Recently in Professional services Category
The purchase by Havas of a majority stake in crowdsourced ad agency Victors & Spoils is a sign of a major shift in the advertising industry. I have written several times before about crowdsourced advertising agency Victors & Spoils. V&S Founder and CEO John Winsor spoke at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, and I have
Continue reading V&S acquired by Havas: A pivotal moment for crowdsourcing in advertising
In my first book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services the final chapter was titled Value-Based Pricing: Implementing New Revenue Models. Pricing by value rather than time is clearly a central aspect to building true knowledge-based relationships, since knowledge should be measured by the value of its application rather than time spent
Continue reading Value based pricing is at the heart of the future of professional services
I am about to hop on a plane to Hawaii, where I will be running the ‘keynote workshop’ on Creating the Future of Professional Services for global accounting network DFK International’s annual North America conference on Maui. While it’s pretty crazy, I will only be there for as long as I spend travelling to Hawaii
Continue reading Workshop slides: Creating the Future of Professional Services
This morning I am giving the external keynote at a closed conference for senior client executives run by a major professional services firm. They know the technical content they are presenting is rather dry so my role is to provide a highly engaging kick-off to the day (spouses are invited too) which is also practical
Continue reading Keynote slides: The Power of Social Media and Future Organizations
For many reasons PR (or perhaps rather what PR could be) is close to the center of my interests. As we shift to a world driven by social media and influence networks, arguably the PR industry has the best background and capabilities to help organizations deal with the new challenges and opportunities that are emerging.
Continuing our series of conversations with Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency, and myself, here is the one we kicked off with: what is the role of a futurist? Here are a few of the topics we discuss:
I recently ran a workshop on the future of business at the strategy offsite of one of the world’s largest professional services firm. During the evening I had a very interesting conversation with one of the regional directors about how professional service firms are tapping external networks. For over a decade I have written and
Today’s Australian Financial Review has an interesting article titled “Watch out for the spook in the navy blue suit” which looks at how professionals can respond to anonymous slander, quoting me and a few others. It looks at FirmSpy, which is a site that provides gossip about Australian professional firms, notably law firms and the
Continue reading The dilemma for professionals: How do you respond to anonymous leaks and slander?
A little while ago I co-authored a White Paper for SAP titled Service Delivery Innovation: Creating Client Value and Enhancing Profitability, focused on large professional services organisations. Later today I’m running a strategy workshop for a large technology vendor with a significant professional services arm. In the course of preparing for the session I looked
Continue reading 5 Driving Forces of Global Professional Services
I recently gave a presentation at an offsite meeting of the leadership team of a global professional services firm. I was asked to speak about the future of business, and to be provocative, which is usually my objective in that kind of situation – it’s not very valuable if you can’t get people to think
Continue reading Why high performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty and lack of control
John Winsor, founder of Victors & Spoils, the world’s first crowdsourced agency, gave the opening keynote at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit in September last November. It was fascinating to hear about how he had brought together an extraordinarily talented distributed team, and convinced major brands such as Harley-Davidson, GAP, Levi’s, and Virgin America to
Continue reading Crowdsourcing attracts the best advertising clients, and it all began with a tweet…
Gideon Gartner has just posted a great article titled Advisory Industry, a future redesign: the “Payment” Model, in which he draws on investment banking research pricing as a model for IT analysts and their clients. Gideon writes: So in the Wall Street model The buy-side “analysts” will work closely with their most helpful and favorite
Continue reading How IT analyst firms can learn from investment bank research pricing models
I was recently interviewed for a report created by the executive forum Vistage, titled 12 Trends That Will Define Business in the “New Normal”. One of the key trends covered in the report in which they drew on my thoughts is reputation management, excerpted below. Trend 7: Reputation Management
I am just back from Phuket in Thailand where I facilitated the offsite session of the top 120 executives of a major professional services firm in Asia. This is staple work for me. My role at these kind of events ranges from delivering a keynote presentation that brings forcibly home the key themes of the
Continue reading Designing and running executive offsites and retreats in Asia
A few months ago I wrote about The shift from corporate brands to personal brands, referencing Jeremiah Owyang’s move from Forrester to the newly-founded Altimeter Group with former colleagues. This is a long-term secular trend – in fact last week when I spoke at the Online Marketing by Design event I pointed to it as
Continue reading The power of personal brands in strategy and attracting talent
Earlier this week I did the opening keynote at the AMP Hillross annual convention, with the title of Embracing the Future. Hillross, one of the most upmarket of the wealth management networks, is seeking to lead the rest of the market by shifting to a pure fee-for-advice model, and rapidly developing a true professional culture.
Continue reading How reputation measurement will transform professional services
I have been interested in the field of expertise location for over a decade, from back when knowledge managers were building ‘corporate yellow pages’ and other tools to find the best expertise in the organization. Unless a large organization can bring the most relevant expertise within the firm to bear on the problems and issues
Continue reading The immense value of expertise location will help drive enterprise social media
Was just catching up on Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang joining Charlene Li’s Altimeter group from Altimeter. Jeremiah is quoted in the New York Times: Mr. Owyang said that his story holds lessons for other companies. “I think this is an interesting trend that many companies are going through — personal brands are here to
Continue reading The shift from corporate brands to personal brands
I had a very interesting meeting yesterday with Deloitte Digital‘s CEO Peter Williams, someone who is always on the vanguard of innovation in professional services. A few things he mentioned about what they’re up to: * Yammer (enterprise micro-blogging) has taken off and is getting substantial use across Deloitte Australia. They did a security test
Over the last years I have spent significant time assisting professional services firms to drive innovation. This year I am finding that the economic climate is intensifying the focus on these issues rather than pushing them to the background. The pressures that commoditize services are intensifying, local and global competition is increasing, and clients are
Continue reading Driving innovation in large professional service firms: Six high-return initiatives
The existing logo for Advanced Human Technologies was designed in 1997. Not only has the world changed a lot since then, it is now becoming a very different company. It is time for a complete rebranding, starting with the logo, and including a complete redesign of the website, which is also sorely out of date.
The September issue of the Consulting News magazine of the ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) includes an article I wrote on Building Better Client Relationships. The article is below: Building Better Client Relationships by Ross Dawson In an increasingly money conscious and global economy, where consultants often spend large sums and substantial energy
Continue reading ASTD Consulting News: Building Better Client Relationships
Media Trends+Strategy magazine (click on the link to access the magazine in interactive format) includes a piece titled Media: The State of Play – Expert Analysis which features edited interviews with a variety of participants in the media space, including John Sintras, CEO of Starcom, Belinda Rowe, CEO of ZenithOptimedia, Collin Segelov, Executive Director of
Last week I delivered a keynote in London on behalf of LexisNexis to a select group of senior executives of large professional services firms. The broad theme was the future of professional services and in particular practice management. In my speech I emphasized the network perspective on professional firms. In an economy where value is
Continue reading Keynote: building the networked professional firm
Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at the Managing Partners Forum at Byron Bay, on the topic of Creating the Future of Professional Services, focusing on how to create differentiation in a highly competitive globalized market. The event brought together a small and exclusive group of the Managing Partners of a wide variety of major
Continue reading Keynote at Managing Partners Forum: Creating the Future of Professional Services
The UK magazine Legal Week has just published an article co-authored by myself and Josh Bottomley, the Managing Director of LexisNexis UK, titled Managing a Law Firm: A networked world. The genesis of the article is that I will be delivering the keynote to a group of Managing Partners of major law firms in London
Continue reading Strategy in a networked world for professional service firms
On December 5 I am giving a “View from the Top” online presentation to US and European members of the Association of Executive Search Consultants on Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships:The Key to Avoiding Commoditization. There is no question that commoditization is one of the most powerful driving forces in the global economy. While this has
Continue reading Presentation: Transcending commoditization in professional services
When I was in Singapore recently to deliver a keynote for a client, I was interviewed by Radio Singapore International. Click here for the transcript and podcast of the interview on the Radio Singapore website – the complete interview is also below. While it was a brief interview focused on professional services, a few themes
Continue reading Professional services are the future of the economy
A recent article in Lawyers Weekly magazine titled Firms warned to embrace Web 2.0 opens as follows: AUSTRALIAN LAW firms risk losing clients as well as talent if they don’t make use of Web 2.0 technologies, an expert warns. Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network, said that Australian firms are lagging far behind their
On Thursday I was in Singapore to give a keynote speech on The Future of Professional Services for clients and prospects of Epicor, a mid-tier enterprise software firm that has developed a substantial global market for its professional services software suite. Some of the issues I covered were the Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services, building
Continue reading Innovation in professional services: the case of DDB and Keith Reinhard
This morning I gave an extended keynote session at the annual offsite of a very interesting global professional services network, which brought together the leaders of the member firms. International networks in accounting, law, consulting, and other professional services have flourished over the last years as small to mid-sized firms have sought the benefits of
Continue reading Professional services network offsite: Tapping the Power of Collaboration
Professional services guru David Maister has announced that his next book is going to be self-published. He says: Ask any business author who has published a book what the experience was like: for the vast majority, the horror stories are endless. Basically, publishers don’t actually add any value. Yes, they can edit a manuscript and
Continue reading Self-publishing in a networked world: The case study of David Maister
SAP has just released a Though Leadership White Paper on Service Delivery Innovation, which I wrote with Matthew Horenkamp of SAP America. Service Delivery Innovation is an absolutely critical issue for professional firms. Firms’ ability to do this well will undoubtedly be a major factor in determining the winners and losers over the next decade.
I recently pointed to the launch of the second edition of Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, including the free download of Chapter 1 of the book. Following on from this, the other free chapter from the book is Chapter 6 – Enhancing Client Relationship Capabilities: Implementing Key Client Programs. Over the last decade most major organizations
Continue reading Chapter 6: Implementing key client programs
One of my deepest interests is professional networks – how groups of independent professionals coalesce to serve clients. I’ve written about professional networks in both of my books, and this will be a central theme of one of my future books. Future Exploration Network is my own implementation of a professional network, in which we
Continue reading Professional networks and marketing without advertising
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About the Blog author
Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of AHT Group, which consists of 3 companies: consulting, publishing, and ventures firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy firm Future Exploration Network, and events company The Insight Exchange.
Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.
Books By Ross Dawson (Incl. Free Chapters)
Articles and Reports
Future of Media Report 2008
Future of Media Report 2007
Future of Media Report 2006
Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Network Strategy
Future of the Media Lifecycle
Future of Media: Strategy Tools
Executive Insights into Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0 Framework
Trend map 2007+
Extinction Timeline
SAP White Paper: Service Delivery Innovation
White Paper: The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services
CNET/ University of Virginia White Paper: How Technology Purchasing Decisions Are Really Made
PM Network magazine's lead article on virtual teamwork (440KB), featuring Ross Dawson on the cover
Microsoft Strategic White Paper: How To Lock-in Your Clients (1.1MB)
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