How Tech, Media, and Consulting Convergence Can Right an Egregious Wrong
Michael Porter possesses the most overpowering intellect of anyone I have ever met. He’s simply brilliant.
Most great academics win important prizes. Important prizes are named after Michael Porter.
So how did the Harvard Business Review price his groundbreaking article, “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy,” for only $6.95?? After all, even the country’s worst lawyer still gets away with charging $200 an hour.
Well, the lawyer does work for hire. The lawyer has the mandate: “solve my problem!” Meanwhile, all Michael Porter did was forge a “theory.” Oh, how abstract. How can that possibly solve the problem a business person faces, today?
A Detour through Convergence
In our businesses, I evangelize the convergence of marketing services, media, technology, and information services. I believe that effective communication for any organization requires an increasingly interdisciplinary approach that incorporates elements of each discipline:
- Marketing: Companies cannot buy their way into a brand. They need the consumer to engage.
- Media: Companies find value in the already assembled audience that large media companies offer.
- Technology: Companies needs sophisticated consumer-centric information technology to reach micro-clusters of customers in personalized ways.
- Information: As businesses use these tools and standardize processes, they will rely upon benchmarks, data sets, and other sources of information to assess and improve performance.
Media companies may have the best skill set possible to take advantage of this convergence. They have built-in audiences, and they know how to engage people. They are well positioned to offer customized solution information at scale, if they are willing to think more broadly about the prospect of providing deeper solutions to the marketplace. For example, Wall Street Journal now offers a section on Management 2.0, and Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg Business Week do as well.
From a different line of attack, the pragmatism of digital agencies (and their lack of hard assets) may, in fact, make them more agile as “solution provider” who integrate the other disciplines. Alternatively, software companies that transform themselves from “hammers looking for a nail” to user-centric solution providers have a similar opportunity. Their tools are sticky; B2B software applications such as Salesforce.com run critical processes in even small organizations. Finally, information service providers that integrate themselves into the flow of an organization can become indispensable. As we digitize increasing amounts of information, the capacity for sentiment analysis is a new frontier in helping extract insight from processes that previously seemed incapable of systematization.
Moving to Solutions
The Holy Grail of business is creating solutions. Strategy consultants — the ultimate “solution” — undertake the messiest of intuitive activities to solve complex interdisciplinary problems that existing machines and processes cannot tackle.
But the dark secret of strategy consulting firms is that they use mere mortals to accomplish their “high value-added” black magic. While consulting engagements are guided by senior partners who possess decades of intuition, experience, and remarkable intellectual firepower, most of the work is done by mere mortals, graduates of top business and law schools who work hard but who do not bring deep domain experience to engagements.
The “Know” portal, the knowledge platform of one leading global consultancy, is a veritable treasure trove of high-value information. Most leading consulting firms provide their junior personnel access to similar knowledge development platforms that help transform these mere mortals into super-powered solution providers. Any enterprising new consultant can see the confidential results of past studies for different clients in these private extranets.
If highly customized media from the “Know” portal creates millions dollar consulting engagements, clearly the media companies are on the wrong end of the pricing premium. Leading media companies — Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Business Week — are missing out. And they are repositioning themselves, moving from “information providers” to platforms that facilitate information distribution and networking.
Ready, Set, Disrupt
A generation ago, a disruptive breed of information-based organizations began this trend. The Corporate Executive Board, Gartner, Forrester, The Advisory Board Company, were disruptive innovators that provided some of the value of consulting at shared cost. They used a version of the 80-20 rule (80% of the value; 20% of the cost) to build billion dollar businesses with a simple value proposition: you don’t need the customization.
The next frontier is to go 95-5. To go 95-5, a solution must solve problems in a highly customized way — at shared cost. Yesterday’s disruptive opportunity was low customization, low cost. Today’s disruptive opportunity (high customization, low cost) is even greater. Instead of providing reports on a generic problem at shared cost, new organizations can provide specific solutions at shared cost. Successfully executing on this opportunity will require all four skills: the media mind, the marketing mind, the technology mind, and the information services mind.
If these four things are combined together successfully, the combination is powerful: a solution that is far lower cost and even greater value than consulting.
What if every company could access their own “Know” portal? And what if that “Know” portal was filled with solutions and answers, as well as tools to start implementing them?
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