THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 19, 1994 TAG: 9411190475
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
Companies no longer should consider hiring management consultants an option - consultants have now become a necessity.
Says who? A.T. Kearney, a Chicago-based international management consulting firm.
Still skeptical? Well, Kearney says they have a survey, conducted by Louis Harris and Associates, to prove the point.
The survey says half of 778 companies questioned last spring were then using management consultants.
``To reflect that every other major corporation in North America and Europe is currently using consultants at the corporate level implies something akin to a necessary condition, that the advice and counsel from consultants have become essentials, not luxuries,'' said David J.R. Ogilvie, senior vice president of Louis Harris and Associates.
So, an international consulting firm commissioning a survey that winds up validating the use of consultants? Surprise.
``You kind of maybe would question the objectivity,'' said Suzanne Huddleston, vice president of market research at The Wessex Group Ltd., a consulting firm in Williamsburg. ``It doesn't surprise me though, because who else would do the survey?''
Huddleston and other management consultants in this region conceded that skeptics could question the results. But they said a consulting firm that skewed its questions to get positive answerswould quickly come under fire from others in the consulting business.
Glen St. Pierre, who runs an independent consulting business in Williamsburg, said that he understood why a survey done for management consultants that touted consultants would raise eyebrows. But he said there are plenty of business college professors with ``a hard-nosed approach for management companies'' who would quickly scuttle any consultants' attempt to give themselves more significance.
Harris & Associates selected the 778 companies used in the survey randomly from Dun & Bradstreet and the Business Week international 1000 list. The companies all had annual revenues of more than $250 million.
Paul Inglis, a partner at Kearney, said the high usage of consultants didn't really shock anyone at the firm, because business has been good at Kearney and its competitors. He said the segment of the survey about consultants could be viewed to be in the interest of Kearney.
``You're right,'' Inglis said, ``to some extent this is saying, `Do you realize consultants are being used in many other companies?' Maybe it would raise the question, `If all these people are using consultants, maybe we should.' ''
Larry Ring, a marketing specialist at the College of William and Mary's graduate school of business, said the number of companies lends credence to the study.
``With reorganization and downsizing, companies have a heck of a lot less fat than before,'' Ring said. ``But they also have a heck of a lot less people to do things than before, so they're farming things out to consultants.''
And Ring said that Kearney's hiring of a well-known polling firm also adds objectivity to the survey's results. Then again, Ring had a confession to make:
``They (the business college) probably passed you along to me because I do some consulting.'' by CNB