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A message from the editor
The Wisdom of Teams was a groundbreaking book in its day, and helped us all to understand the ingredients that created high performance teams. However, ICG’s analysis reveals that when you hire a branded consulting team, you often don’t get a lot of wisdom – while the partner on the assignment has an average of nearly 10 years’ experience (and the associated wisdom), the juniors have only 2-3 years… and of course the partner is not working on your problem full-time. By our reckoning, the average experience (read: wisdom accumulation) in a consulting team is only 4.4 years. By contrast, the average for an ICG consultant is over 14!
These statistics might not be such a surprise, so as you use branded firm pyramids – or contemplate using them – it pays to be mindful that augmenting your team with an experienced (and wise) unbundled consultant from ICG is not only good value on a per day rate (typically 30%-40% less) but they also bring substantially more experience, as well as an approach which is very much focused on building your internal consulting capabilities, not ours!
This month, our Article of the Month is entitled Retail Banking Distribution 2025: Up Close and Personal from BCG, as reviewed by Julian Cappe, leader of our retail banking work at ICG. With 19 years’ strategy and consulting experience, Julian actually exceeds the ICG average by a significant margin! You can reach Julian via [email protected].
Happy internal consulting,
David Moloney
Global Editor