Fiona Czerniawska has written widely on the consulting industry - details of her books can be found below.

Arkimeda also publishes articles and research reports targeted at expert consulting audiences.

The Trusted Firm: How Consulting Firms Build Successful Client Relationships

Peter Hill, Chief Executive, Management Consultancies Association

The Trusted Firm presents a compelling blueprint for the consulting firm of the future. From concepts to tactics, this book shows firm leaders why and how to rethink their businesses to earn client trust­the ultimate market differentiator.

Michael W. McLaughlin, Editor, Management Consulting News and author of Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

The consulting industry has been on a roller-coaster ride since the heady days of the 1990s. After a recession triggered by the dotcom crash, it’s now growing rapidly again – but in a market that has changed beyond all recognition. Fees are down, buying is centralized and many clients are ex-consultants who know all the tricks of the trade. It’s a hostile environment in which great personal qualities are no longer enough – consultants need trusted firms behind them, helping them deliver results. This unique journey through the new consulting terrain looks at how leading consulting firms worldwide create a platform for success: what values they need; who they recruit and what recruitment processes work best; how they keep their finger on the pulse of the market; how they match the right people to particular jobs.

October 2006 (UK)

January 2007 (US)

May 2005

Business Consulting: A guide to how it works and how to make it work

(with Gilbert Toppin)

Business Consulting is a welcome book, one with many, many insights, and it deserves careful, thoughtful reading.

Consulting to Management March 2006

In the last three decades of the 20th century the management consultancy industry grew at a cracking pace but increased scepticism about the value that consultants genuinely add, combined with the economic slowdown, has made life much tougher for the consulting industry. As firms have cut back on consulting services and begun to review the way they use consultants, consulting firms themselves are looking at how they need to change. People are now talking about business consulting rather than management consulting. Using real examples from a range of private sector firms, public sector organisations and from the consultants themselves, this book explores the new business consulting world and looks at every element of it with the aim of both helping firms make better use of consultants and showing consultants how they need to adapt and provide their clients a better service.

Management Consulting in practice

This authoritative new book explores the relationship between top management consultant teams and their clients. Through a series of case studies, from both the private and public sectors, it presents best practice in consulting at the sharp end of contemporary management across all disciplines including change management, business strategy, outsourcing, operational performance and human resources.

The case studies are drawn from the MCA Awards, which recognize best practice in all categories of management. Firms present qualifying client engagements for evaluation by a distinguished panel of judges drawn from industry, government and academia.

This book illustrates clearly the experience of working with consultants and the tangible and intangible benefits that can result from an effective client-consultant relationship.

September 2004

Read a sample case study - Living the brand - for real

November 2002

Read the introduction - Giving and Receiving Value for Money

The Intelligent Client

Only in a minority of consulting projects do the managers involved know - let alone agree - why consultants have been hired. The Intelligent Client aims to redress this balance by helping managers create effective, productive and value-for-money relationships with their consultants.

• When you decide to hire a consulting firm, be absolutely clear why you are doing so: precisely what resources, skills, knowledge or processes will the consulting firm add that you could not have found internally?
• When you come to select a specific firm to work with you, what are the attributes most important to you and to the project in hand? What evidence can you see in the behaviour of the consultants and the information they give you prior to signing the contract that will help you make the right decision.
• When you come to decide how you're going to work with them, what are the key aspects of an effective relationship?
• How should you behave as a client? For you to be able to trust a consultant, that consultant has to be able to trust you.

Intelligent consultancy needs intelligent consultants and intelligent clients.

The Intelligent Client is one of the first six books in the Management Consultancies Association series, of which Fiona Czerniawska is series editor.

Value Based Consulting

'This is a book for those who care about the strategic future of large consulting firms and are able and willing to think deeply about that.'

What do clients really value when it comes to consultancy? They want to hire the right firm to do the right project, delivered in the right way.

Some consulting projects never recover from the initial mismatch. A firm that may be highly capable of doing a project in one field is hired to one in another where its expertise is much thinner on the ground - a round peg going into a square hole, either because the client hasn't been sufficiently clear about what is required or because the firm has managed to persuade the client that it is capable of delivering in this new field. Other projects may start well - with a real synergy between the client's and consultants' strengths - but come unstuck along the way, perhaps because the consulting firm doesn't generate the new ideas expected by the client or can't supply the level of in-depth expertise required. The internal management of the consulting firm may also have an indirect impact: its project management may be cumbersome, its culture bureaucratic. Other projects simply end badly: the client has got what it wants, but the manner of delivery has been unsatisfactory - the consulting team may have been disorganized, people may have had to be moved around at short notice, notional partners may not have been able to work together effectively in practice.

Value Based Consulting explores the conflicts that often arise between the commercial aims of clients and the consultants they hire. In doing so, it presents a blueprint of how consultants and consulting firms could and - in some cases, do - manage to overcome the more insidious problems that have attacked the consulting industry - reconciling goals where reconciliation has been assumed to be impossible - in order to create greater value for clients.

April 2002

Read the first chapter - What Clients Want from Consultants and What Consultants Want from Clients

November 2001

Read the first chapter - Where are we now?

Management Consultancy: What Next?

When the e-business boom became the e-business bust, it wasn't just the dot.coms and venture capitalists that were affected: billions of dollars were wiped from the value of the aggressive e-specialist consulting firms which had sprung up during the 1990s. For the incumbent consulting firms, the change appeared to offer new possibilities: the world was going their way. While dot.com failures dominated the headlines, large corporations - those behemoths of the 'old' economy - had begun to invest millions of dollars in e-business projects. Many were internal (e-procurement projects offered - and continue to offer - enormous savings); most had a very low public profile; all of them offered opportunities for consultants, especially those firms that could demonstrate that they could bring the best of the new and the old together - innovative thinking implemented with 'old' economy discipline.

E-business changed the consulting market, but will these changes stick? Are we seeing the beginning of the end of the 'new' economy firms and the resurgence of the established players? Or will at least some of those new firms deliver on what they promised - the re-definition of professional services? Will e-business be the 'big thing' for the consulting industry over the next ten years? Or is there a 'next big thing' out there, waiting to happen?

The aim of this book is to answer these questions in two ways. Like Management Consultancy in the 21st Century, it's split into two parts. The first section (What next?) analyses the short-term future of the consulting industry and looks specifically at the legacy of e-business - its impact on the client-consultant relationship and the strategic challenges it posses for the consulting industry. The second section (And Then What?) is based on interviews with leading management consultants around the world, and takes the process a step further to ask that truly billion dollar question: what next?

Management Consultancy in the 21st Century

Consulting firms have survived - indeed thrived - so far because they have been able to adapt to change as it has happened. The firms which encountered the changes of the 1980s - the broadening of services and growing importance of information technology as a source of fees - were small by today's standards and it therefore took comparatively little effort to re-align their internal organization in the face of these changes. For the biggest firms, the situation is now very different. All have massive investment in office networks, computer infrastructures and - most importantly - human organizations. Few will find it easy to change as quickly again: some may not be able to at all.

Consulting firms are going to need more warning this time around and it follows that they are going to have to start breaking the habit of a lifetime, and look ahead at the future of their own industry.

The objective of this book is to do just that, to see the form that the consulting market, the firms that operate within it and the process of consultancy itself will take in the future. Part 1 looks at how the way in which trends already visible in the industry may develop in the immediate future; Part 2 looks further ahead to look at the shape of consultancy in the more distant future, and is based on interviews with the leaders of some of the world's major consulting firms and other experts on the consulting industry.

This book is not just aimed at consultants themselves: the future of consulting is an equally important subject for the companies which buy consultancy, for the managers who work along side them and the ordinary citizens whose lives are - increasingly - affected by them.

February 1999

June 1998

Business in a Virtual World

Every organisation consists of two parts: the physical and the virtual. The physical is made up from things such as buildings, machinery and people; the virtual from elements such as information about customers, knowledge about how to get the best from a manufacturing process and the rights to exploit a particular invention.

The information revolution provides organisations with an unparalleled opportunity to move parts of their business from the physical domain to the virtual domain. A shop is no longer the only way to sell to your customers, nor do you have to keep large stocks of every product you sell. Almost any part of a business can be converted from being a physical entity into information which is stored and manipulated within a computer. Once that transition is made, new economic laws take over. Information can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible with a physical object: it can be transmitted around the world at a phenomenal speed; it can be duplicated and sold many times over without incurring additional costs. These attributes mean that organisations that embrace the virtual world can play to a different set of rules - rules which are heavily stacked in their favour. Business in a Virtual World will open your eyes to that revolution.

Corporate Speak

Ever wondered why that well-written strategy doesn't get implemented? Or why different parts of your organisation can't work together. Corporate Speak shows that understanding how organisations use language provides a fundamental insight into their effectiveness. Many organisations are already experimenting with 're-engineering' their corporate language in order to exploit new opportunities. As the number grows, language looks set to be one of the competitive weapons of the millennium.

As business people, we tend to think of ourselves as doers rather than talkers. We are reluctant to take language seriously - as the derision with which we regard mission statements and management jargon testifies. But the world of business is becoming increasingly reliant on language: knowledge-sharing, empowerment and globalisation are all trends that meant that we are already spending more time talking, and less time doing.

To succeed in this new environment, we will need to challenge our basic preconceptions about the role of language in business. We will need to understand the way in which language can affect how we: organise ourselves; relate to customers; develop and implement strategy; position ourselves in the marketplace; and exploit technology.

Corporate Speak offers a radically new way of thinking about corporate culture. Using evidence and case studies from a wide range of top companies, it looks at how areas such as strategy, information technology, public relations and management are all influenced by the way we talk about them.

October 1997