Develop PI-shaped consultants
Going from a T-shaped consultant to a Pi-shaped one
In the consulting industry, there used to be the push for consultants to become a T-shaped leader. In the T-shape, the horizontal bar is consisted of general business capabilities such as strategic thinking, problem analysis and solving, people leadership, and communication. The vertical bar focuses on the consultant’s functional skills. For example, some consultants might focus on operations and some might focus on IT or marketing.
This model has served many consultants well for decades. Most consultants started their career building horizontal general business skills and as they progressed through their career, they started to build up their vertical specialization, be it marketing or operations or IT.
In a world where technology is fundamentally transforming industries and companies, the old T-shape will no longer suffice. Everything that a consultant does now require deep technology knowledge and capability. For example, strategic thinking is no longer just thinking about how markets and competition will evolve. It’s also about how technology will disrupt an industry and how new business models can be created. Problem analysis and solving is no longer limited to simple Excel analysis. The 80/20 analysis that was constrained by the data availability can now shift to big data analysis over decades of data. Consultants can now easily integrate data from multiple systems and create real-time dashboard and models. AI can even replace some of the manual data crunching and analysis. Communication is no longer just PowerPoint. Instead, data visualization and Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality can make the presentation much more interactive.
When it comes to the vertical expertise, technology is going to be playing an even bigger role. All business processes must now be assessed across the three key technology dimensions: can the business processes be further automated? Can the business processes be further analyzed? And can the business processes be revamped using Artificial Intelligence? While it’s possible that some business processes might be still more on the manual labor processing side, anything that faces individual consumers would have to aim for 100% digitalization.
Given this, the new wave of consultants must go beyond a T-shape and become PI-shaped. The second vertical column is technology. All new consultants must be able to do four things:
· Know how to program
· Learn how to use the next generation technology tools to augment their general business consulting skills
· Understand how to mix business and technology and be the bridge between business and technology
· Capable of leading a technology development team
Know how to program is a must. Programming is now being taught at high school and colleges. The ability to program is not limited to basic languages such as HTML or Python. One must learn more fundamental programming skills such as Java and C and Swift/C-Sharp. A good technology capable consultant must be able to understand programming mobile apps and analytics and artificial intelligence.
A good pi-shaped consultant should also be able to leverage the next generation technology tools to solve business problems. The first set of tools that consultants must master are tools such as data visualization and advanced data analysis tools such as Domo and PowerBI. Those tools would augment the traditional Excel analysis and provide the capabilities to analyze a vast amount of data and visualize them in a different way. The second set of tools that consultants must master are the collaboration and project management tools such as Trello, Slack, and Asana. Project management is no longer limited to Microsoft Project. Instead, the collaboration must be always on and support multiple teams. Thirdly, new communication tools such as augmented reality could be leveraged to make the presentation much more interactive and intuitive. Communication should go beyond PowerPoint presentation.
One of the key advantages for a consultant is their business acumen. A well-rounded consultant, being able to speak both the business and technology lingos, would be invaluable for any clients. As I have told many of my clients, technology doesn’t matter to them because they haven’t used all the technology yet. Furthermore, for the technology that they are using, they haven’t achieved the full potential of the technology. These clients need consultants who can speak both tech and business to understand how to best apply technology to solve business problems. The bi-lingual consultants can also help clients think about building the surrounding enablers to get the full value out of technology.
Being able to lead a technology development team might be the outlier considered by many. But in today’s world, strategy is almost obsolete immediately. What’s more important is to be able to keep on executing and then adjusting the strategy. All consultants must be able to lead a technology team to create an MVP to make the strategy and their recommendations more real. This would require consultants to be able to lead a team and be credible.
For a well-rounded PI-shaped consultant, it’s not only adding technology to be the second vertical column. In addition, it’s also expanding the horizontal bar to include newer technology-empowered management tools such as agile and LEAN start up. these tools can enable consultants to broaden their horizon to better leverage to drive product innovation.
The PI-shaped leader is not limited to just consultants, however. The pi-shaped leader is also critical for the next generation of corporate leaders. Companies should train their next generation of leaders the same way as consulting firms build next generation consultants. Many companies have deployed management trainee programs. Such programs should be adjusted to include the technology dimension and create the PI-shaped leaders.
