The Future of Consulting (Round 1)

European Straits | Work in Progress

Hi, it’s Nicolas from The Family. Here’s a first round of work trying to devise the future of the consulting industry. Subscribers: Please read and let me know what you think 🤗

1/ Let me tell you a secret: If you want to make a guess about an industry’s future, the surest approach is to study its past. According to Ben Horowitz (as told in this commencement address), this is what inspired Brian Chesky’s long-term strategy for Airbnb. And studying history is what we’re going to do today with consulting. How did the consulting industry come about?

You can learn most of it by reading Christopher McKenna’s The World’s Newest Profession. The whole thing started with the Glass-Steagall Act, which was adopted in 1933 to curb the large banks that were dominating the US economy at the beginning of the 20th century. The new rules forbade two things.

The most well-known provision is that the Act forced the banks to pick a side between two very different businesses: investment banking on one hand a…