Globalisation

From the consultant’s point of view, a particularly important feature of the globalisation of business is the trend towards more homogeneity. At the moment, the levels of use and degree of maturity in the European Consulting market vary quite widely, with the UK and Germany being more mature markets, and Italy and France (for example) developing at an increasing pace. One of the effects of the globalisation of clients’ businesses will be that discrepancies such as these will tend to disappear: consultants, in meeting their clients’ needs, will themselves become more homogeneous. But homogeneity will bring its own opportunities. We are already working with clients to establish multinational, multi-skilled — even multi-company — teams, because only through these combinations of perspectives and skills will they be able to take advantage of the borderless opportunities of a world in which industries are converging and geographical boundaries disappearing. The challenge for Consulting firms, therefore, will be to maintain pools of specialised, often local knowledge in an environment where homogeneity is becoming the norm; it will be to be able to integrate very different sets of cultural values without losing their essential variety.