StrAIT Blogging

I recently attended a dinner meeting addressing, among other things, the future of work. That reminded me of a book that I read a long time ago in which the same thing was discussed. That book is titled “The Future of Work”. An image of that book cover is shown here (click on it to see that book on Amazon.com). I’m not going to attempt to do a book review here. I will address one of the points made in the book and what it means to the consulting business.

In Grantham’s book he describes the “Hollywood Model”. That business model is based on the movie making business in Hollywood where teams of independent, self-supporting specialists group together for a project. At the completion of the project, these teams disband. These specialist entities may be individuals, small organizations, larger organizations or yet another small team of specialists. As this idea evolves we start to envision a network of entities that begin to look like a complex molecule.

Maybe it would be more meaningful to refer to a molecular consulting ecosystem. Just for kicks I did a Google search for “molecular consulting ecosystem” and got no hits. I think I’ll include that phrase in my keywords for this post. Or not. Back to a serious note, the notion of comparing coordinated groups of independent entities for some common purpose to something like a molecule is not a new idea. Actually, if you think about it, we are talking about a fairly structured collection of entities focusing on very specific goals or projects. I think the best analogy is a crystal. Crystals are composed of atoms in a very specific structure. They tend to be stronger and more predictable than more typical organic molecules. They also tend to last a long time. Maybe naming such a business model after a crystalline structure is a good idea.

So what should be done to actually use this idea in a more general purpose consulting environment? Let’s think about a few more details and specific goals of such an arrangement. So what are the basic goals for the group?

• The entities (individuals or small groups) must be knowledgeable.
  
• The entities (individuals or small groups) must be perceived as knowledgeable by the group’s clients.
  
• The entities (individuals or small groups) must be safe to do business with.
  
• The entities (individuals or small groups) must be perceived as safe to do business with by the group’s clients.
  
• The group must have a means of generating new opportunities.
  
• The group must have a means of presenting a unified presence to the marketplace.
  
• The group must have an accepted means of distributing revenue among the entities.
  
• The group must have an accepted means of distributing operating costs among the entities.
  
• The group must have an accepted means of distributing liability among the entities or centralizing it as appropriate.
  
• The group must have an accepted means of recruiting and vetting new entities.
• The group must have an accepted means of allocating rights and access to any intellectual property generated by the group during an engagement and not the exclusive property of the client.
  
• The group must have access to systems to support collaboration among the entities for skills exchange and training.
  
• The group must not be constrained by national boundaries.
  
• The group must have access to systems to allow the collaboration on work product documents and proposals.
  
• The group must be able to scale to perform various sizes of engagements.
  
• The group must be able to include external entities as necessary for specific engagements.
  
• The group must be able to include clients as appropriate.
  

Basically, the group must be able to function very much like a company but maintain the ability to expand and contract as needed. It strikes me that what the group needs is an infrastructure that looks much like a PMO, or Project Management Office. That PMO must have some of the attributes of a business and not just a department within a larger organization. Going back to our crystal analogy, there must be a seed crystal around which other crystals form or connect. That seed crystal becomes the key to making everything else stable and effective. The seed crystal contains the PMO.

Maybe I’ll just call this the “Crystal Consulting Model”. Google doesn’t have anything for that phrase either. Anyway, consider this a part of an upcoming series of posts. I don’t know how many or when they will appear but this topic is important to our business so defining it more clearly is very important to us.

Thanks for stopping by. Any comments would be much appreciated. See you next time…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites