Managing The Professional Service Firm

The connection between a firm’s leverage structure (its ratio of junior to senior professional staff) and the people marketplace can be captured in a single sentence: People do not join professional firms for jobs, but for careers.

leverage is also central to its economics.

“If an individual has ego needs that are too high,” notes Peter Friedes, Hewitt’s managing partner, “they can be a very disruptive influence.

The strategy development task is not an exercise in forecasting. Rather, the goal is to create the responsive organization; to put in place a set of operating procedures which force the practitioners to listen to their marketplace on an ongoing basis, not as a one-time piece of market research; to require them to reexamine their methods of operatio

At the best professional service firms, it is routine practice to require that, at the end of each and every client project, the engagement leader will sit down with the client to obtain the client’s feedback on what went well, what less well, and how the engagement might have been improved. These discussions might cover not only the technical qual

leverage is also central to its economics.

“Raspberry Jam Rule”—the wider you spread it, the thinner it gets. The broader the audience you attempt to reach, the weaker is the impact.

contributes to the unmanageability of professionals: their daily roles as “experts.”

Experience has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, for one part of the firm to create a strong “frontier expertise” reputation when the firm is already well known as a low-cost provider.