Agency vs. Management Consultancy… or People vs. Processes – Meeting people and talking about topics drives me always to re-think topics, directions and ideas. Sometimes it’s just the half of a sentences which point me in a direction and let me brood about something. Now I came to the different direction, the different culture and the different approach between agencies and  management consultancy.

Companies needs to transform themselves. I do not want to name it digital transformation. Digital platforms offers possibilities for everyone to post their opinion on the one side and they leave tracks. So people are more visible which gives them more power thank 30 years ago. We are living in totally transformed media landscape. In the past it was a one direction communication for companies, now it’s an interaction and they need to listen carefully what people say and what they do.

Marketing is much more than just communication, it’s the entire interaction. This is a  complete different game play which requires a different approach, different directions and  a big internal transformation of processes, structures and thinking. Thinking about this brought these two post in my mind:

Digital Transformation: Road Work Next 5 Miles

What is a #CX Methodology and a #CX Strategy?

The pyramid shows the entire world where we need to work on and every single level could fill many blog posts. What I have done in the pyramid was to split it between strategic and operational. This is right, but to short and does not reflect the attention / importance of the upper part of the pyramid. What we need to think about is the methodology which I described in the second post in the case of #CX. To bring this together the pyramid could be extended like this:

Source: Aligned on video “Leading with OKR” @ Murakamy ¹⁾Das OKR Modell – Führen mit Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) – https://murakamy.com/okr

We need to understand that Vision, Mission and Values is not just something for the corporate page or the corporate ID card.

But who is responsible for the methodology? Who needs to implement it and who can drive it? While agencies are more people focused, management consultancies are more process focussed… or the other way around, management consultancies are playing in the area of methodology while agencies focus on transformation like shown in the pyramid. Both are doing strategy, but from a different direction.

Passion and a clear / strong approach to drive the topics is essential. We need to drive them though inspiration and not processes. Processes are needed to bring the passion to live, but they should always be second and must follow the passion. Customer Experience (#CX) follows the VEA principle which I described here.

What we need is a combined approach. We need people with passion and a clear structured mindset… Visionary people who lives in the reality of today. It is like with a climber. A climber must be  fit with his body (1), his mindset (2) and he needs the passion (3) to climb up a mountain like the mount Everest. He must have all three things to manage the challenge.

To bring these people to power, they need to deal with the right stakeholder. They must be the trusted advisor for the board level as well as the senior management and should be placed on a very senior management level. Then, and only then, they align both worlds… the world of the agency and the management consultancy.

These are people with the agency in their heart and the management consultancy in their mind.