In recent years, consultants have increasingly taken on more of a leadership role in companies.
In a way, they are becoming more like CEOs.
The most prominent examples of this trend are the consulting giants McKinsey & Co. and Deloitte & Touche.
Both are based in the United States, and McKinsey and Delositte have a combined net worth of $9 billion.
Their top executives, in turn, are highly compensated with salaries of $2.5 million and $2 million, respectively.
But the new trend also reflects a broader shift in the way companies operate.
A consultant is often more of an administrative, business and legal person than a CEO.
McKinsey is now the largest consultant firm in the world.
The company employs about 1.5 billion people.
But many are working on a far different project: helping companies become more agile, flexible and connected.
The McKinsey report on the consulting industry found that the most common mistake companies make is to try to manage the complexity of their projects by outsourcing them to a third party.
Instead, the consultants said the biggest mistake is to not understand the underlying business process, the process by which a project is created, or the process that guides the design, implementation and management of the product or service.
“They have not thought through the complexity and the complexity is often the most important,” said John Schmitt, a former executive at McKinsey who helped develop the report.
“This has a cascading effect.”
Many companies are also struggling to attract top talent.
For example, more than two-thirds of companies surveyed by McKinsey reported having fewer than 10 employees by 2020.
The companies that are hiring the most, on average, are those with high compensation, including those with more than $200 million in revenues.
But some of the biggest changes are coming from smaller firms, which are less dependent on big consulting firms and less reliant on their own networks.
For many smaller firms that hire consultants, it’s hard to keep up with their own internal growth and are more likely to rely on a smaller team of people.
Some small businesses are turning to the likes of Big 4 consulting firms for the first time.
In recent months, these firms have been expanding their scope and offering more flexible consulting work.
But these smaller firms still face a huge challenge, said Schmitt.
They need to be able to offer the level of expertise and experience they need to become a true global consulting giant.
That means that they need an agile team of professionals, who can work with a wider range of clients and are well versed in a wide range of technology issues.
“The challenges are real,” said Marc Schulz, CEO of Big4, which has a $200 billion market cap and has more than 100,000 employees.
“We have to get our business in sync.”
To be successful, these companies need to get out from under the weight of their past mistakes and adopt the best practices they learned from their past work.
And in the coming years, they also need to learn from their successes.
In the McKinsey study, more small firms were able to find a more agile way to manage projects.
For instance, in the last year, more of them have embraced the “strategy” approach, which uses agile development, team-based management and customer engagement to streamline and improve processes.
But they still have some work to do.
“A lot of small firms, when they start, they say they want to do a strategy consulting, but they never really take that first step,” said Schulz.
“What you’re really looking for is an agile, distributed strategy and you’re going to see that through a series of trials and iterations.
They’re going from trial to trial, and you’ll see that it takes a lot of effort and that’s a big part of why you’ll end up having to reinvent your entire business model.”
The McKinley report also found that large companies need a different approach to business strategy than small firms.
Small businesses need to adopt a strategy that is not only more flexible, but also more responsive.
That includes a more focused focus on their core business.
That is where they need more agile management and more collaboration.
They also need a better relationship with their suppliers, so they can better respond to the evolving needs of their customers.
“When you start outsourcing, you start looking at all your business metrics,” said Karel van Buren, president of Karel Van Buren &.
Associates.
“You’re basically looking at your bottom line and your growth rate, your cost of capital and you start to think about all the different things that go into that.
You’re essentially outsourcing your business to a consultant.”
In the next five years, Big 4 consultants are expected to grow by a staggering 300 percent.
In fact, their net worth could surpass $1 trillion by 2025.
The biggest growth areas include software development and mobile technology, which will