Justin Thyme

It’s the arts!

Ernst & Young has certainly reaped the benefits of its sponsorship of the highly successful Monet exhibition at the Royal Academy. Andersen Consulting has also attempted to carve itself a slice of the cultural pie.

Andersen has successfully wooed Lord Melvyn Bragg and Co. in order to secure the sole sponsorship of The South Bank Show. You may have already noticed the trilling prelude to the show’s own title sequence. One of the perks of such sponsorship was the invite that arrived on Justin’s desk coaxing him along to The South Bank Show Awards. The stars that appear on the Andersen corporate campaign pale into insignificance when compared to the stellar gathering at The Savoy Hotel, last month. Justin watched as luminaries such as Salman Rushdie, Ginger Spice, Alan Bennett, Steve Coogan, Ken Loach, Yehudi Menuhin, Elaine Paige, George Melly and Dame Edna Everage doled out and collected their gongs. A more surreal event has yet to be experienced. Whilst Edna threw gladioli among the gathered, talk on table 25 turned to burning supply chain issues and recent internal reorganisation intricacies. The impromptu press conference at the celeb-bash, was unique for the way in which no-one managed to keep eye contact through the entire event – as they were too busy clocking the Talent.

Get some in

Right! You ‘orrible little man! Your consultancy needs you! It ‘as come to my attention that the Ministry of Defence is working with Coutts and Co. in order to help personnel leaving the armed forces. The overall aim of the service is to prepare war-torn soldiers for the real horrors of “civvy street”.

Coutts will help ex-forces personnel to recognise that the skills they have are marketable (guerilla warfare is a must for work within the Big Five). It also helps them to write a CV (and include the letters MBA) and helps them believe that the civilian world does, in fact, want them).

I can think of a number of consultancies who would pay a lot of money to take someone on who can a) show consumate negotiation skills, b) hold steely eye contact, c) load a rifle in under 10 seconds. At ease!

‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello

The bobby on the beat is no longer simply the upholder of law. No.

He must be a manager, a communicator, a consultant, a public relations expert and a skilled politician. Step forward Xebec McGraw Hill which has developed a multimedia management training and communications skills tool for the Lancashire Police Service. The training service provides a mixture of interactivity, graphics, animation, and case-study information.

Inspector Marc Vincent told Management Consultancy that the courses were designed to blend both humour and drama in instructing the force. Humour and drama? Well, I guess that’s why they stopped using episodes of The Bill as a training tool.

Put a foot in it!

Those wild guys at The Aziz Corporation are up to their old tricks again.

The latest online offering from the spoken communications consultancy invites surfers to vote in their Foot-in-Mouth awards. Nominees include the BBC’s Anne Sloman for forbidding all programmes mention that Peter Mandelson is gay, Eddie George for his comments that job losses in the North are a fair price to pay for inflation and Bill Gates for stating that he knew nothing about illegal deals to carve up the Internet, which contradicts earlier documents written by Gates himself. www.azizcorp.com is the address you’ll need for an immediate response.

Consultants wage a bloody guru war

It’s official. Sir John Harvey Jones is the consultancy world’s darling.

Druid Management Consultancy polled 1,000 consultants in order to find out who was really admired for their skill and gravitas. One might expect Sir John to be somewhere near the top but when you look a little further down the list it becomes a little more surreal.

Closely nestled beneath Sir John, we find Dilbert. Twenty percent of consultants felt that he carried more weight than any of the other candidates.

The unlucky gurus this year were Peter Drucker, Scott Handy, Tom Peters, and even Machiavelli.

The bad news for UK Plc is that over 60 percent of management consultants believed that there are not enough top-quality management consultancies in the UK. Er … in that case someone hasn’t been telling the truth in the series of interviews that Management Consultancy has conducted over the last year, where you would believe that all is rosy in the consultancy garden.