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    The Creative Consulting Company
    23 Jul 2018Working Paper Summaries

    The Creative Consulting Company

    by Robert S. Kaplan, Richard Nolan, and David P. Norton
    Management theories cannot be tested in laboratories; they must be applied, tested, and extended in real organizations. For this reason the most creative consulting companies balance conflicting demands between short‐term business development and long‐term knowledge creation.
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    Author Abstract

    During the past 50 years, several consulting companies introduced important new ideas that extended management theory and improved management practice. This paper draws upon public sources and the authors’ personal experiences to describe how three management consulting companies created and sustained several big management ideas. The consulting organizations identified companies that had introduced an innovation to address a practice gap or anomaly. It then described the innovation in articles, cases, and public conferences and proceeded to help a new set of companies implement the management innovation, which led to enhancements in the original innovation that made it more understandable, generalizable, and robust. The consulting leaders sustained their thought-leadership positions by creating an ecosystem with senior executives at pioneer corporations and academic/thought leaders. The paper also describes how other consulting companies did not sustain an initial thought-leadership position because of a failure to recognize the synergistic interplay between knowledge application and knowledge creation.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: July 2018
    • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #19-001
    • Faculty Unit(s): Accounting and Management
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    Robert S. Kaplan
    Robert S. Kaplan
    Senior Fellow
    Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus
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    Richard L. Nolan
    Richard L. Nolan
    William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus
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