business consultants

Products rarely achieve smashing, universal success to the accompaniment of widespread complaints from the paying customers - not just once in a while, but time and again. The MS-DOS operating system is a conspicuous example: but the much reviled business of management consultancy can't be far behind. British industry spent some £250 million last year on manufacturing consultants alone: that's a mere raindrop compared to the $15 billion flood which US businesses, despite the criticisms, spent on all consultancies.

Another $750 million went on business books; the best-sellers usually come either from consultants or from academics who also earn consultancy riches in their ample spare time. More billions still are lavished on courses and business school studies which are dominated by the same academic and consultancy gurus: The Witch Doctors, as John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge call them in a new book which talks of managers' 'pitiful predilection for magic cures.'

Since there are no magic cures, this condition would indeed be pitiful - and reviewers seized on the book as a debunking attack on the magicians. Peter Martin, writing in the Financial Times, took up the same theme: 'What is there about management that makes intelligent, active participants so willing to place their faith in nostrums of - to put it politely - uncertain validity?' Turn to Fortune, and the agony is piled on. An anonymous ex-consultant, for example, offers this 'advice to my fellow managers when hiring a consultant. Buyer beware.'

In the same issue, another writer says that the gurus' have 'loosed a plague of fads...precipitating layoffs in the tens of thousands. Meanwhile gurus themselves have never looked happier or better fed. Their pelts are sleek.' Yet managers are neither pitiful nor credulous. Gurudom has soared as a commodity, and companies have adopted many and varied consultancy prescriptions, in response to real needs. Those compelling causes come under three interlinked headings: technology, competition, and complexity.

In IT alone, organisations face decisions of far deeper significance than ever before: the wrong decision and implementation will damage, not just their data processing, but their ability to compete: getting it right, on the other hand, can create lasting advantage. Turning to outside expertise isn't an option. No company can possess the range of experience and skills that a top-class computer services supplier must possess. Aligning the IT potential with operations and strategy is the path to optimising all three.

The boom in manufacturing consultancy has similar causes. The 17 largest UK-based firms, according to the FT, have raised numbers employed on manufacturing projects by 80% in three years. Their customers are looking for benefits like 'lean manufacture' - using tools and techniques of Japanese origin to compress time and reduce cost. Re-engineering, too, now as much criticised as it was once over-praised, uses well-established techniques to reform processes end-to-end. That remains vital. 'Best practice' has become mandatory, and expert outsiders are better placed to find and implant the world's best in would-be world-class companies.

To become a world-class competitor, however, you must know your starting point in the race and measure the distance from the start to the desired destination. Your perceptions of the gap (probably large) will be wrong: skilled outsiders will unearth the hard truths and critical actions required to beat the competition at closing the gap and thus delighting customers. Their imperative demands weren't dreamt up by gurus: customers wrote this script themselves.

Customers, though, will only be delighted by companies which achieve maximum, willing cooperation from all employees at all levels - and from their own suppliers. The 'virtual company' is a guru coinage: but virtuality's basic principle of supplier-customer partnership in the cause of faster, better performance preceded the gurus. Complexity enforced the partnership. All markets, industries, products and services have become more complicated as the options, for both supplier and customer, have multiplied - think only of IT.

Once, IT meant only mainframes: then minis arrived: then PCs. Now hardware is merely one element in a rapidly shifting kaleidoscope of applications and communications. This pattern of change and rising complexity is universal; the degree of uncertainty inevitably increases in conditions of complex change. It isn't just that uncertain managers grasp for impossible certainties. The gurus and the consultants provide unifying themes and coherent courses of action, signposts along the necessary road of introducing order into chaos.

True, in the end the best songs are the old ones. That doesn't make them less valid. Develop state-of-the art products and processes, including those of management. Match or surpass the best on every dimension that matters to customers. Adopt strategies that provide clear, high , compelling objectives. And - which is where the so-called witch doctors come in - understand that good managements need all the good help they can afford.