What is a next-generation partner company?

I don’t even need to explain it now, but companies have several partner companies that support their management activities. For example, a consulting company that drafts and designs management strategies on behalf of companies, an advertising agency that works through advertising production for media such as TV commercials, newspapers, magazines, and the web for products and services of companies, core systems of companies, It is an IT vendor that builds IT infrastructure. In addition to partner companies, there are also partner companies that use their professional qualifications, such as tax accountants, lawyers, and patent attorneys, to support the management activities of companies from the side. What I would like to discuss here is the actual situation of partner companies and how to select them. The three most important are consulting companies, advertising agencies, and IT vendors. This is because these partner companies have a significant impact on the performance of the company depending on how they are involved. Top-notch companies with abundant funds have set up departments equivalent to these partner companies, scouted human resources, and secured them within the company. Still, for example, when you hit a commercial, you should be indebted to a major advertising agency. And most companies, except for “wealthy companies”, will ask the necessary partner companies according to budget, timing, issues, etc. However, partner companies do not have the absolute know-how of management strategies to support client companies. Still, why is it possible to exist as a strategic partner of a company? The reason for this is that partner companies aim to make profits only in the departments they are in charge of. As a brain, I can give some advice, but it is not the role of the partner company but the job of the manager to take a bird’s-eye view of the industry as a whole and formulate a management strategy. A well-known partner company attracts excellent human resources. Among them, major companies have a track record of making profits with the support of first-class companies, so newcomers form a “team” with their seniors to respond to the company’s demands. The education at that time is similar to the apprenticeship system of “stealing skills” like Japanese craftsmen, and it is quite difficult for one senior employee to train many juniors. What each company requires of these “teams” is different, so once we have a certain level of common know-how, all that remains is to achieve success in responding to the needs of the field. Although this process is repeated to increase the experience of each employee, it seems that they are not aiming to improve the skills of the company as a whole by sharing the know-how they have learned through horizontal connections. As a result, the quality of employees tends to vary. (Know-how becomes personal) I guess so.

When I visit companies to support their management strategy, I often hear that they used another consulting company and failed. This story is not new. Ever since I worked at an advertising company, I have wondered why people hate consulting companies, so even now I try to ask for details whenever the subject comes up. The reasons are many and varied, but let me give you one example. It’s about a railway company. When I was talking in a department called the Corporate Planning Office, I was shown a management plan created by my previous consulting company. There were two copies of the plan, each proposed by a different company. Both were created by a major consulting firm that everyone knows. The plan was thick, probably about 300 pages. I flipped through the pages, but to be honest, I couldn’t help but sigh, thinking, “This is terrible.” From my time as a new employee to the present day, I have created many different proposals and plans, so I can tell the quality of a document just by reading a few pages. The main reason why I thought the management plan was terrible was that it was clearly written by multiple people, and the overall content was inconsistent and the contents were not connected between the beginning and the end. Probably because of the division of labor, each person in charge had their own “color” and their claims were subtly different. . Even if I took this seriously and tried to put it into practice, it seemed impossible to realize it. The person in charge of the corporate planning office also noticed the inconsistency and lamented, “This is not very useful.” When I asked the price of this management plan as a trial, one company cost 100 million yen and the other cost 30 million yen. Since it was a large company with money, it may be enough to dispose of the person in charge for “failed this time”, but if it is a small and medium-sized company, it will be a big loss. There is none. However, what is really scary is when you trust and practice a management plan of this level of quality. No matter how you think about it, if you put a lot of money into it, the loss will be immeasurable. Thinking about it sent chills down my spine. Since the damage was minimal, it can be said that the Corporate Planning Office’s decision to stop was correct in a sense. The other day, I was asked to design a management strategy for a company with annual sales of about 20 billion yen. With a scale of this scale, of course, there must have been consulting firms intervening in the past. When I asked him about it, he said, “Well, I asked a major consulting company for about 30 million yen, but it was no longer useful. The output that came out was ‘Your company’s strength is its human resources.’ As expected, the president was furious when he saw this.” There have been cases where companies made good use of consulting firms and their proposals were successful, resulting in improved business performance, but such failures occur frequently. It’s happening in reality. In the past, I interviewed several people in order to explore the actual situation of consulting companies. One of them is a professor at the MBA school I belonged to. He worked at a major consulting firm before teaching at the school. So he asked candidly what was really going on at the consulting firm. Large consulting companies tend to hire highly educated people. In addition, it seems that there is a systematic training system for training new employees, but it seems that there is no unified basic rule or know-how in formulating a management plan. After the training, senior employees will teach them through practice, but since everyone is smart in the first place, it seems that the education is mainly focused on “learning on site”. As a result, since it is an individual instruction, the management plan that is output depends on the ability of each individual. Talented personnel create a good management plan, and unqualified personnel create a poor plan. produce a book. The bottom line is that even at a major consulting company, the quality of consulting is inconsistent depending on the person in charge. There is one more thing that managers who hate consulting companies say. That is, “They can formulate strategies, but they can’t teach you tactics.” This has a very deep meaning. There is no need to explain the difference between strategy and tactics. No matter how good a strategy is, a strategic design that is not based on tactics, that is, how to practice, ends up being just an empty theory. In other words, it is “only idealistic and not realistic”. Consulting companies make money by strategically designing. And if you can charge more, you’ll be credited with doing a great job. To put it in extreme terms, all you need is the ability to create proposals and plans that look like they can be bought with a lot of money. It doesn’t matter where you are. This is because if you provide such raw support, you will not be able to get rid of it. Of course, there is almost no field experience. Because I don’t work for that company. In this way, people who don’t know the site very well and have different abilities put together empty theories and put them together into a plan. That is the true nature of the expensive strategic blueprint. Of course, I have many excellent management consultants among my acquaintances and colleagues, and they are producing results that are worth the cost. However, it is an important theme that must be reconsidered by the consulting industry as a whole to dispel the negative image that managers say. So how do you avoid wasting money and choose the best consulting firm? After all, managers and executives have no choice but to improve their knowledge and skills, develop their own management strategies properly, and acquire the ability to put them into practice. That’s the manager’s job. You will fail because you will throw the whole thing to other companies. Once the manager himself has improved his literacy in management strategy, he can ask a consulting company to provide partial support only where necessary. If there is something wrong with the support content, you can stop there and fix it or switch to a different company. If you have a keen eye for support, you will be able to realize your business strategy by keeping costs low without expanding the damage.

For some time now, there have been several major incidents that have shaken the credibility of the advertising agency industry, such as the suicides of employees and the Olympic concession issue. Although we are not defending advertising agencies, we are also important business partners with them, so we know what goes on behind the scenes to a certain extent, and we can understand the anguish of advertising agency managers and others. What are the pains of advertising agencies? They are the decline in cost-effectiveness and the inability to keep up with the diversification of media used to provide information. Let me explain in some detail. Normally, when a client company wants to place an advertisement, an advertising agency takes care of everything from the production of the advertisement to the placement of the advertisement, but the word “advertisement” and its existence have become obsolete. As the word implies, advertisements widely advertise a company’s products and services to consumers. In the past, products and services were either seen in person at a nearby store, sold by a salesperson, or by word of mouth. In addition to this, companies with budgets used mass advertising in newspapers, radio, magazines, etc. to increase sales. Then, during the period of rapid growth from the 1960s onward, it was the spread of television that further boosted large companies. It was a time when family and friends would gather in front of the TV set, and the next day they would be talking about TV at school or at work. The impact of advertising was enormous, with a single successful TV commercial even giving birth to a publicly traded company. Today, however, with the increase in overtime work, dual incomes, and the diversification of non-television entertainment, family life has become more distant, even if they are still under the same roof. In addition, the Internet environment has been enhanced and social networking services (SNS) have become widespread, so that good products and services spread through word-of-mouth information. In the same way, “hype” is quickly detected as a lie and spread. There are also bad examples of falsehoods that are spread further because they are believed to be true. Failures or mistakes can quickly lead to flames on social networking sites, and companies are often devastated until they cannot easily recover. Companies then begin to “self-regulate” to be on the safe side, and the impact of their advertisements diminishes. Another major factor is that people’s incomes are declining rapidly and they no longer spend money on things. These various factors have led to a reevaluation of the meaningfulness of advertising itself, and an increasing number of companies are working to optimize or reduce their advertising expenditures. It is a little late to mention this, but the fact is that corporate advertising budgets have actually increased since the “Lehman Shock. Although it is not possible to make simple comparisons due to the rising cost of placement and other reasons, advertising expenditures themselves have increased compared to the “bubble” era. Instead of some companies cutting back on their marketing and promotion budgets, others are spending heavily. Particularly noticeable is Internet advertising spending. Eclipsing the cost of television placements, Internet advertising expenditures have continued to rise steadily since the mid-1990s, the so-called “zero years. Although mass advertising on TV, newspapers, magazines, etc. (*Mass advertising refers to mass media such as TV commercials, newspaper ads, magazine ads, billboards, etc.) has declined, the direction in which advertisements are placed has simply changed, and new advertising design models that did not exist in the past, such as directing advertisements from mass advertising to the Web, have appeared, and the way companies design advertising has This is why the way companies design their advertisements has changed. However, ad agency managers are having a hard time making a move. Herein lies the weakness of the old advertising agencies. The first reason for this is that the competition for a certain portion of the mass advertising pie has begun, and the number of companies that can engage in mass advertising has become limited. One of the causes is the aforementioned decrease in TV viewing time. Television is

In order to avoid such failures in IT solutions, it is desirable to appoint a consultant who understands the company’s needs and issues, understands the characteristics and programs of the IT vendor, and skillfully connects the two. Good consultants are not easy to find. There are increasing calls to reduce costs through the introduction of IT, but this is only possible if you can make full use of IT. What kind of choice you make here and how well you introduce IT will make the difference.

What did you think. Many doubts remain about whether the current business support of consulting companies, advertising agencies, etc. is sufficient for corporate support. In fact, all these partner companies can see a common management strategy policy. That is, (1) work segment (2) to improve hands-off. Certainly, in order to provide management support, all-round knowledge, experience, and know-how are required. There are many managers of partner companies who think that human resources are fluid and that employee education is not permanent, and that the training cost will be nothing. Therefore, it is “business segment” that enables education in a relatively short time. Also, if you pursue “good hands-on” while doing this segment, you will be able to pursue profits without spending time and money on education. If you choose such a partner company, it will only cost you money, and you will not be able to proceed with your work from a holistic perspective, so it will be difficult to achieve results. So which company should you choose?

(1) A partner company that has a comprehensive support system from strategy to tactics

(2) A partner company that focuses on human resource education. I would like to explain this point in detail, but this is the end of this column. Text: Hiroshi Ashida

●The column is scheduled for the 1st of every month. Column scheduled to be published in September: “Why IT Vendors Will Disappear Soon”