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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