Category Archives: Business Process Insight

My profile on the PwC alumni intranet site

Business Process Insight

I was recently profiled on the PwC alumni site in my role as Master of the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants.

I am grateful to PwC and its ancestor firms (I joined what was then Deloitte Haskins and Sells), for giving me entry to the fascinating world of management consulting. For those without access to the PwC alumni site, this is the gist of the profile:

Chris Sutton, Master of the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants (PwC, 1986-2000)

Chris tells us a little bit about his experiences:

What are you up to now?

The Master is the Volunteer CEO. My focus is on driving the strategy of the company, which includes Pro-bono consulting and mentoring, providing education through Bayes Business School and our Pro-bono Centre for Management Consulting Excellence, and participating in events ranging from formal livery dinners to pancake racing for charity and a charity sleepout for the homeless in Guildhall Yard. As Master I also act as the ambassador for the Company at a range of events in the City of London, and preside over a lovely ceremony where we admit new members to the Company.

What does a typical day (or week) look like for you? 

I am a working Master, in that I also do management consulting assignments as an independent consultant, mainly in the international development and social justice sectors. So there is a lot of multi-tasking – except for each Friday and some Sundays where I volunteer as a chaplain in a prison (no mobiles or laptops allowed!). In summer terms I teach management consulting to MSc Management students at Bayes Business School, where it is great to be with the consultants of the future!

What are your passions, and how have they impacted the direction of your career? 

Like many management consultants, I enjoy variety and actively seek out interesting and challenging opportunities. I am also committed to life-long learning; having become a chartered accountant with DH+S in 1989, I recently became a chartered management consultant. I had a great 13 years at PwC and its predecessor firms, working primarily in the banking sector. Then I joined Logica (now part of CGI) because I wanted to get into Outsourcing and rose to become global MD of BPO. After 15 years there I went independent. As all independents will tell you, there are periods of feast and famine, and in one famine I volunteered to work with a charity in Rwanda. That charity did work in prisons, and the experience there led me to focus on international development and social justice as my consulting sector of choice. And ultimately to become a volunteer prison chaplain in the UK, as well as recent roles as interim head of finance capability at Plan International, and interim head of strategy at Nacro.

Who has been the greatest influence on you during your career? 

In my early career it was great client leaders like Don Argus, the then CEO of National Australia Group; in recent times it is Emmanuel Olusola King, a British Nigerian prison chaplain.

What is your fondest memory of your time at PwC? 

Bizarrely, a short consulting engagement in the city of Zaporozhye in Ukraine in 1993 – there was so much energy and excitement in creating a new country. My heart bleeds for what is happening in that city today.

Are you still in touch with any of your former colleagues? 

Yes – there are around a dozen PwC alumni who are members of the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants, and I come across many others in other livery companies such as the Chartered Accountants, the HR professionals, the Information Technologists, the Marketors and the Tax Advisors.

What did you learn during your time at PwC that you still keep with you today? 

The combination of audit and management consulting training taught me to keep asking questions until I truly understand what people are telling me.

What do you value most about the alumni network? 

It’s a great resource for connecting with people, and also for hearing truly inspirational stories at alumni events

What three people would you invite to a dinner party? 

Michael Mainelli (the next Lord Mayor of London subject to election, and an inspirational Management Consultant); Emmanuel Olusola King (my mentor as a prison chaplain) and Ms Kanan Barot who will likely succeed me in October as the next Master of the WCOMC.

Where is your favourite holiday destination? 

Greece. I studied Classics at university, and am enthralled by the ancient history of Greece and the archaeological sites. I have enjoyed at least 20 family holidays in Greece, always to different places, and there is still so much more to see. My favourite place within Greece is the ancient site of Delphi, standing among the ruins high on the mountainside, and looking out over groves of olive trees towards the distant sea.

What would be your motto? 

I will borrow for myself the motto of the WCOMC: “Change through Wisdom”

What have been your main learnings over the last couple of years? 

As someone who is naturally a bit introvert, I have enjoyed discovering an extrovert side through meeting so many fascinating people as Master of the WCOMC. At a practical level, coming out of the pandemic, face to face meetings are great, zoom is good, but a day of trying to combine face to face and zoom meetings is a challenge I have yet to solve.

Master of the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants

Business Process Insight

I was honoured to be installed last night as the new Master of the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants.

The Worshipful Company of Management Consultants enjoyed the wonderful atmosphere of Apothecaries Hall,the oldest extant livery hall in the City of London, for our annual installation dinner last night. We also installed Kanan Barot, Andy Miles, Malcolm McCaig and Collette Stone as our new Wardens. Ian White was admitted as our newest Court Assistant.

We were so pleased to have the company of distinguished guests including Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein, President, City, University of London as our guest speaker, Sherriff Andrew Marsden, Professor Andre Spicer, Dean of Bayes Business School, Master of the WCSIM Philip Thomas, Master of the Charterhouse Peter Aiers, and Commander James Nisbet whose Sea Cadets formed an excellent carpet guard.

A key theme of the new Master’s year is to build on our great relationships with City, University of London and Bayes Business School.

We were also really pleased to be joined by our members Lucinda Peniston Baines, board member of the Management Consultancy Association, and Peter Johnson, Advisory Committee member of the Institute of Consulting, and we look forward to building on our shared heritage with the MCA and IOC.

Working with business school students to help the economy re-emerge after the pandemic

Business Process Insight

So pleased to be back in the lecture room at Cass Business School last week with the very talented 2020/21 cohort of MSc Management students. 60% of the students are in London, 40% are overseas so my lectures are both F2F and online. Thanks to all our clients who have offered management consulting projects to the student teams – many of these clients are Cass Alumni.

This year’s clients range from multinational corporates to private equity and fintechs, and the work ranges across brand and marketing strategy, business case development, product development, staff wellbeing policies, supply chain management and consulting support to a new business launch. Client demand for projects has been strongest in the financial services and construction / real estate sectors as clients plan for post-lockdown growth.

The student teams now have six weeks to analyse their clients’ situations and needs, research options and come up with practical solutions and recommendations which fit within the context of their clients’ strategic priorities, resources and constraints. I am looking forward to some great presentations at the end of June.

Coming out of lockdown – testing the atmosphere

Business Process Insight

So as we workers get ready to go back to our offices (realising some are already back, some have a while to wait, and some may have never left!) what good advice is out there? Too much, I feel, and much of it conflicting.

Scrolling through my old photos, I came across one I took last September, way back in those days when you could visit a museum. In this case it was a visit to a working industrial building, the gloriously ornate Abbey Mills Pumping Station in east London, as part of the wonderful Open House weekend.

This must be one of the poshest sewage stations in the world, designed in the Victorian age. And at ground level, there are no nasty smells. But for all the glamour, the staircase leads to the business end of the operations, and I guess the signage is necessary if the virus has impacted your sense of smell.

“Test the atmosphere before entering” is great advice for going out of lockdown and back to work, I think. Yet again, there is probably a consulting thesis to be written about all the different atmospheres that need testing in the workplace, and the myriad tests you could pay a consultant to do….

Consultants will need a significant change of skills by 2030

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Together with Dr Mike Fenn, I was pleased to lead this important research project for the CMCE. The text below summarises the findings and recommendations.
A copy of the full report can be accessed free of charge through the following link: https://www.cmce.org.uk/projects

In 2018 the Centre for Management Consulting Excellence (CMCE), a pro-bono organisation established by the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants that

brings together management consultants, academics and other stakeholders in the management consulting community, conducted research into the skills that management consultants will need to sell and deliver assignments in 2030.

We sourced data from 157 respondents through face to face interviews and an online survey. The respondents comprised not only consultants and their clients, but a broad range of stakeholders. The consultants came from both large and small firms, and many have management experience in industry.

Respondents were asked to rank and comment on a number of technology and societal drivers of change, in terms of the scale of their likely impact on the skills needed by consultants. The survey then asked whether the traditional skills of a consultant (change management and the like) would still be relevant by 2030. We also gave space in the survey for respondents to provide unprompted insights.

Cyber Security (as a risk management skill) came out top in the impact rankings, with cyber risks being seen by respondents as a potential massive roadblock to a digital future beset by “unknown unknowns”. How to assess the risks, and how much of an organisation’s limited resources should be expended, in a context where assailants are out to destroy your business or steal your IP? While there will continue to be a technical battle between the good and bad guys, management consultants will be expected to drive board level discussions on steering their clients’ businesses through the cyber minefield.

In second place came AI (Artificial or Augmented Intelligence). There was a huge polarisation of views; some respondents see AI as huge disruptor, others see consultants taking it in their stride. Several respondents argue that the full impact will be felt by 2040 not 2030. New consulting skills will be in demand in framing questions, assessing how AI insights can be translated into human capabilities to deliver results, and advising on ethical implications and accountability.

In third place came the trend among consultants towards self-employment. Respondents agreed that concepts such as portfolio careers and work/life balances are here to stay, while also recognising that much of the new technology (AI engines, for example) will demand a level of investment that only big consultancies can afford. Will there be anti-trust legislation by 2030 if big firms act as AI monopolists? Respondents also commented about the pressures for independent consultants to both deliver and sell, with a new breed of agencies already offering to sell.

While coming out lower in the impact rankings, the other prompted themes – Big Data,

Globalisation, Internet of Things and Robotics all generated incisive comments.

Timeless consulting skills such as senior relationship building and change management will remain very important in 2030, as humans look to humans to contextualise and interpret the recommendations that technology will generate. This comes with two provisos – consultants must invest in understanding the new technologies if they are going to be able to interpret them, and they must beware the dangers of interpreting purely through the lens of past experience. The T-shaped consultants of 2030 (combining both deep specialist and broad generalist ability) must

also need resilience in order to thrive at an increased pace of change.

The most frequently mentioned “new skills” that consultants will need, according to our

respondents, are

New Technology | Cyber Security | Innovation | Self-promotion | Cultural adaptation | Empathy

There will be a change, and perhaps some reduction, in the opportunities for junior consultants to enter the market, with AI and Robotics taking over some of today’s entry-level consulting activity. Yet there will be new junior roles in scrubbing and keeping secure, at an industrial scale, the data that will feed the new technologies. We will also see an increased percentage of data scientists on many consulting assignments.

We asked our respondents: “All things considered, what change will there be in Consulting Skills needed in 2030 versus today?”

The overwhelming answer from our respondents is that the impact will be incremental, not radical. It suggests that adaptable consultants can march forward to 2030 in their stride. But the survey data rings an alarm bell for consultants when the results of consultants and non-consultants are compared. Non-consultants see the impact of cyber security, AI and self-employment on consultant’s skills as being much more radical by 2030 than do the consultants themselves.

There are some powerful implications here, which might lead to two alternative conclusions.

Consultants see the world through a filter of “we have seen changes before, we will overcome” and are better prepared than their clients give them credit for.

Or

Consultants are under-estimating challenges that are much more evident to the clients that they seek to serve, calling in to question whether they will have the knowledge and aptitude to be of use to clients in 2030.

Both are valid hypotheses, and of course for the management consulting profession the first one comes across more comfortably than the second.

Yet it could be disastrous to ignore the second conclusion.

Consultants must direct their inquisitiveness and knowledge building to get to grips with what is happening with new technologies and demographic trends, and to understand better the implications that these will have both for their clients and their clients’ customers. These are not all things that are fully known today, but that fact cannot be an excuse for any complacency. Clients need consultants to be thinking ahead of them, not lagging behind.

The CMCE wishes to thank all the people who gave their time to participate in the research, and the MBA students from Coventry University in London and Cass Business School for their invaluable support in collecting and analysing the data. The CMCE also appreciates the sponsorship provided by Sheffield Haworth for the publication of the report into our research.

Speaking at Qurated Network Directors’ Forum on 14 February 2017

Business Process Insight

I look forward to speaking at Qurated Network – Director’s Forum on Valentine’s Day in London. It will be interesting to see if we all end up agreeing whether banks’ ever increasing use of customer data is going to get their customers to love them more, or end up in broken relationships! It should be a fascinating debate

PS – and it was indeed fascinating! Great to see the diversity of views from my fellow panellists David Power from Wonga, Matt Rowsell from Worldpay, and Javier Campos from WPP. Personally I think banks should be wary of emulating retailers too slavishly in their use of data to push targeted marketing to their customers.

As Matt pointed out, we tend to give permission to the likes of google and Amazon to target us. We might set the bar higher for banks, and don’t give them implied permission to exploit data about us in the same way. And as Matt and Javier both showed, banks have an almighty challenge to piece together all the different pieces of data they have about us, across their legacy systems, which gives them endless opportunity to draw wrong inferences.

My own conclusion is that there are elements of the data-exploiting online retailer model that banks could usefully follow, but they should carefully aim to set their own standards. I think we all agreed that the overall aim for banks should be to focus on delivering a great customer experience, across services which consumers really need them to get right.

There is a short video of the event at http://bit.ly/2lifrFB

Do You Speak Fintech?

Business Process Insight, Fintech, Retail Banks

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Photo: Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture “The Head of Invention” in Holland Park, London

In the course of one day in the City of London last week, I was in three different conversations about Fintechs.

What struck me was that the financial services experts that I was talking to all had different examples of what a Fintech is. One mentioned a supplier of banking systems, another mentioned a disruptive network platform provider, and another mentioned a niche consumer lender who has been around in the market for at least a decade. Added together, these cover a very broad range of businesses indeed.

Check out the web and there is no standard definition that seems to have consensus. The UK government (UKTI) definition is as follows: “In its broadest sense, we define FinTechs as high-growth organisations combining innovative business models and technology to enable, enhance and disrupt FS. This definition is not restricted to start-ups or new entrants, but includes scale-ups, maturing companies and even non-FS companies, such as telecommunication providers and e-retailers.” (UK Fintech, On the Cutting Edge, HM Treasury and E+Y, August 2014). There is so much in there, it is hard to detect a couple of keywords.

Perhaps market forces are dictating the use of a very inclusive definition. If Fintechs are currently attracting investment capital, and being championed as the provider of choice for the digital generation, then what Board is going to tell its Chief Executive not to embrace the term wholeheartedly? Especially as the definition brings with it the allure of high growth for potential investors and, for the Chief Executive, the imposition of some ambitious growth targets. Of course market forces will create winners and losers, but you cannot win if you don’t take part.

I believe however that some structured definitions within this very fluid and fast moving market are important. As an interim executive, I get frequent approaches along the lines of “Are you interested in this CXO or NED role with XYZ Fintech”. How can anyone sensibly answer this without some discussion of the nature of the Fintech business and the operating model that it needs to have to be successful. It’s not enough to say that you can thrive in this market if you understand both banking and technology; that particular competency has been around since at least the 1950s.

For simplicity, let’s say a Fintech (in the retail banking market) could be a combination of one or more of the following businesses:

·         A software provider of banking systems

·         A platform provider who uses the software to provide a processing service to multiple banks

·         A bank (or quasi-bank) which is providing technology-enabled services to its end-customers; such a bank could be a pretty much anywhere on the challenger / maturity scale.

The combination point is important – for example a challenger bank might make much of its ability to create new software, or a platform provider might aim to win direct B2C business by putting in place some key “bank-like” services. But, just like the big conglomerate industrials found in the 1980s, the shareholder value of running all three types of business through the same management team may prove be to less than the value that can gained when the different businesses can be run by real specialists. The proviso of course is that, for overall value to be created in the Fintech market, there has to be a willingness for collaboration.

All three types of business need to deliver profits and return on investment. They all need to have a vision for where the sector is heading and the opportunities for disruptive growth. They also need to embrace the spirit of collaboration. But that aside, very different operating models are needed in each of these businesses.

The software provider and the platform provider are both B2B providers, whereas the bank (in this example) is a B2C provider. B2B and B2C entail very different go-to-market strategies.

The software provider is typically focused on innovation, and managing the costs of investment. Service is important, but it is rarely the core competence of the organisation. The platform provider is highly focused on managing service levels and operating costs. The bank is concerned with market share, and the risk/reward profile of its customers, and might be ready to outsource many of its delivery services.

The bank will have a regulator on its back, the platform provider will be trying to design a service which avoids the need for regulation, and the software provider’s only interest in regulation is in making sure its software can produce the numbers that regulators want to see.

In summary, this is definitely not a case of “one size fits all”. The Fintech concept embraces at least three very different types of business, which in turn have their own distinct skills requirements at executive level.

Talking Heads

Business Process Insight

I recently took time off between assignments to join the crowds at the Business Show at the Excel exhibition centre. It was certainly a full house, and yes some of the presenters did live up to the reputation that, for a modest fee, they can provide you with the snake oil recipe to get rich quick. But I enjoyed visiting the Google digital garage, and meeting some of the smaller suppliers. In particular I was pleased to have the opportunity to do a 60 second “talking head” video at the Cincera stand. You can view it on https://youtu.be/mvUEn58rvCw – please tell me what you think of it!

Work has been nicely busy of late. I have recently been consulting at a global standards and certification organisation, helping them to design a business process outsource service for the digital age. Yesterday I started an assignment at a UK regional building society (savings and loans) helping them to ensure that their IT arrangements are compliant with FCA regulatory guidance.

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In looking for a photo opportunity to capture “regulatory challenges” I took this shot of one of the dragons (thank you Wikipedia for telling me it is not a griffin, which is what I always thought it is!) that mark the entrance to the City of London. This one is on the Embankment, just as a storm is about to break…. It seems to me the dragon is not too worried, he has seen it all before!