Clay Christensen: Hi, this is Clay Christiansen, and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call The Disruptive Voice. In this podcast, we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at HBS, building and sustaining a successful enterprise. In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course, and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them, and I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful. If you have an idea about a topic or a speaker that you'd like to hear more about, or if you'd like to comment on our work, please reach out to us here at the school.

Katie Zandbergen: Hello, and welcome to The Disruptive Voice. I'm Katie Zandbergen, your host for this episode, and the community manager here at the Forum For Growth and Innovation. Today, I'm delighted to welcome two current MBA students to the podcast. Jasmyn Beausejour, and Nicolas Kernick are both members of the Harvard Business School class of 2019, and both took BSSC during the fall term of 2018. This semester, under the supervision of Derek van Bever and Clayton Christiansen, they've been working on an independent project through which they've revisited the 2013 HBR article entitled, Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption. In that article, Clayton Christiansen, Dina Wang and Derek van Bever concluded that, though the full effects of disruption have yet to hit consulting, our observation suggests that it's just a matter of time, and that there may be nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.

Katie Zandbergen: Six years later, Jasmyn and Nicolas have set out to study the consulting industry today, asking themselves, how can we reconcile the disruption idea with the tremendous success experienced by incumbents, and as time marches on, where's the industry heading? In order to better consider these questions, they've looked at the consulting landscape through the lens of jobs to be done for which clients hire consultants, and in particular for which they hire the big three consulting firms, namely McKinsey, Bain and the Boston Consulting Group.

Katie Zandbergen: I'll let them tell you more about their study, the findings, their recommendations, and whether they believe that the consulting industry today is on the cusp of, or immune from disruption. Nicolas and Jasmyn, welcome to the podcast.

Nicolas Kernick: Thank you.

Jasmyn Beausejour: Thank you.

Katie Zandbergen: To begin, could you tell our listeners a bit about yourselves? For instance, what did you do prior to starting your MBAs, and what are your plans for life post-graduation?

Nicolas Kernick: Thanks for having us, Katie. I grew up in Europe, a bit in France and in the UK, studied in Cambridge in the UK, and then worked at BCG, Boston Consulting Group for three years across London, Madrid and Amsterdam, just finishing, and we had our last day of school yesterday. I'll be going back to BCG, I'm actually moving offices over to the San Francisco office, so really looking forward to actually getting back into the consulting industry.

Katie Zandbergen: Great. Jasmyn?

Jasmyn Beausejour: I grew up in Montreal, I worked for three years as well for the Boston Consulting Group in Montreal, Toronto, the US, Chile, France and Singapore a little bit. I am also graduating this year with Nico, and very excited to be joining the BCG Boston office where I'll be spending the next couple of years.

Katie Zandbergen: Great. Were your backgrounds in consulting and your plans to get back into consulting a driving force behind the decision to choose this particular topic for your independent project?

Jasmyn Beausejour: Absolutely. We took BSSC last semester, and we thought, wow, these theories are very powerful. We started to think about what they meant for our industry and our future company, and we thought it'd be very important for us to understand whether our company was well positioned moving forward, and whether the consulting industry was going to be the same as when we left it, and whether within two or three years, it was going to be very different in how we were going to like these changes.

Nicolas Kernick: I think it's fair to say that we started off of a slightly pessimistic mindset. I think that we were concerned learning about the theories, about what it might mean for our future company that we were deciding to go back to. So, it's been interesting having both an academic journey, learning more about this, but also a little bit of a personal journey, where we're thinking, where are we potentially going to fit into this if the way we're seeing the industry changing and continues to change the way that it is?

Katie Zandbergen: For our listeners, could you recap the major arguments and conclusions that were made in consulting on the cusp of disruption, which is the October 2013 HBR article that you revisited in your current research?

Nicolas Kernick: Absolutely. The article was quite a flagship I think, and it's been re-quoted and cited in a myriad of different ways online. The key tenants of it are that the main incumbents in consulting had two key strengths; opacity and agility. They've always been very good at adapting to client demands, and they've also always acted a little behind bars. And when we think about the theory of disruption, a lot of it comes down to the fact that clients are better able to understand what they're buying, and want to choose certain parts of what they're buying, and get those at a better price or more conveniently. I guess the main prediction was that as access to knowledge is democratized in our world, the opacity within consulting was going to fade, and clients therefore wouldn't need to pay the fees of big consulting firms anymore. So, a lot of more modular providers would be able to come in with different business models and specialize in supplying just one specific link in the value chain, rather than clients constantly needing to go to large integrated solution shops like Bain, BCG, McKinsey.

Katie Zandbergen: How well do you believe those arguments have withstood the test of time?

Jasmyn Beausejour: We see that most of these forces are in fact still at play and they're playing out. We do see some consolidation, we do see some modularization. But as you said, the big question for us was, if this all is true and disruption is indeed happening, how can we explain tremendous success from the incumbents?

Katie Zandbergen: Those do seem quite contrary. How did you decide to reconcile those two problems?

Jasmyn Beausejour: Well, the first thing we had to figure out is how were we going to tackle this problem, what lens would we use? We tried labeling the industry by client, a little bit like the famous Christensen article with Nucor and US Steel where you can label client as profitable, not profitable or requiring very high purity steel or not. For consulting, that doesn't really work. Clients may need consultants for a very simple task or for a very complex task, which will drive different levels of profitability. So, that didn't quite work, and the same is true for the supply side. So, we found another way that was quite helpful in helping us understanding the various trends, and that was looking at the reason why clients were hiring external help in the first place, which led us to the jobs to be done framework from BSSC, where we could look at the types of projects, the types of jobs with different characteristics, and understand what the various trends were.

Jasmyn Beausejour: A powerful way that we found to segment the industry that really helped us understand and see what was happening in different parts of the industry was to use two different scales, two different axes. The first axis, the vertical axis is the complexity axis, and complexity here can be defined as technological, so are we talking very deep learning algorithms, that kind of stuff. It could be how critical the project is for the business; is it a bet the house project, and it could also be just the lack of clarity around scope of the project; do we even know what question we're asking the consulting team?

Jasmyn Beausejour: The second axis, the horizontal axis is the scale one; how big does the consulting team need to be to deliver on that project? That's tremendously important, because some of the new entrants in the market, they can't put together a team of 100 consultants. They just don't have the scale nor the capabilities to coordinate across all these consultants. And so, these two axes, with the jobs to be done framework, was quite helpful in helping us understand the different trends in the market.

Nicolas Kernick: When we break the industry down into those requirements, into those jobs to be done by the clients, we have these four corners. I think it's very helpful looking at those four corners relative to how consulting has evolved over time. I remember when I actually first started consulting, and I think my first week of training, we was shown a project that had been done a couple of decades earlier where consultants were following people around a supermarket with a map of the supermarket printed in their hands, and drawing with a pencil line where people were walking. If they did that for a whole day, they got some thicker lines through certain shopping aisles, they got some thinner lines around some less used aisles, and that was how you did a space productivity analysis at the time. So crucially, this was gathering data the clients didn't have, trying to understand that data, and then making recommendations from it, and at the time, clients had no way of doing that, they probably didn't know exactly that they wanted that, and it required quite a lot of people because you needed someone to be following clients around a supermarket all day.

Nicolas Kernick: So at the time, that's quite a complex and quite a large scale project to get a consultancy to do. If you now look at that today, it's actually a very simple, very small scale project where the client probably already has the data. The client probably interpreted the data already, and a lot of the analyses are so basic that many, many people could do it, and I would expect in most clients that they have the data capabilities internally to be able to interpret it and generate recommendations, and most big supermarkets would have that space productivity team. What we see is that projects that grow old move towards the bottom left of our framework. So in the lower left of our framework, we have smaller scale and less complex jobs such as today, making board decks or pure strategy projects, and simple run of the mill due diligences. In this corner, we really see commoditization and modularization in the value chain.

Nicolas Kernick: The tasks that are required are simpler and simpler to do over time, many people in the consulting industry, but also internally to clients are gaining the capabilities to be able to do this in their sleep, and we really see low end disruption in this corner from lower cost business models. So, this is where you can get business models which have a fundamentally different cost structure to do simple jobs, and do it just as well as any of the more expensive business models. And then, we really see the theory kick into action here, that the more expensive ones are getting displaced out of this corner.

Jasmyn Beausejour: On the lower right corner of the framework where we would classify jobs that are larger in scale but still not extremely complex, and again, complexity can come from technology, from the importance of the project, or just how well scoped the project is. And so here, we have large projects that are well scoped, that are not cutting edge technologies such as the layering, or a post merger integration, or perhaps a project management office type work where we are just helping in the implementation of relatively simple things. In that corner, the main trend is that the projects that used to be large and complex, that used to be in the upper right corner are naturally moving to that corner. Why? Because as they get executed over and over again, the scope becomes much more defined. It is much more easy for clients to say, I know exactly what I need, I even know what success looks like, and when that is true, brand name loses its importance, and price and convenience gain in importance.

Jasmyn Beausejour: And so here, we see natural providers as large firms that are able to offer very good quality at a lower cost. Here we could see Deloitte, Accenture, IBM, many others able to come in and deliver good quality at a much lower cost. So in some ways here too, we see low end disruption, and critically, we see two things happening; projects moving down and incumbents moving up. That obviously puts pressure on whoever is in the top part of the framework.

Nicolas Kernick: I think it's also important to say about that bottom right corner, that we see a lot of value in the industry there. It could be interpreted to be low value because it's lower on the framework, but not at all. Companies like Accenture have grown astronomically fast because they're serving their clients really, really well. But what we found speaking to different players in the industry is that they serve their clients well when it's a well-defined project, when it's maybe a project that has been done multiple times or doesn't need to be quite as critical to the success of the client's business, and we really see the brand come into play whether you're going to decide to take one of those players or not. There's a lot of growth, there's a lot of clients who have projects that need to be done in that corner, and those projects are very important for the businesses, but are generally just better scoped, better understood, and therefore more measured in terms of price and convenience than projects that are more complex.

Nicolas Kernick: The upper left is where we have smaller scale, more complex jobs, and here you can think about things which are hard to define but don't need huge teams to implement either. It could be anything from a partner being a sounding board to a CEO, let's say. A CEO has so many problems that keeps them up at night, they need someone to bounce ideas off, they need to understand what the cutting edge thinking might be in certain areas. That would be a very specific example. You could also have companies looking at talent platforms or contacting directly expert companies such as GLG to ask for really precise advice from someone who has been doing the exact question in that mind for a few years.

Nicolas Kernick: What we see in this upper left corner is that a lot of players want to try, and play there because that's where you really hone your skills, and so we see a lot of M&A activity from the large consultancies in this corner. We see, for example, the acquisition of QuantumBlack with McKinsey, we see BCG trying to build the digital ventures arm of their company, where they're really doing relatively small scale projects which can grow, but they're incubated. So, they're not integrated to the rest of the company, they're not large scale complex projects from the off.

Katie Zandbergen: And what about the top-right of the framework?

Jasmyn Beausejour: Absolutely. The upper right of the framework is tremendously important, and this is where we came to the realization of how could it be possible that McKinsey, Bain, BCG were growing so fast despite some of the forces that we've been describing. And here, we're talking about very large, very complex jobs, critical to the business, perhaps with a slightly less well defined scope, such as large scale digital transformations, the implementation of agile workflows in traditional banking industry. There's a very famous example in ING Netherlands, where they completely redefined how they work in six months, had never been done before, and one of the big three firms help them with that. And of course, you would go with one of the big three firms because it is still not well defined, it's never been done before, so the brand factor plays a tremendous role a lot more than the cost factor. And so, that corner is clearly very important for MBB. This is where they are the natural provider, this is where they are uniquely positioned to deliver value to their clients, because they're able to take on these complex projects and coordinate across very large teams of consultants.

Jasmyn Beausejour:This is where they make their money, this is where they grow the most, and the reason why they can keep doing that is because new jobs keep arising in that corner. There is no ceiling to the framework in some ways, so we're talking about this vertical axis. While there is no end to that vertical axis right now, it keeps going up and up and up, and this is why we think that McKinsey, Bain, BCG, have been able to keep growing as fast as they have despite all the forces that we've been talking about.

Katie Zandbergen: Thinking about your independent project, can you tell our listeners a bit about what the project entailed, and also what your major findings were?

Jasmyn Beausejour: Absolutely. We have interviewed over 25 top level consultants, including the CEO of two of the top three consulting firms, many partners at large, accounting firms that also provide consulting services, and also dozens of people at what we would traditionally call challenger companies, talent networks, AI driven data gathering platforms, so lots of interviews. And we've also surveyed over 85 current and alumnus of these top three consulting firms to see how the work was changing while they were in their role. This is how we gathered most of our information coupled with, of course, secondary research. Some of the major findings is that the theory of disruption really relies on companies who can develop their offering faster than the clients are able to increase their willingness to pay for better quality. In the case of Nucor and US Steel, well US Steel was developing better and better steel, and some of those clients were not willing to pay for that better steel, nor for that costlier business model, and that's why the lower cost business model was able to come in and steal some of those clients.

Jasmyn Beausejour: Well, one of our major finding is that we don't think this is happening right now in the top right corner of our framework. We do not see McKinsey, Bain, BCG as being over-delivering to clients. They are delivering but they are not over-delivering. Basically, these projects are so important that any extra value, clients are willing to pay for. That is one of the key things that we found throughout our project.

Nicolas Kernick: As long as this top right corner continues expanding as we've seen in the past few decades, then more and more projects also move from the top right corner down towards the bottom, towards the bottom of the left of the framework, and that is effectively growing the whole industry. Something which would have been very innovative five years ago in consulting is pretty run of the mill now, and so there are lots of consultancies that can grow very well and very profitably by replicating some of the projects that were done that were maybe more cutting edge a few years ago, and being able to do those for a larger portion of the client base, and being able to do those more cost efficiently, and just as well because those capabilities have now become far easier to achieve and implement for those consultancies.

Katie Zandbergen: In the 2013 HBR article, it's written, if you are currently on the leadership team of a consultancy and you're inclined to be sanguine about disruption, ask yourself, is your firm changing at least as rapidly as your most demanding clients? You both agree that the big three are indeed keeping up with their most demanding clients?

Nicolas Kernick: We agree to a certain extent, and I think it's hard to measure. What we have been incredibly impressed by is that maybe out of 25 to 30 interviews that we had, at least three quarters of them mentioned this article that was written six years ago. And some of the biggest firms say that they discussed this article annually at the very highest level of the firm. And so, I think that the forces are very clearly there, and consultancies are clearly finding they need to be agile and keep on responding to them, and that's what we really think the strength of the theory is now. In terms of are they therefore keeping up with their clients, we believe that client demands are very hard to fulfill, and they're changing incredibly fast, and we believe that consultancies are probably growing at a similar rate. We definitely don't think that they're going faster than clients because we haven't seen any examples of clients being over-served.

Nicolas Kernick: I think one way to think about it is that many clients are so big, that just a small change in how good the capabilities of the consultancies they hire might be, it can still have a huge impact on their bottom line if they're able to apply it and integrate it into that company, and so it's very difficult to get to a point where a client feels over-served and that an extra bit of value isn't worth what they're spending on it.

Katie Zandbergen: In this top right of your framework where you've got large scale, highly complex projects, you just said you haven't seen any examples of clients being over-served. This brings to mind in the healthcare industry for instance, it could be said that it is very difficult to over-serve clients in healthcare because, can you ever have enough health, right? Do you think it's possible at some point to over-serve clients in the consulting industry, or is the industry somehow shielded from this?

Jasmyn Beausejour: To answer your question, I would go back to the framework and say, talking about the consulting industry at large doesn't take into account the nuances of the jobs to be done enough. And so to answer your question, is it possible to over-serve a client on making a board deck? Yes, definitely. A slightly prettier slide coming at a much higher cost is not worth it, so that's the down left portion, the framework. If we go to the upper right, then no, it is not possible to over-serve a client because now we are in these large complex, undefined cases where a bit of value, as Nicolas said, a bit of value adds tremendous impact to the bottom line of the client. And so, they would be willing to pay for that bit the value more in the top right corner.

Katie Zandbergen: You talk about this top right corner as growing without any end in sight to this growth. Which factors do you think are driving that growth, and do you think that that growth will be sustained carrying forward into the longer term future?

Nicolas Kernick: Yes, we think that growth will be continued, and I think that we'll speak about a couple of potential threats to that a little later. The real factors that are keeping that growth going are technological change, globalization, and then just rising tide of consulting generally. I think on the technological change, what we see is that the rate at which technology is changing is increasing itself. And so actually, if we look today, we think that the speed at which clients are improving their technological capabilities, and therefore ultimately increasing their technological demands to consultancies is much faster than it was in the previous decade, let's say. So technology is really a driving change there of pushing up that ceiling in the top right corner. A second factor is the increase in globalization, but also the digitalization of supply chains and the increase in competitiveness in many industries. So some of the disruptive competitiveness, if we think for example of the banking industry and fintechs that are increasing, the more of these competitive pressures the clients are feeling, the more their demands will increase relative to what they need from consultancies.

Nicolas Kernick: And finally, I think all of these factors help the overall consulting pie, or let's say the rising tide to grow, so all actors are benefiting.

Katie Zandbergen: You also wrote that incumbents should be focusing on how to continue being masters of sustaining innovation while stressing the importance of an elaborate and exploratory M&A strategy. Thinking about mergers and acquisitions, do you see a great M&A strategy as being critical purely from the perspective of the big three being able to successfully navigate the sustaining trajectory, or does the M&A strategy have a role to play in terms of self disruption and keeping disruption from others at bay?

Jasmyn Beausejour: That's a very interesting question. First, let me restate what self disruption would mean in this context. Self disruption would mean creating a new business model or acquiring it, and bringing it in, in order to serve the same jobs at a lower cost. That would be self disruption, and we have seen some of that. Actually, the 2013 article talked about McKinsey Solutions, which was in many ways an attempt at self disruption about systematizing and productizing the offering, but that would not be the main thrust in the MNA strategy that we are observing. What we are observing is much more the acquisition of new business models in order to increase the breadth of capabilities of the consulting firms. And therefore, to directly answer your question, we would think that the main thrust is about sustaining trajectory.

Katie Zandbergen: Do you also see those acquisitions as trying to deepen in-firm expertise, in terms of competing in the upper left quadrant where you're looking at projects that are more complex and require a deeper expertise of a certain area or subject matter?

Jasmyn Beausejour: Absolutely. We see a lot of these adjacent firms as being key players in that upper left quadrant of the firm. And when we talk about acquisitions, it's important to understand that this is a people business, and so an acquisition could be a natural from acquisition, but it could also be just a very strategic hiring.

Katie Zandbergen: Given your findings and view of the consulting landscape as it now stands in 2019, what do you think some potential challenges in the industry will be going forward?

Nicolas Kernick: I think for the big three, it's all about making sure you keep moving up and right, you keep expanding with that expanding corner of our framework, if you like. What we see at the moment is that it's going to continue because there's always an escape path. Everything's changing so fast, jobs are getting more complex and so clients need more from consultancies. If however, there somehow appeared a ceiling to this complexity axis, then the model would start looking a lot more like the steel industry, a lot more like where US Steel was not able to create anything which clients valued more, or at least valued enough to pay more for. If we see that dynamic happen within clients, then I think that we would see effectively the bottom right corner shrink, and players from the rest of the framework come and eat McKinsey, Bain and BCG's lunch because they're charging too much for projects that would become run of the mill and commoditized.

Jasmyn Beausejour: Thankfully for MBB, we are not forecasting this to happen anytime soon, we are simply saying that if it were to happen it would be a problem. The other existential threat that could happen is the advent of a truly creative and adaptive artificial intelligence, which to be fair, we are very far from. Today in artificial intelligence, is a lot about prediction. Essentially, these are prediction machines that we are creating. Prediction and judgment are two very different things, and so as predictions become cheaper, more commonplace, commoditized in some ways and better with AI, so economic theory would say that the value of the complement of something becoming cheaper increases. And so, if we see judgment as a compliment to predictions, the value of judgment increases, and who is better placed to provide advice when it comes to judging something? Well, that would be McKinsey, Bain, BCG. So in the short term, we see the advent of AI as something that will benefit McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and when we see an AI that is truly capable of creativity, then we would say this is an existential threat. But we're far away from that, and in the meanwhile, we believe that MBB might actually benefit from the rise of AI.

Nicolas Kernick: This creative judgmental AI, and a ceiling to the upper right are two potential, though we think extremely unlikely existential threats. But in the meantime under the water, the top consultancies are paddling like crazy. As we mentioned earlier, they're reading this article that was written in 2013 and discussing it to decide how they're going to strategize over the next few years. We see full main sustaining threats which they're paddling for under the water, and they are premature modularization, suboptimal M&A strategies, suboptimal training and incentivizing of the people who coordinate the integrated offerings, generally partners selling, and finally being able to continue to attract and retain the top talent which has made them so successful in the past. These full threats are really what the top consultancies have to keep doing right to be able to stay in that position in the top right corner, and keep benefiting from a rising tide of consulting generally.

Nicolas Kernick: The first threats is the premature modularization. So in that top right corner, as we discussed, we do not see that consultancies are currently, or will in the future, over-serve their clients. And if they're not over-serving, then that corner and those projects are not ready for modularization, and it would be very ill advised for companies to start modularizing and start offering just slimmed down versions of their offerings to serve jobs in that corner. So, we really recommend that consulting firms trying to operate in those large scale complex projects, continue to adopt an integrated architecture as they are continuously expanding their service offering, as opposed to trying to coordinate multiple external vendors for deep analytics or for creative design thinking. We believe it should all remain in-house to really benefit from the advantages that an integrated architecture can offer you.

Jasmyn Beausejour: The second threat that we see is suboptimal M&A strategies. As incumbents develop their offering, they often resort, as we said to M&A, and one good example would be the acquisition of QuantumBlack in data science by McKinsey. When we think about M&A, it's really useful to classify what type of M&A are you doing? In fact, a lot of M&A fail because the acquirer doesn't have a clear view of why it is that they're acquiring the business. And so short of conglomerate type acquisition, there are really two types of acquisitions; the acquisition where we are acquiring the firm's resources in order to reduce our costs or commend price premiums, something that we would call leverage to business model acquisition, is really a bid to acquire the firm's resources in order to either reduce costs or command price premiums. The second type is the reinvent the business model type acquisition, where the bid is really to acquire the firm's magic so to speak, and bring in a new business model or perhaps protect against commoditization.

Jasmyn Beausejour: These two types of acquisitions entail very different things when it comes to integration. Most, if not all of the M&A in the consulting industry should be considered a reinvent the business model, because it's really about adding breadth to the offering of the firm. And so, we therefore recommend that the integration be very thoughtful, the new businesses need to be kept as separate as possible in an attempt to really keep the magic so to speak, intact. They need to have their own business model, they need to have their own career tracks, they need to have their own incentives, priorities, processes, in order to really unlock their full potential.

Nicolas Kernick: Related to the second threat, but slightly different, is this idea that consultancies work through conductors. When we think about client relationships, there is generally one or a handful of partners who are really in charge of that relationship, and in charge of making sure that the client is seeing impact across all touch points with the consultancy. This isn't new, but as we continue moving through a world where consultancies can offer more and more, it's critically important that those conductors, those partners fully able to grasp the breadth of the firm's offerings, and be able to sell it in a way that makes sense for the client, and in a way that the client will feel was worthwhile to them.

Jasmyn Beausejour: The fourth threat is really around talent. In the talent space are two main trends, the first one is there is a very strong need for specialist talent than experts. So in some ways, as some of our interviewees have said, the generalist consultant is moving away. The second trend is there is a move from very analytical work, but analytical in a strategic sense to very project management like work. And so, there is analysis, big data analysis, less Excel based analysis, and then on the other hand, there's project management. Our research has shown that the fun factor within consultancies is perceived to have gone down, and that's coming from the 85 people that we surveyed. And also, about only 20% of them have said that this kind of project management work is what they prefer doing, so that is in some ways concerning.

Jasmyn Beausejour: The other thing is the recruiting pitch the consulting firms are doing, if you look at their website today, really sound like the old job of what a consultant was doing, and a lot less what the consultant is actually doing today, which is a lot more project management, and so we think there's a little bit of friction here. From a specialist talent point of view, of course now MBB competes with tech firms, so we're talking user experience specialists, we're talking data scientists and other technologists, so they have to compete with them. Now, we have reasons to believe that they have an attractive proposition, and as a head of recruiting has told us, the salary is about on par or higher, the diversity of projects is much bigger if you work at BCG for instance as a data scientist. The other thing is that the career progression is quicker within the consulting firms.

Jasmyn Beausejour: So, our recommendation here is that first, be very clear about what the world will look like if you come into the consulting world, be very clear on your recruiting effort, and then keep a very strong focus, and keep your eye on the level of satisfaction of your specialist talent, because it has been that talent was key, and it will remain like that.

Katie Zandbergen: You've carried out this research project within the time constraints of the term, but had you had more time to work on this project, what else would you pursue or take a deeper dive into?

Nicolas Kernick: I think probably two main areas. Firstly, there are so many different clients and so many different projects that it's very hard to fully analyze the whole space. So, we've focused most of our interviews on the supply side, and I think if we were able to interview 300, 400 companies, then we might shift more to the demand side to really better understand how their jobs to be done is shifting. Secondly, I think we'd focused on one of the key threats that we think, which really is this talent piece. As these jobs are changing over time and as consultancies require different talent, will that top talent with these different skills really be attracted there in the long term, and will they want to stick around? What we hear is yes, but we'd like to do more research to prove that.

Katie Zandbergen: Do you have any final thoughts or takeaways to share with our listeners?

Nicolas Kernick: As we've gone through this project, we have come to a couple of major realizations, and I think we've realized that these theories can be very useful, but it's also very to apply them too readily. It's only when we really look at the dynamism of a whole industry, that we can really get the full benefit from them. So for example, in the consulting industry, if we look at it statically and we don't see that increasing complexity in that top right corner, it's very easy to label everything as low end disruption. It's only when we really understand how the projects are changing over time, that we understand the different nuances, which we think have really informed our research.

Katie Zandbergen: Well, Jasmyn and Nicolas, thank you for joining us in the studio today. I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Jasmyn Beausejour: Thank you for having us.

Nicolas Kernick: Thank you.

Clay Christensen: Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show, and want to learn more, please visit us at our website or leave us a review on iTunes. Until next time, good luck everybody.