (for those of you struggling to justify your budget). OK, the ad copy is over.

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The New Growth Formula for the Indian Tech Firms

While vacationing, I couldn't resist commenting on an article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal about the troubles of the Indian tech services firms. (“For India’s Tech Titans, Growth is Waning,” Aug. 20.)

The article described what perhaps was an inevitable trend: declining growth of Indian IT firms as their labor costs increased, competition from other low-cost locales emerged, and Western demand for IT services slackened in an economic downturn.

But the way out of the crunch is also predictable: deliver IT services that are not only less expensive but are also better than those provided by Western companies.

That takes breakthrough services – i.e., creating innovative and superior ways of providing tech support, building Websites that provide post-sale customer service, mining customer data to identify new-product opportunities, and myriad other IT service and consulting offerings. The article said some Indian companies are taking that route (Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys were mentioned).

The question then becomes this: How do you create breakthrough services? One long-ago-proven method is studying a set of non-IT service companies (i.e., your customers) that are exemplary in some domain – building great customer service Websites, providing excellent tech support, etc. – and comparing what they did to a set of companies that aren’t so good at the same task. Studying the key differences between these two groups then shows the IT service/consulting firm doing the research what it must do in its service -- in other words, formalizing informal practices.

This is how the reengineering consulting service was developed by Michael Hammer and the consultancy CSC Index in the late 1980s/early 1990s. It requires an investment in research that leads to service innovation. We haven’t seen many Indian IT service/consulting firms – or Western firms for that matter – make such research investments. But after the price advantage diminishes between the Western and Eastern firms, offering a superior service is what will separate the market leaders from the laggards.

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Home Page as Showcase for Thought Leadership

I absolutely love the new website of newly christened management consultancy Booz (formerly Booz Allen Hamilton). The firm has devoted most of the site's home page to its intellectual capital -- not to its dozens of practices, or to some smarmy mission statement, or to some incoherent message from the CEO.

Here's the site: http://www.booz.com

It's pristine, to the point and engaging. It may have gone a little overboard in emphasizing the firm's thoughts. (The few executives who haven't heard of Booz may not realize it's a management consulting firm from the home page alone.)

But it works for me. What do you think?

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How Publication Design Derails Thought Leadership

You wouldn’t read Harvard Business Review if it looked like a sales brochure – dominated by fancy photography unrelated to the copy next to it, shorn of author bylines, and organized into small sections that force 100 words to make points requiring 1,000 words. Would you?

I recently received IBM’s 2008 “Global CEO Study” and saw such a publication. Seventy-five pages that look like a slick brochure. Only it’s a study, not a sales pitch. But it appears like a sales pitch.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves since I got into the thought leadership marketing business 21 years ago. Most professional services firms continue to use sales brochure design – not editorial publication design – to dress up their intellectual capital. It’s a big mistake – just like putting a Hyundai badge on a car that is a BMW or Lexus-worthy competitor. (In fact, Hyundai just did this, with a $38,000 new car called the Hyundai Genesis. Wall Street Journal auto reviewer Jeff Sabatini raved about the car last Saturday but ultimately stated his belief that Hyundai’s down-market brand will curb interest in it.)

I haven’t read the IBM report, so I can’t comment on the content. (Here’s where to go to get it, but you have to register: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/html/ceostudy2008.html)

But I imagine IBM spent a great deal to create that content – on conducting the interviews (around 1,000 face to face) and on the design of the publication.

And that’s the problem: The design is way too slick.

Does the brochure design-editorial publication design debate rage on in your organization? And if so, who’s winning?

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The Custom Publishing Conundrum

In recent weeks, several freelance writers have told us their ghostwriting work in producing white papers, articles and custom publications for IT companies is drying up.

I’m not surprised, and it’s no reflection on the skills of these writers. In my mind the downturn has to do with the way publishers of the material – the IT vendors -- address the quality of the ideas in their publications. The vast majority of the articles I’ve read over the years are superficial, vague, jargon-filled, and evidence-free (i.e., very few identify customers that have benefited from their technology). I can’t imagine these articles generate many leads.

If they did, why are budgets for them apparently being slashed today?

To be sure, custom publishing nonetheless remains a big business in the U.S. IT vendors publish hundreds of white papers every year. And in 2008, business-to-business marketers in the U.S. will spend an estimated 30% of their marketing budgets on “custom content” (email newsletters, white papers, customer case studies, blogs, etc.), according to a March study by Junta42 and BtoB magazine. (To see the details, go here: http://www.junta42.com/resources/Business_to_Business_Custom_Publishing_Research/)

Technology vendors do need to tell their target customers that their products have value. They do need to provide evidence that they understand the operations of their customers' business that their technology improves. But they need to do so in a convincing way.

I’d love to hear from the community that produces these publications – the ghostwriters, marketers, PR agencies, IT research companies and computer publishing firms (or anyone else involved in this business). Is your business off? What do you think of the product you’re producing? Does it generate quality leads? How would you improve it?

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Why Your CEO Should Blog

There are a fast-increasing number of blogs in professional services. But few of those bloggers appear to be from the people who run these firms.

I recently came across one very interesting exception: the CEO of Indian outsourcing firm HCL Technologies, a $1.9 billion firm. Vineet Nayar's blog is remarkable on many fronts: for his candor, for the number of posts, for his seeming passion for blogging (although there doesn't appear to be new posts since June).

Check it out: http://vineet.hclblogs.com/

The blog allows HCL employees, clients and prospective clients to better get inside Vineet's head. And he blogs a lot about the kind of company HCL is and is becoming.

From his writings, Vineet appears very employee-focused. I admire his willingness to publicly air his -- and his employees' -- views on HCL's work and work environment.

Do any of you have CEOs who blog? If so, what do they blog about? And what's been the external and internal impact of those blogs? And if they don't blog today, do you think they should?

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Why Display Ads Should Display Expertise

Two ads in today's Wall Street Journal show how professional firms should use advertising – not just to promote a brand image but also to plug specific insights and client work.

Accenture ran an ad in its continuing Tiger Woods series, a now 5-year-old campaign featuring the world’s premier golfer. The ad shows Tiger sizing up a putt, with the copy below the ball mentioning the firm’s research on 500 “high-performing” businesses and client experience. The jump page is www.accenture.com/research

EDS, in the same edition of the newspaper, ran an ad featuring its client work at Molson/Coors.

When they run advertisements, professional services firms should go beyond their brand positioning statements, especially when they are unmemorable, vague and non-distinctive. Why not point to a new piece of research or a client case study on a website to increase the chance that an expensive advertisement goes beyond the vague benefit of “brand enhancement” to actually generate specific inquiries about specific expertise?

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Can You Give Away Too Many Thoughts?

I recently received an email from a marketing person at a large professional services firm who lamented about an issue I have heard for 20 years: Some professionals in the firm worrying about giving away the firm's secrets in its various thought leadership marketing activities.

My response was (and will always be) this: If a client or competitor can figure out how to solve a certain problem by merely reading your article, presentation or even book, you don't have a defensible service. "Reengineering the Corporation" (Hammer and Champy) sold millions of copies in the 1990s, yet lots of consulting firms made lots of money helping companies reengineer their businesses. Many companies couldn't reengineer their processes just by reading the book.

Have you heard this concern -- that "we're giving away our secrets" -- at your professional services firm? And how have you responded?

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Horse Before the Cart

Hi to everyone who reads this blog -- everyone who wants to learn about and share their experiences and views about the emerging discipline of "thought leadership."

This is my second post but my first introduction to all of you -- i.e., what this blog will be about, who I am, and what I'd like to see from all of you readers. First, I'd like you to contribute because that's, in part, what makes blogging MUCH different than just writing and posting articles. The power of a blog, it seems to me, is not just for all of you to get inside my head but for everyone to get inside your heads.

This is my first blog, so please bear with me as I wrestle with what for me is a new medium. The medium at first does feel a little bit like my very early days as a business journalist and sports journalist. (I was a sportswriter in college and just out of college -- San Clemente Sun-Post in the late 1970s -- until I realized that good sportswriters were a dime a dozen.) I switched to business journalism in 1980 when I joined the Orange County Register in California. I loved the ability to write something and see my work in the next day's paper.

Now the "next-day's paper" is the next-minute's blog. Very powerful, and very scary.

Why does the world need one more blog? (Note: maybe it doesn't.) I have been involved in this field of "thought leadership marketing" for 21 years now. (You know something is emerging as a recognized field when it finally has a name that people recognize.) I was fortunate (and lucky) to have joined a management consulting firm (Index Group) in 1987 that had linked up with an ex-MIT computer science professor named Michael Hammer in a research program called PRISM. That program was where the reengineering concept emanated. Index the consulting firm converted it into a consulting practice, and reengineering became the blockbuster consulting concept of the 1990s.

So I was very, very lucky to have seen how the sausage was made -- how the reengineering concept was developed, packaged and marketed. And I got the wonderful opportunity to play a big role in marketing it.

Other consulting firms had been at the thought leadership game long before Index: McKinsey (McKinsey Quarterly has been around since 1964), Booz Allen and others. But none of them had created a blockbuster concept like reengineering. Index's revenue grew from ~$40 million in 1987 when I joined the firm to ~$250 million by 1995. What's more, reengineering had become a multbillion-dollar consulting industry (with firms like McKinsey, Cap Gemini, Accenture, and Deloitte all providing reengineering services).

I view thought leadership as a way for professional services firms of all types (not just consulting firms) to demonstrate their expertise to prospective clients, to give them a sample of their "smarts." Traditional marketing techniques such as advertising, brochures, trade show booths, etc., are not good ways to demonstrate a professional firm's expertise. An advertisement only allows you to declare your firm has some expertise.

There's a big difference between declaring you are the expert and demonstrating it. Clients want you to demonstrate you are a leading expert. Besides having great client references, the way to demonstrate you have expertise on some issue is to show your command of it in a 3,000-word article or 200-page book (or both and more). That's why publicizing research reports, publishing in Harvard Business Review, writing compelling business books, etc., etc., can help professional firms rise above the noise and grab client attention (and budget).

In this blog, I will share my experiences and views on thought leadership. I will point to exemplary things some professional firms are doing in the thought leadership domain, and things they SHOULD be doing to generate and market compelling ideas.

But I want to hear your views as well, and push everyone's thinking about this emerging and exciting discipline.

Welcome aboard.

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The lightbulb goes on!

We had a great session on Thursday morning with the New England Chapter of the Professional Marketing Forum in Boston. The topic was "Establishing the Digital Relationship."

Tim Parker of my firm (The Bloom Group) presented on the use of Web 2.0 technologies by professional services firms. Here is Tim's presentation:

2008 Bloom Group Website Study

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Doug Cornelius of Goodwin Procter, a law firm, told us about his experiences of blogging on knowledge management and on his legal specialty, real estate finance, for law firms for 18 months.

Establishing the Digital Relationship

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And Yuval Zukerman of interactive marketing agency Molecular Inc. gave his presentation, "So You Have a Blog. Now What?"

So You Have A Blog: Now What?

view presentation (tags: blog social network web)

I think everyone came away without a strong impression that if some people in their firm weren't already blogging, they should be (including me)! So thanks to Tim, Doug and Yuval for truly demonstrating the need for people in professional services firms to blog. And (especially) for pushing me into the blogosphere.

Here I go ...

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