Just a moment ago, I had one hand on my credit card ready to buy up the domain names for www.McKinseyBlog.com, www.BainBlog.com, www.BCGBlog.com, www. AccentureBlog.com, www.DeloitteBlog.com, www.PRTMBlog.com, www.BearingPointBlog.com, and www.EYblog.com.
They are all available. Are the traditional management consulting firms a bunch of laggards when it comes to blogging even though the rest of the industry is starting to show signs of life for corporate blogs?
Well, blogs succeed because of individuals so don't go making a run on those corporate-oriented blog domain names.
Now I did find a reference here that talks about how Microsoft and McKinsey are encouraging employees to blog. But I have been unable to find a mass of individual management consultant bloggers out there. Now Tom Peters has an McKinsey alumni badge. One would think that the thought leadership of these firms (whether strategy- or implementation-focused firms) would lead them down this path. History has shown that traditional management consulting firms produce this type of work. Thought leadership includes areas like M&A as it relates to shareholder value, farm animal-growth share frameworks for marketing, pricing methodologies, IT alignment … the list goes on and on.
So far, I have reconciled this in my mind as follows: The use of corporate blogs is not yet widespread enough to justify pressing this too hard in the consultancy firms. There are many other reasons that come to mind too (such as management consultants tend to tackle problems from the top down, i.e., flowing from strategy & conceptual through implementation so blogging may appear at lower-levels), but slow dispersion of corporate blogging to date seems to be the most natural explanation to me.
That said, there are CEO and senior executives forming blogs. And blogging is supposed to be one of the fastest growing things on the Internet as reported by a number of analysts. As management consultants frequently work at the CEO levels, hopefully they are at least getting a chance to learn about the blogging medium that their clients are starting to use. Tom has at least.
Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group
Update (5/23/05): Due to continued traffic to this post, I thought it would be good to forward point to an update I had …
Update (1/4/07): After close to two years, here's a new post on more consulting blogs.
Update (3/19/07): McKinsey alum Paola Bonomo commented here (thanks, Paola) and points us to a wiki of McKinseyite and McKinsey alum blogs.
Update (4/16/09): McKinsey blog here?