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.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment