Scenario - you leave your consulting firm and end up with a position in a corporate where you buy consultancy services. How does what you have learned about your old firm influence what you would buy from them? Would you continue to cheerfully subscribe to their marketing pitch? Would you become a cherrypicker? Would you put them in whole or certain service lines on the blacklist?

thankfully i've worked in some great places with some highly inspirational people so i would always given them a fair (not biased) shot.

my personal tack has tended to be to give opportunities to those service lines (and specific teams) that I knew to be client-centric, deep in content and value-adding, and avoid those where I knew a thin veil of marketing puff was concealing a pool of generic bodyshop resource - and I've seen a lot of the latter. I have given repeat business to a team that has moved between firms - ie in that case I see the value as being with the team of individuals rather than the 'host' company

I'm with Billum on this one.There are groups in my firm that I wouldn't hesitate to bring in with a strong recommendation; however there are others that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.It is mostly based around the partner that heads up the group. One or two of them are superficial and incapable of selling interesting work and have therefore built a team of superficial, uninteresting, undifferentiated and incapable people around them.The majority of partners where I work, however, have got solid teams which can do the strategic piece but have got detailed delivery capabilities also, which is actually much harder. On a completely unrelated point, there are way too many "fire and forget" consultancies that produce theoretical solutions to oversimplified problems and then arrogantly chalk up the subsequent implementation failures to incompetent clients.EC