Kelso Consulting's blog for management consultants

Nine signs your thought leadership campaign will go wrong.. and how to sort it out

Your management consultancy is ambitious.  It sees an opportunity and wants to stand out as the go-to firm.  You want clients and prospects to recognise you as experts.

But standing out in a crowded market is difficult, so what could be better than an attention-grabbing "thought leadership" initiative?  After all, market leaders like Accenture, Clifford Chance, McKinsey and PwC do lots of it, as do many successful smaller practices.

For many consultancies, Thought Leadership begins here and nine months later it has grown into a successful project.

But at others it is a different story: progress is slow; enthusiasm has ebbed; time and costs are high.

Often those projects that languish had failure "built in from the start" and major avoidable problems that have made failure.inevitable

How do you tell if your project is going to be a great success or if it is heading towards disaster?  Here are nine tell-tale signs:

1 - No senior champion

2 - Weak project management

3 - A committee is running the show

4 - Sales displacement activity

5 - It's "just a marketing initiative"

6 - Unclear objectives

7 - Doing Thought Leadership in areas you don't know well

8 - Shallow findings

9 - No thorough launch plan