Author: Yao Yao time: 2005-12-2811:32: 48.
First, the birth of local consulting companies
"In this industry full of megalomaniacs and charlatans, he is a truly original thinker", which is the evaluation of Drucker, the "father of management" by The Economist magazine in the United States. Is the first half of this sentence, I think it is more appropriate to put it in the management consulting industry in China. Below, we will start from the birth of the consulting company and feel the standard consulting behavior of China Consulting Company:
The reason why there are so many management consulting companies in China, or so many people join the team of establishing management consulting companies, is that the entry threshold of consulting industry is low, and a consulting company can be established with 65438+ 10,000 yuan or 80,000 yuan. The registration fee for consulting companies is the lowest in Shanghai. As long as you hire an intermediary company, provide two ID cards and pay more than 1000 yuan, you can register a consulting company with a registered capital of 65438+ 10,000 yuan or even 500,000 yuan. After two weeks, everything from business license and tax registration certificate to official seal, legal representative seal and even membership card of private enterprise association will be done for you. The rest is to rent an office building (commercial and residential), buy two computers and an emergency phone, and the company can open. On the other hand, the consulting industry looks very profitable. The so-called ride a bike in, if you can convince the boss, then you can drive out. Low input and high return, people naturally flock to it.
More importantly, management is a strange thing. It looks easy to get started and master. After reading two management textbooks, you will feel like a management expert. Even people who have no theoretical basis in management can tell you how to manage and put forward their own set of management theories. So, we also saw the management books all over the street, what is "easy management" here and what is "management cheats" there; Learn management from Tang Priest or Song Dynasty, and learn management from West Point Military Academy for a while, which makes everyone feel that management is as simple as that. The author once wrote an article entitled "My wife taught me how to manage". The reason is that the author accepted an invitation from an entrepreneur friend to help him manage a foreign trade company in Shanghai. Because it is a small company, my friend asked my wife to be the cashier of this company, saying that he was more at ease. My young wife just graduated from junior college and then worked as a secretary in a company for a year. In this context, I am told every day that I should manage it in this way and that way. I always thought I didn't know how to manage, but I was mismanaging. It can be seen that people with a little knowledge will think that they know management; Any "intellectual" who works in an enterprise can tell you how this enterprise should be managed.
However, these "management experts" are often unable (or were unable) to practice their "management ideals" in the enterprises they serve, and the only way out may be to set up a management consulting company. For example, we saw that some MBA graduates couldn't find jobs, so several people got together, drank a few glasses of old wine, shouted "I won't cooperate with others" and began to do management consulting. We also see that some professional managers have failed to display their ambitions in enterprises. They always think that the boss doesn't know how to manage, but it is difficult for them to display their talents. Then, they thought that writing a few reports a month would earn 10,000 yuan, while writing a report for consultation would earn 300,000 yuan, so they raised the banner of "manager school" and started consulting. Not to mention university professors, they think that management consulting is their hereditary territory, and theory should be combined with practice, not to mention that they have a large number of cheap graduate students to use. Finally, we can see that the intellectuals in China, big or small, true or false, have devoted themselves or are ready to devote themselves to the revolutionary torrent of management consulting.
When consulting companies start, the first problem they face is how to take orders, or how to market them. These intellectuals often don't have much social resources, and feel that since they want to be teachers for others, they have to put on airs, and it is better to wait for customers to come to their homes. Moreover, they also learned that enterprises in China often look for consulting companies online after consulting needs. As a result, the author found that the marketing model of local consulting companies is very single, and they basically rely on the network. To rely on online marketing, in addition to making a bluff or attractive website, it is more important to improve the click-through rate or attention of your own website-because customers often rely on search engines such as Baidu and Google to find consulting companies, domestic consulting companies have made great efforts to improve their rankings on search keywords such as "management consulting", "consulting companies" and "strategic consulting".
One way is to participate in the "bidding ranking". This is a business launched by Baidu, which means that whoever pays high money can rank first in search results. Because domestic consulting companies regard the Internet as their magic weapon to make a living, they are hot in the ranking of related keywords, and the price is also hot. At the time of writing this chapter, 54 consulting companies have participated in the bidding ranking of "management consulting" keywords on Baidu, and the first bidding has reached 9.88 yuan/time. In other words, if you search for "management consulting" on Baidu and click on the number one consulting company, the other party will pay Baidu 9.88 yuan for each click (strangely, there is no ranking of international consulting companies here. This means that you can't find a foreign consulting company after searching for "management consulting" on Baidu for five pages. And if these consulting companies want to always appear on the right page of the search keyword "management consulting" (called hot words in Baidu), for example, if they want to rank in the top three, the quotation has reached 33,600 yuan/year.
Another way is to "optimize the network". This is mainly aimed at Google search engine. Google's approach is fairer. For example, it is directly marked as "sponsor link" on the right, but the price is unambiguous at all, and it is $3 per click. The ranking on the left, he doesn't charge, still follows the search principle in our hearts-what kind of web page should be ranked first with the highest attention. However, in this way, IT has brought business to many IT companies. Their main job is to help domestic consulting companies do network optimization to improve the search ranking of websites in Google. Therefore, if readers have the heart to search for "management consulting" on Google every day, they will find that their left ranking is always different. This is not the result of any consulting company's increasing attention, but the result of the consulting company's network support to further optimize the website.
Second, the packaging of local consulting companies.
The bidding ranking is done, the website is optimized, and customers come to us. The key is packaging. According to the author's experience in dealing with various local consulting companies, the author summarizes their packaging as "two exaggerations and two vacuities", that is, exaggerating the company's image and performance; Virtual organizational structure, virtual company team. Specifically:
First, exaggerate the company image.
Open the website of any company, and you will see that the "company introduction" is full of all kinds of adjectives. You are "the first well-known management consulting company established in China" and I am "China TOP 10 Gold Medal Management Consulting Company"; You are "strategic research first" and I am "management promotion leading"; You are "the best" and I am "the biggest"; You are "top" and I am "first-class". It's really "the flowers are getting more and more fascinating." Anyway, first of all, customers are fascinated, all experts, all professionals, all integrating theory with practice, all blending domestic and international. Who should we call? Secondly, researchers and caring people in the consulting industry are also very confused. China's consulting industry seems to be prosperous, and there are China McKinsey everywhere, even more than McKinsey, because they are all "rooted in the local area and pay attention to actual combat" and "based in China and connected with the international community". Speaking of which, Zhuo Yuan once drew such a picture (figure 10. 1 missing), and I saw that at least three local consulting companies quoted this picture. They just changed Zhuo Yuan here to the name of their own company, and then put it in the company's promotional materials and project proposals for extensive publicity. Domestic consulting companies are often lazy, and plagiarism is one of the major problems, which I will always mention later.
Second, exaggerate the company's performance.
Since it is impossible to compare the advantages and disadvantages of "company introduction", it seems that we can only compare the consulting performance or success stories of these companies. But here, it is full of more exaggerated elements. The following are some commonly used techniques, which I summarize as the following three tricks:
1. Turn private into public, that is, describe your past consulting performance as a successful case of the current company. This is very common in small and medium-sized consulting companies in China, especially in newly established consulting companies. As the author said earlier, it is very popular for domestic consulting companies to divide and combine. What should I do if there is no case in the newly established consulting company of the old consulting company? Take some cases that I hosted, participated in and even just learned in the past as the cases of this new consulting company. Some newly established consulting companies of professional managers regard the enterprises they have served as their own consulting cases. So let's look at the websites of domestic consulting companies, and each company has outstanding performance, with at least a dozen typical cases (by the way, this is another move. In other words, it is only a typical case or part of the case, which makes customers feel that there are still many successful cases not listed above. But in fact, if all the companies that have consulted and worked in this company are added up, it can only list a few "typical cases".
If it is acceptable for us to list only the names of these enterprises in the publicity, I saw a newly established consulting company (such as S Company) in Shanghai. In the case introduction part, I used 30 pages to introduce the consulting case they had done for an import and export company, and detailed their suggestions from strategy to organization to finance, process and human resources. In fact, this case was done by roland berger, and the author also believes that the founder of this company once participated in this consulting project. However, it would be a bit unorthodox if the report were moved here intact, only replacing "roland berger's suggestion" with "S company's suggestion" and putting it as its own consulting case in the project proposal provided to customers.
2. To see big from small is to exaggerate small projects into big ones. On the websites of consulting companies around the world, we can see that many companies have consulted China Telecom, Lenovo Group, Datang Telecom and Minmetals Group. In fact, they may have just consulted some subsidiaries under these groups, so they consulted the group; They may just have done a module of human resources for these groups, such as job qualifications, so they have done human resources consultation for these groups and even the whole; Some even gave some training to these groups (or their subsidiaries and Sun Company), such as professional etiquette, but on the website, these groups "unfortunately" became their consulting customers. "Seeing the big from the small" is a common exaggeration, but I have seen another kind of performance promotion, that is, "controlling the small with the big". That is to say, I consulted a certain group, which has four subsidiaries, that is to say, I consulted five companies, so I just added five more companies to the company's customer list.
3. Make something out of nothing. The worst thing should be this situation, which has two specific manifestations: the first situation is that projects that have never been done at all have been done. There are two types here: timid and brave. Timid people just don't list customers' names, but only say that they have consulted "a leading domestic food enterprise" and "a listed domestic chemical company", which is euphemistically called "keeping secrets for customers", but he knows so many domestic food enterprises and listed chemical companies that it is impossible for customers to know whether he has consulted them. However, customers are getting smarter and smarter, and they often ask consulting companies to provide a list of companies they have served and contact information for verification. There will be something bolder here. I have encountered this situation. A consulting company clearly listed several "successful enterprises" that it had served in the project proposal submitted to a potential customer, but the customer called to ask, and the other party's reply was "This consulting company only came to talk about the project, and the project didn't close at all". It's a pity that the consulting companies in China are so bold and the consulting industry in China is so chaotic.
In the second case, an obviously unsuccessful project is said to be a successful project. This is too numerous to mention. On the websites of various companies, there are successful projects everywhere, even with the signature of the customer leader and the official seal of the customer company as evidence. You can't believe it. Are they really successful projects? That's true, but how can you see so many consulting shady stories on the Internet, hear so many complaints from enterprises about consulting companies, and see so many consulting companies struggling or even closing down in real life?
Third, the virtual organizational structure.
Obviously, for an office space of 50-60 square meters, you can open the company's promotional materials and have a look. There are strategic consulting department, investment banking department, business development department, administration department, human resources department and customer service department. In short, there are many seven departments and eight rooms. Five or six people can flaunt that the company has power industry research centers, food industry research centers, financial industry research centers, or enterprise strategy research institutes, human resources research institutes, and organizational structure research institutes. Finally, we should learn from international consulting companies and set up knowledge centers for knowledge management. Obviously, there is such a small company, and as a result, it is run in Hangzhou and Changsha, which gives people the feeling that it is a consulting group.
I often study the websites of various consulting companies in China. The most interesting thing I have ever seen is that there are two consulting companies, one in Hunan and the other in Hubei. Judging from their company profile, eight poles are out of reach. I don't know who made such an organization chart first (figure 10.2 is missing), and the discerning person knows that these institutions are virtual at a glance. It is such a picture that another company puts it directly on the Internet as its own organization chart in order to save trouble. The graphics remain the same, even the empty boxes are exactly the same, except that the name "XXX" there was changed to the name of our company, and then the names of "Wuhan" and "Changsha" were changed. The author recently visited their website, and these two pictures have been changed, but the business objectives, business philosophy and business mission of the two companies are still the same. So domestic consulting companies are really lazy sometimes. If you look carefully on the Internet, you will find that they imitate each other in many places and even blatantly copy them. For example, I will do the evaluation of others as the chairman of the client enterprise; Others engage in project managers and consultants, so do I, and so on.
Fourth, the virtual company team.
I'm afraid this is an open secret in consulting companies. The consulting team, which claims to be hundreds of people, may actually have one or twenty full-time consultants; Invite a large number of professors and masters as consultants. In fact, we all know that these people just ignore them, and even they have long forgotten that they are consultants of this consulting company. The author once saw a consulting company, and the publicity materials listed the names and resumes of more than a dozen consultants in the company in detail. Customers must think it's true. In fact, many of them are friends, classmates and even students who have worked here before, and he is the only one in the whole company of One Man's Army. I have also seen a well-known professor listed as the chief expert or chief consultant on the websites of several consulting companies, so I am curious, "Which is true and which is false"?
If the previous vanity is to make a fuss about quantity, then there is another vanity that is to brag about quality. You say you are a master of management, and I brag that I am a master of management; You said that you have great accomplishments in the strategic field, and I said that I have a very high understanding in the field of human resources. The most powerful person I have ever met is the "president" of a consulting company, who advertised himself on the website as "the most promising management master in China in the eyes of industry professionals". Bao Zheng is a consulting expert whom I admire very much. I think it is appropriate to put a paragraph he wrote in Hejun Forum here: "People often call themselves or others' masters'. A few days ago, my wife said that XXX has also become a master. She was very depressed and found me the title of' Grandmaster'. I said I was annoyed since I was a child, and I was either chased or cursed. All along, I hope that others will' don't treat me like a person', the master is a liar, and the generation of masters is a' bag of shit'. "
It can be seen that although domestic consulting companies despise planning companies the most, they are also the least willing to be regarded as planning companies by others. But in fact, when they promote themselves, they still haven't got rid of the falsehood, bigness, emptiness and shallowness inherent in China's planning industry, which can be described as "gossiping about top hat and Qi Fei, false experts * * * false cases". The consulting demand of Chinese enterprises is huge, realistic and growing, but many enterprises do not have such a pair of "eyes", so they can see clearly such a consulting world, so some rely on friends' introduction, some are called to Hu Kan by others, and some engage in bidding, but they are all faced with similar project proposals, and they look like luxurious "expert teams", but finally they are really invited to China at a loss. What is the effect of consultation?
Thirdly, the services of local consulting companies.
In some consulting companies, the fate of consulting is doomed from the moment you sign a consulting contract with them. He made so many packages and made up so many stories in front, the purpose is nothing more than to trick you into signing a consulting contract with it. He also knows that the scams carefully woven in front are always exposed, so what they are pursuing is "how many can be cheated?" Cheating the down payment basically achieves the goal, but it is even more important to support customers to pay the second consultation fee. Therefore, the author found that local consulting companies often require higher and higher down payment when designing consulting contracts, ranging from 20% to 30% to 40%, and even require 50% in advance within three days after signing the contract. Once, the boss of a consulting company told me that his theory was to write the project proposal well and sign more contracts, so that the down payment for each contract was enough. As for the reputation of customers, it doesn't matter. There are more than 1000 counties in China, and each county can eat one, which will last forever.
Therefore, although domestic consulting companies often laugh at McKinsey's acclimatization, they always cite Shida's case, and foreign consulting companies are just like that. It is best to hire a local consulting company with low price and good quality. However, compared with McKinsey, their prices are cheap, but things are not necessarily beautiful. If Shida is interpreted by ST as the poor level after consulting by McKinsey, the author knows that among the clients consulted by some "famous" consulting companies in China, some enterprises have gone bankrupt, some projects have been dismounted, and some famous securities companies have now closed down for rectification. However, compared with McKinsey, the reputation of these consulting companies is really too small, and others are unwilling to speculate on how much "role" his consulting has on the bankruptcy of enterprises.
At least one thing here, I think many consulting companies in China can't compare with "McKinsey", that is, their serious and responsible attitude towards enterprises, or their professional ethics of taking consulting activities seriously. In all fairness, although the author criticized the rigid process suggested by McKinsey for not being suitable for enterprises in China, they were actually working according to that rigid process, including seriously forming a joint project team, holding a project kick-off meeting, conducting detailed interviews, and conducting in-depth exchanges among consultants after the interviews. Because of this, they wrote several people in the project proposal, so they sent several people; What to do in the project proposal and what to do afterwards; What is the work plan listed in the project proposal, then the future work plan must start like this. Unlike many local consulting companies, the only purpose of the project proposal is to cheat the consulting contract, so we can brag and clap our chests to our heart's content. As for whether the project is really completed and whether the promised things can be done, let's talk about it.
Figure 10.3 (temporarily absent) is the work arrangement of the international consulting giant m company on the first day of a "business process reengineering" consulting project. It is precisely because of this rigorous and substantial arrangement that customers will feel that even if the final project is unsuccessful, they have learned a lot of knowledge or methods from the company, or at least feel that M company has done its best.
However, it is difficult for consulting companies in China to make customers feel this. Although you can package your team strongly when packaging, you will find that the staff are stretched when doing the project; Although you can promise that the company boss (or partner) will put 50% or even 100% energy when you make a bill, you will find that the energy is unevenly distributed when you do a project. There are only a few people in total, so they can't do the owner's project and the western project; Just one or two high-level partners, if they put more energy into this customer, they will naturally put less energy into that customer, not to mention he wants to set aside some energy to talk about new projects. As a result, customers often find that there are several experts in the project proposal that they have never seen before; When talking about the project, the partner promised to come at least twice a month, but now he hasn't seen him once in two months.
Let's take a look at how some local consulting companies enter the market for consultation. First of all, the project kick-off meeting can't be held, and the time that partners can stay in this enterprise is limited, so it is better to start research directly; Even if you want to drive, it's just a formality. I read the project proposal one by one. In fact, there is no need to set up a joint project team. At most, the enterprise is required to appoint one person to contact them. In this way, in fact, they have long forgotten that the "consultation process is not only the transfer process of reports and programs, but also the transfer process of knowledge and methods" promised in the original project proposal. The gap with international consulting companies is exposed-they can scold McKinsey in the project proposal, but when consulting, they actually don't pass on as much knowledge or methods as McKinsey.
Then there is the investigation. Of course, the same questionnaire will be sent out, regardless of its function, at least it can be used to draw many charts in the future. When writing a diagnosis report, use these charts to make up for the lack of content. Internal research can be as little as possible. One month or 20 days of internal research written in the project proposal, if you stay two or three times or seven or eight days, is actually a lot. Especially the leaders of the company, naturally only need to go out, meet the boss of the company, talk for a long time, and then go directly to another project. External research is economical. Most of the time, I just surf the Internet or go to the library to look up information. As for what to interview with consumers, suppliers or distributors, customers should not go unless they insist. After all, we are not McKinsey, and we don't have so much money and so many people. We don't need to do such a complicated project. In fact, only when they do specific projects will they admit that they are inferior to McKinsey-anyway, at this time, the contract has been signed, so we should cool our clients down and not let them have too high expectations of local consulting companies.
Finally, it is natural to make plans for customers. At this time, no matter which school he is a consultant, he often takes the same road, that is, the road of "plagiarism". This habit may have been formed when they were in college. People who have been to college, especially boys who have been to college, may have a history of copying homework. You copy his homework and I'll copy yours. Anyway, deal with the teacher. I got into the habit of copying papers when I was a graduate student. I copied a paragraph from this paper, another paragraph from that paper, and finally I copied it to my own "paper". This is to meet the requirements of the school "how many papers must be published after graduation". When I joined the work as a consultant, I suddenly found that there are such good things in the world, and I can make a fortune by copying other people's consulting plans. Naturally, I prefer to copy. However, the target of plagiarism is different now. First, copy similar schemes I have done in the past, but there are not many materials worth copying. Then turn to copying other companies' plans. As a result, we can see that many consultants download various consulting reports online all day, and some consultants exchange consulting reports themselves to increase the resources that can be copied. Some people even become dealers who specialize in selling "consulting reports". This kind of trafficker is rampant, and the author receives several emails selling consulting reports in his mailbox every week, but there is a real market. The author knows that the boss of a consulting company spent 2000 yuan to buy a CD that is said to have "included the reports of major consulting companies such as McKinsey and BCG". If he got the treasure, he wouldn't show it to the employees below. Only after the consultant completes the scheme can he find some beautiful PPT supplements from there to "show" his strength while improving the scheme level.
Interestingly, on the one hand, many bosses of consulting companies try their best to find and copy other people's reports, on the other hand, they try their best to prevent employees from copying his things. This has brought about the general "conservative" phenomenon of domestic consulting companies. Many bosses of consulting companies keep their consulting reports like treasures, and even their consultants are not allowed to read them. The reason is often that the founders of these consulting companies resigned from famous consulting companies themselves, taking away many consulting reports from the past companies and becoming the capital for him to start this company now. In order to prevent this practice from being repeated by others in the current company, they often keep the company's consulting report very confidential. For example, they don't provide the new consultants with the company's consulting plan as a reference at all, so that these people can rely entirely on their past experience to carry out consulting. This has caused many companies' consulting reports, without a unified idea or even a template. The level of the report depends entirely on the level of the project manager. If the project manager comes from "Laomai" or has some McKinsey reports at hand, then this report is a copy of the simple Laomai at first glance; If someone comes from Ronaldinho or appreciates roland berger's things and accumulates a lot of Ronaldinho's plans, then this report is a typical roland berger style. On the one hand, the consulting reports (service quality) of these companies are uneven; On the other hand, when these consultants are in the company, they will actually try their best to steal your report; After they leave, these reports will still be circulated around the world, exchanged, purchased and copied. You can't stop it. If you started by stealing other people's reports, it is difficult to ensure that employees will not steal your reports after leaving their jobs.
The only thing you can't steal is your thoughts. It is precisely because the entrepreneurs of these companies have no ideas of their own that they regard those reports as treasures-without these things, he can't write anything, or without these things, his company is nothing. Therefore, when everyone regards the consulting report as a treasure and consultants are copying it, we have to talk about a very serious problem in the field of management consulting in China, that is, the general lack of ideas. We often see that "strategy" is popular, and some consulting company bosses package themselves as "the first person in China strategy"; "Execution" is very popular, and some company leaders jump out and say that they are "the first executive in China"; "Integration" is the fashion, and some consulting companies claim to be "the first brand of integration in China". In short, whenever it was popular, he boasted about what he was good at, but it just revealed that they didn't have anything of their own. There are also some consulting companies, which belong to another situation. That is to say, they also put forward some theories or opinions of their own, which sounds quite bluffing, but these things often just tell us "how to manage" and belong to empty epistemology. Writing articles or doing training is ok, but it can't be translated into consulting reports at all. In other words, it is impossible for them to become consulting tools or methods, let alone be used by customers and produce benefits. Therefore, when they really want to write a consulting report, they will still get McKinsey's report for inspiration.
In this way, we see a very strange scene: on the one hand, many domestic consulting companies are frantically criticizing McKinsey, on the other hand, they are frantically collecting consulting reports from McKinsey and quoting McKinsey's PPT in their own reports. Just give an example. Figure 10.4 (temporarily absent) was originally produced by M company, but now it has been copied by everyone. We can already see it in the project proposals or consulting reports of many "famous" local consulting companies.
A netizen once wrote in the post: "I used to work for an international consulting company. When my supervisor gave us training, he told us a sentence-'others can copy our PPT, but they will never understand what is behind PPT. What I want to tell you is what is behind PPT (our consultant manual)'. Yes, international consulting companies will not write these things into PPT, but as consultants, they must deeply understand the profound meaning behind colorful PPT. Otherwise, it will skew the good classics. Therefore, even if you have all the methodology or consulting reports of McKinsey, Kearney or BCG, you may not be able to do consulting. You must deeply understand and even innovate. You must think for yourself. The beautiful PPT of an international consulting company will only make you lazy and dull your mind. You may only download and copy, and eventually your fingers are developed and your mind is simple. " Explain what he means again, that is, although the author has pointed out the hidden ideas behind "McKinsey" PPT in the previous chapters and criticized it.