Consulting Edge

The anti-iPad

akashbhatia — Mon, 20 May 2013 02:48:17 +0000

Interesting viewpoint in MIT’s technology review on what the market for tablets and apps looks like in a developing country. Essentially (in India) the interviewee is targeting to sell a ~$80 tablet that has comes with an unlimited data plan for $2 a month (yes, two; not a typo!). Worth a quick look if you’re interested in any developing markets.

Management consulting firms are on fire

akashbhatia — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:00:41 +0000

Nice little article from the Economist on the state of the management consulting world.

Summary: The top firms (MBB) are doing well and growing. The middle tier and below are merging and/or bolstering their capabilities, while the “Big Four” try to move up.

Also, if you are wondering what the “glamor” lifestyle of a consultant looks like, look here. This is bang on.

BCG CEO interview

akashbhatia — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:20:57 +0000

Interview with the CEO of BCG. Most of the interview seems bland to me; the only interesting fact seems to be that BCG is growing at ~10% a year based on the article’s numbers.

Humor: A solution for boring conference calls?

akashbhatia — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:46:35 +0000

Sales doesn’t have to be sleazy

akashbhatia — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:58:37 +0000

Young consultants are often enamored with the “case” rather than how the case was sourced/sold. If only it were that easy. Cases don’t appear from thin air. Sales is the lifeblood of all businesses, including consulting. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of books that do a good job of highlighting the key traits of good sales people.

I just finished a neat little book (Life’s a pitch by Broughton) that may bridge that gap. It uses a wide variety of examples – from a seller in a market in Morocco, to the pitchman for infomercials on TV; there’s never a dull moment. It is very well written with lots of humor and empathy (rather than just trite ‘sales tactics’). Most importantly it emphasizes (and shows with examples) how one does not have to be the “sleazy car salesman” type to be successful (thank god; otherwise I would fail miserably).

I would recommend this to all consultants that are either Partners (or nearing that zone).

Multi taskers 3 times less productive

akashbhatia — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 05:41:40 +0000

Interesting little piece from HBR that ‘proves’ that multi-tasking doesn’t work. In fact, the data shows the non-multi-tasker to be ~3x more productive.

Let me know if you need the article.

The definitive text for big data?

akashbhatia — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:33:21 +0000

The weekend edition of the WSJ had a good review of a new Big Data book.

I would normally yawn (since there is so much flipping hype about this), but what caught my eye is the fact that one of the authors is a correspondent for the Economist (https://twitter.com/kncukier).

Looks like a good one to pick up.

Semi-conductor ecosystem cheat sheet

akashbhatia — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:54:50 +0000

I was doing some research for a semi-conductor client and came across this neat view of the sector ecosystem.

Nice little cheat sheet when you’re trying to get a mental model of how all the pieces work together. The document that this is from – “Merrill Lynch – Moore and beyond: global
semiconductors primer – Feb 2013″, is actually a very well written primer of the sector – worth a read if you’re curious.

Rolodex for the 1%

akashbhatia — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:19:48 +0000

NYTimes has an article about a new startup (Relationship Science) that claims to have the “rolodex for the 1%” (see article). It’s not a social network, but rather a consolidation of publicly available material.

Key claims:

Deep information about influential people – who they are and who they know, what you have in common with them, and most importantly, how you can gain access to them and their organizations
Over two million influential people and their organizations, including their work history, board connections, deal history, education, non-profit donations and affiliations, political donations, personal interests, creative works and awards, business relationships, and relevant familial connections

Price: $3000 a year per person. Sounds like a no brainer for consulting companies.

Mobile accelerates digital coupon use (and an interesting dog fight)

akashbhatia — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 01:29:13 +0000

The digital industry is almost 20 years old, but it is far from boring (yet). The more noteworthy trends and innovations are coming not from the “pure” digital stuff (e.g. think websites), but at the intersection of the physical and digital. One of these is in the area of coupons.

Although this has long been a pretty static industry, the inception of digital is disrupting this industry – big time. eMarketer, in one of its latest publications, reports that mobile is driving use of coupons (not surprising); it expects about 33% of all smart phone users will use coupons, up from about 20% in 2011. Why does this matter? There’s real money to made (or lost) here: The coupons market is approximately a $10B market (compared to the mobile advertising market, which is ~$8B).

I think what’s more interesting is that the future of this space is not guaranteed to be “won” by those that are the incumbents; this space is being attacked from multiple players – Vendors in the coupons space (think Groupon, Coupons.com), Mobile payments players (think ISIS), issuers and network providers (think V.me from Visa) and software companies (think Google Wallet).

Expect plenty of positioning, tall claims and a rash of acquisitions.