The Chair Update May 2020


Dear Colleagues,

At the end of April your Board of Directors met virtually. You can check out the public minutes HERE.

I have also done a video overview of this update, which you can check out at the end of this page if you prefer.

Your Board, and the Secretariat staff under the leadership of our Executive Director have been very busy. This is an update of our main activities and an exciting announcement.

Online Seminar Series
The online seminar series was launched on April 23 to great reviews. Thank you all for participating in the events, for sharing so freely, and in general helping the profession to grow. We have two types of events. One is a panel / discussion forum. In these cases, we have one session that caters to Asia time zones, and one that caters to America time zones. Europe and Africa get to chose whether they prefer a morning or afternoon session. The second type is when we have an expert provide webinar-style content. In this case we do not repeat the content but rotate the time zone, so everyone gets an equal chance to participate live. All of the content is published on our YouTube channel: ICMCI Official Videos https://gj.al/Dv3sm7. If you didn’t have a chance to participate in the live event, you can review the video there.

Check out the upcoming seminars at the bottom of our home page, or in the Events section at: https://www.cmc-global.org/

2020 Meetings
The Board had to make some hard decisions about our upcoming events. While final details are being worked out, the bottom line is that we have decided it is not wise to proceed with the live events planed for the rest of 2020. The EuroHub will be changed to a virtual event on June 5.  The CMC International Conference has been postponed for one year, and our colleagues in Armenia who had been selected to host us in 2020 will conduct the event in 2021. The Annual meeting will be changed to a virtual Annual Meeting – our first of this kind. We have some exciting ideas on how to make this interactive and enable us to carry on our governance business. We will keep you informed as details progress. The AP Hub has been cancelled for 2020.

These are drastic steps made necessary by the global Covid-19 pandemic. I know we will all find ways to keep ourselves fresh and in touch. Now more than ever we need to rely on our network so we can learn from each other and leverage each others’ strengths.

Membership Strategy Taskforce
In February I announced a Task Force to address how we can attract new entrants in to consulting to affiliate with our Institutes. I had hoped to announce the Task Force in March and begin work in April. As you can well understand, our attentions have been diverted!

In spite of the pandemic, and in fact reinforced by it, growth is foundational to our future success. We are facing challenges as the profession of management consulting. Our clients are and will be facing immense disruption through automation and digitization. Consulting itself is being disrupted: both in the way our services are perceived and in the greatest availability of knowledge of all time to our client base. At the same time, the very way in which new entrants to consulting perceive the profession is changing. 

As I announced in February, we believe that for success this will need to involve private investments, and we already have an interested party who will invest the necessary resources and give us the leadership we need to get us to the business model stage. I am pleased to announce that the Chair of our Task Force is Sak Hutanuwatra, Chair of IMC Thailand. As many of you know, Sak is an energetic person who has access to the kind of investments we will require to stimulate the growth we need.

This is a new way of doing business for us. We do not have the luxury of trying to achieve the necessary results using our available resources. Time is not on our side. I listened carefully to Delegates in Nassau and heard loud and clear the summary message: “Now is the time to be bold!”

We will take bold steps, but we will do it though a reasonable consultative process. From the ICMCI perspective, we must understand about new entrants into the consulting field. Specifically, what attracts them to consulting? What do they understand consulting to be? What products or services they perceive they may need to have a successful consulting career? The point of interest is the intersections of these interests with the value proposition of a management consulting Institute. Are we doing enough to help new entrants understand that consulting is a profession, not a series of part time jobs or skills-based contracts? How can we improve our value proposition to better attract these new entrants to affiliate with the Institute, and form there hopefully join, take professional development, seek networking opportunities, and eventually join the Institute and thereafter, also eventually, start the path to certification? 

We will launch the Task Force work on June 2 with an online seminar seeking input from Institutes. Watch for the announcement. In the meantime, I am pleased to announce the following members:

  1. Francesco d’Aprile, past Chair of ICMCI
  2. Jehona Lluka, Director of the ICMCI Board, and Executive Director of IMC Kosovo
  3. Otto Acuna, Chair, Professional Development, CMC Global Institute

I will be personally involved in the work of the Task Force, as will Reema in her capacity as our Executive Director.

ICMCI National Consulting Index
You might be aware of our Consulting Readiness Index (you can find it on: https://www.cmc-global.org/content/nci-history). This has evolved into the ICMCI National Consulting Index (NCI), determined nearly for any country, to be launched June of 2020.

Why have we done that and how to use it:

  • The ICMCI National Consulting Index assesses the stage of development of a country’s management consulting sector by the analysis of several indicators. The correlations of the indicators are set up by our Academic Fellows and published in a peer-reviewed journal. 
  • The NCI is published on a yearly basis in June (connected with the International Consultant Day) and is the official report of ICMCI consistent with our vision to be “the leader in the development of management consulting as a global profession that drives social and economic success”). It will cover all member countries of ICMCI. 
  • IMCs are kindly invited to use the NCI as tool to promote Management Consulting in their country. The strength and the weakness of the market will be shown in the NCI and can be used to approach politicians for advocacy purposes, client organizations, chambers of the different industries, or other stakeholders. ICMCI will advise the IMCs individually how to interpret the figures of the NCI with regards to their specific weaknesses and strengths in the management consulting market. 
  • This is a great tool to help IMCs show the importance of Management Consultancy services generally, and especially so in the upcoming phase of restarting economies.

ISO 20700
Our ISO 20700 Checklist training program has been very successful. We now have 26 Accredited IMCs, and 2 accredited organizations, who have trained to date over 200 consultants. Check out the information about ISO 20700 here: https://www.iso20700.org/

This month we launched the first virtual Train the Trainer training program with IMC Australia. We are looking forward to more IMCs being trained. With our current levels of trained instructors, including CMC-Global Institute’s virtual training program, we expect these numbers to grow significantly.

Our Social Marketing
Under the leadership of Jehona Lluka, our social marketing platforms have been updated and enabled. Please join or like these media to keep in touch with what’s happening in the profession of management consulting around the world:

YouTube ICMCI official Videos https://bit.ly/3cS0YJ0
Twitter: CMC_ICMCI https://twitter.com/CMC_ICMCI
LinkedIn: ICMCI /CMC Global  https://www.linkedin.com/groups/78125/
Facebook Private Group: @ICMCI / CMC Global Official Group https://bit.ly/2WOfAU7
Facebook Page @ICMCI CMC Global https://bit.ly/2XgxtKd
Instagram: ICMCI Official https://www.instagram.com/icmci_official/

Let’s Stay in Touch
Please feel free to be in touch with me at any time. My email is dwight.mihalicz@cmc-global.org. By leveraging our global network, consultants can work together to contribute to a better future for the industry globally, and better results for clients and society.

Collaboration is key… please keep in touch.

Thanks to the Institutes that have invited me to attend their events virtually. I would be very happy to virtually attend a suitable event hosted by you in order to address our strategy or any specific programs of interest to your Institute. Please keep this in mind as you plan your events.