The Virtual Consulting Group is a group of individuals, all of whom have spent many years working with a wide range of businesses and organisations. From that experience, we have arrived at some more or less similar ideas.
Only ‘more or less’ because we remain individuals with a variety of backgrounds and views, and we believe that diversity is stronger than uniformity. But ‘similar’ because we have chosen to create a collaborative structure to exchange ideas and to work together when appropriate.
When we established the group, in 1992, this was an innovative way to structure a consulting team. Now it’s a lot more common.
But one significant characteristic and one driving value remain much less common.
The characteristic is that we are all senior and experienced consultants. We have all been around. We do the actual work, rather than just pass it down to ‘managers’. We don’t have a hierarchy – in fact, we have no employees. We are all owners of the business.
We have two driving values.
The first is that we do work that we enjoy. Life is too short to be spending it on boring or distasteful work just to meet someone’s idea of a billing hours target. We don’t have those.
Our second driving value is that we want to leave a world for our grandchildren that is better than the one we inherited from our grandparents. Right now we feel that this could be a tough call.
We have a variety of views about how this might be achieved, but we are keenly interested in, and discuss among ourselves, the world-wide debate about how traditional organisations might need to the change, the challenges and the future of conventional management, and the various models of capitalism that are emerging, even in the USA.