Careers at Allen Austin - At a Glance
From the 2008 book Deciding Who Leads by Joseph Daniel McCool.
With the demands of leadership at an all-time high and executive tenure at a record low, executive search consulting is the single most influential form of management consulting engaged by organizations.
Working out of sight of public scrutiny, executive search consultants are an invisible force at the center of the global competition for the best leadership. They quietly influence executive compensations, management turnover, leadership development, and even employers' definition of leadership. This at a time when these topics are increasingly the subject of media reports, shareholder meetings, and the everyday concerns of consumers, employees, academics, consultants, managers and social researchers. These consultants' experience, networks, opinions, gut judgments, and, yes, biases collectively set the course and usually preordain the outcome of a search for leadership advantage.
Executive search consulting has been described by more than one of its practitioners as "the ultimate consulting business," and the truth is that no other professional services business has anywhere near its multibillion-dollar global impact on organizational performance, culture and profits. Search consultants regularly move the financial markets when they recruit talented people to high-profile corporate leadership positions, and they similarly depreciate shareholder value when they lure a top executive away from an employer or when they accelerate or facilitate the exodus of key executives from a troubled company.
We're only now in the opening skirmishes of the global war for executive talent. For organizations that find themselves unprepared to engage in it to defend their precious leadership assets, the truth hurts.
A study by RHR International, a U.S. based human resources consultancy, found that 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies anticipated losing half their senior management by 2008, while only about 25 percent were highly confident that their internal talent pool would meet the organization's future needs.
Executive search consulting is a form of business consultancy with an especially bright future, in part, according to Harvard Business School professor Watkins, because it feeds an appetite for leadership talent stoked by the Fortune 500 companies, where, he estimates, more than 500,000 management positions turn over each year.
If done well, executive search consulting has no substitute.