I have waited years for this analysis on management consulting!

BUSINESS: "Management consulting: Giving advice in adversity; Wall Street's woes are yet another headache for the consulting industry," The Economist, 27 September 2008.

I've had this bit for years: my pet theory on management consulting that I developed when I sought to leave Washington and move back to the Midwest in the 1990s. Management consulting balloons across the 1980s just as major corps cut their strategic planning groups to near zero and starting outsourcing that function. So then you see the waves begin with Total Quality Management (TQM) in the early 90s, then the repackaging called Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). The next wave was consumed by the Y2K effort, which then segued quickly into the Tech Crash and 9/11 and the associated new regs, like Sarbannes-Oxley and the Patriot Act. So the BPR-after-next, as I liked to call it, was long delayed.

Now we're into a world where asking companies to pay you millions for a massive PPT slide deck that says, "This is your company now and this is what your company should look like tomorrow," is simply a non-starter. So while the tech-heavy firms like Accenture and Cap Gemini do well at the bottom and the high-end starts like the Monitor Group do well at the top of the pyramid, a lot of mid-range, standard cookie-cutter management consulting firms are seeing their market decline. Everyone wants the super-integrated solution now that combines compliance, security, systems-integration, performance metrics—and they want it delivered in a service-oriented architecture that frees companies up to evolve in ways commensurate with globalization's many demands and opportunities.

Thus, the article says, "the industry badly needs a 'Big New Idea' that it can sell to clients."

Naturally, Enterra sees resilience as the front-runner. Don't just describe the condition; enable it all the way through the architecture and technology.