management consulting 101

"Maybe if I confuse them they will agree with me."
- Scott McGillivray

Mark Twain defined an expert as "an ordinary fellow from another town".

shoes

Peter York looks at the development of marketing here:

[In the 1970s] Our reports were more fancy essays, involving intelligent taxonomies, elaborate conceits and a lot of art references. We wouldn’t have called it marketing then because that generic sailed too close to the cheery, cheesy world of promotions, direct mail and what advertising people called below-the-line; in other words, little better than sales.

When I set up in business with a partner, we described what we did as “research-based strategy”, aligning ourselves with the coming world of management consultancy. We chose not to align ourselves with advertising, the more obviously glamorous front end of marketing. Ad-land seemed a bit rackety. I’d learnt my MR trade before I wrote a word of journalism, but it came in handy, especially the taxonomy part – what we called “market segmentation” – when we described people, what they wanted out of life and how it explained their shoes.

Cash Cow

The Growth Share Matrix is a framework to help companies think about the priority (and resources) that they should give to their different businesses, explains the Economist here.

Pay for performance

A new model to pay for value not hours here.