Can anyone comment on consultancies strong on corporate culture advisory as an enabler for innovation and performance?Strategy& (Booz)?Haygroup?Big 4?Clearly organisations taking culture more seriously eg salz review at Barclays.Many thanks!

Yes Barclays take culture seriously - cutting what is it 6K jobs? The investment bank worth a few pence of a slowly recovering share price which 3 months ago was basically junk? The only MC banks take seriously is Mck, and they could care less about culture - they would point to the real issues, such as rescuing or divest failing business units etc. Culture as an enabler is really just a sugary gloss on commercial necessity.

Second mars. In my experience, corporate culture advisory/consulting is absolute bullshit, especially in trying to drive an innovation agenda.Corporate culture consulting is generally relegated to some 'strategic' report for some head of HR so she/he can present some initiative that inevitably gets no traction with the CEO/board.Innovation is NOT driven by some cultural transformation program. It is driven by core business strategy and the desire to move into a space the absolutely requires innovative products, thinking, operations. It's about deciding to move from an outdated and dying sector to next generation products. That's not a 'cultural improvement' consulting project. That's a pure strat project.

You wouldn't believe how much traction these culture people get, my current project involves such a workstream, what a load of tosh, I say with complete anonymity.Counter to this though, if you can repeatedly bill a client hey they must be getting something.Also a quote i just stumbled upon. 'I don't work here. I'm a consultant.'

You wouldn't believe how much traction these culture people get, my current project involves such a workstream, what a load of tosh, I say with complete anonymity.Counter to this though, if you can repeatedly bill a client hey they must be getting something.Also a quote i just stumbled upon. 'I don't work here. I'm a consultant.'

My instinct is that the 'culture' workstreams are always largely political vehicles - with an element of pushing a change message across the business while providing somewhere to kick anything esoteric or which could involve dealing directly with human consequences into the long grass.