Growth through continuity: a look back and a glimpse into the future

Nick Bush, CMCE outgoing Director

As a management consultant, I’ve always been concerned with looking ahead, helping clients plan for stuff that may or may not happen, so an opportunity to look back doesn’t come naturally to me. When I was asked by the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants back in 2020 to take over from Calvert Markham as Director, my first reaction was to put some plans in place. In addition, with the help of the leadership team, I also took the opportunity to forge a clear strategic intent. This is still in place and, in summary, our intent is to be a recognised open and collaborative professional community for the assessment and sharing of leading and emerging practices in management consulting.

Our main approach to operationalising that strategy has been to grow our network by attracting practitioners, clients and academics with an interest in consulting, and increase the level of engagement around the ideas that are shared. We’ve done this by running virtual Showcase events (17 since January 2021), a series of discussions aimed at the next generation of consultants on the future of work that attracted a global audience, a couple of round table discussions, and a brace of Research Awards. We’re continuing to support research into what we term the difficult questions that the industry needs to address if it is to survive, and publish reports sharing our findings on these key topics, with the intention of stimulating further debate.

Our community has grown to over 1,100 followers on LinkedIn and a steady 600 people who receive this newsletter (if you’re reading this, you’re one of the over 40 per cent of people who open it which is an encouragingly high figure, so thanks for that). Whilst these statistics are tiny by comparison with any of the Big 4 consulting firms, we are entirely volunteer-led so this incremental growth is a tribute to the efforts of the many people who have contributed to CMCE and continue to do so that we continue to grow.

As traditional consulting models adapt to the introduction of new AI-based technologies, I am looking forward to continuing to engage with the challenge of how to deliver excellence in consulting to clients and under Jim Foster’s leadership, I am confident that we will continue to do so.

 

Jim Foster, CMCE new Director

I am delighted to have the opportunity to build on the excellent foundations established by CMCE’s founder, Calvert Markham, and his successor, Nick Bush.  I consider it important to ensure continuity in delivering CMCE’s mission to provide information from consultants and academics for the benefit of the consulting community and also to look at opportunities to enhance the service that we provide.

The work of the Centre will also continue to focus on building a dialogue with all its key stakeholder groups (practitioners, academics and members of our parent organisation, the management consultants’ livery company) as well as reach out to and engage with new relevant audiences via our newsletter, LinkedIn presence and our ever-expanding programme of events. To that end, we will continue to hold regular online events and also plan to hold more in person workshops and roundtables. 

We will continue to publish our monthly newsletter and also plan for some of these to be devoted to a particular theme of interest to management consultants.  

Finally, we will continue to engage with members of our parent organisation, the management consultants’ livery company, with recipients of our monthly newsletters and with our growing LinkedIn community and we are already planning to revive the successful series of events that we ran in 2021 aimed at the next generation of consultants. We will also explore ways to improve communication with each of these groups that we already engage with and to identify additional groups with which to connect.