Business Consulting

Quite a few of you have mailed me / called me and enquired about my work and about business consulting. So let me give some gyan about business consulting.
Let us ponder a little on the recent history of consulting. During the earlier 1990s, consulting engagements could be won w/o a lot of effort. Clients used to tolerate mediocre, even poor performance from the consultants. However, post the dotcom bubble bust, there has been a sea change in client behaviour. There are so many clients who harbour bitter memories of the time & money they spent on a succession of management initiatives - from business process re-engineering and ERP, through e-business to CRM - which yielded little quantifiable benefits.
This has led to the need for the current crop of consultants to bridge the credibility gap. The consulting industry's challenge is to be more pragmatic and to focus more on delivering tangible and sustainable benefits. Demand for general strategy consulting seems almost dead. My personal experience is that today, clients continue to be very demanding. Clients make substantial investments in the work that we do and have increasingly high expectations in terms of the relevance of the work we undertake and the quality of the service that we deliver. Consulting is a serious business which addresses serious things.
BTW, I believe I still haven't answered the primary question 'What is business consulting?'. Well, business consultants are supposed to improve businesses: they are not hired to maintain the status quo but to change it. This might be changing a company's strategy or taking over a process in order to transform it but it does not include managing an existing process in order to deliver the same levels of service at a lower cost.