| | By Mick James
Consultants find
inspiration in the
oddest places: Jonathan
Chocqueel-Mangan of
leadership specialists
Tyler Mangan found the
ideal metaphor in a
leather workshop on a
cobbled street in
France.
“It was all really
good quality and I
talked to the guy who
ran it and found he has
customers in Tokyo and
Milan and Paris,” he
says. Surprisingly, the
owner had no ambition to
ramp up production: “He
said, ‘I’m an
artisan—that’s not what
I do. I can gain a
worldwide market as an
artisan,’ I thought,
what if a consultancy
was like that.”
For Chocqueel-Mangan,
and his co-founder Jana
Klimecki, “Does this fit
the artisan model?” has
become something of a
catch phrase.
“We were looking at
hiring someone, a real
business development
type, who was talking
about creating a great
pipeline and funnelling
people through,” he
said. “But then we
thought ‘this doesn’t
feel artisanal,’ so we
didn’t do it.”
Instead, Tyler Mangan
relies as much as the
French artisan on the
“Where did you get that
lovely bag?” effect.
“CEOs talk to each
other,” says
Chocqueel-Mangan. “We
love what we do and we
are very good at it, and
we are big enough and
bold enough to work with
the top organisations.”
The firm’s approach
stems very much from its
founders’ experiences,
bringing together
diverse areas such as
big ticket project
consultancy,
headhunting,
organisational
psychology and the
balanced scorecard—and
noticing a major lacuna
in the consultancy
model.
“How do we know all
the change we do fits
with what the boardroom
are doing, and how does
the boardroom’s work
translate to the
organisation?” says
Chocqueel-Mangan. “With
some types of
transitions, it’s all
very well to build the
processes and
infrastructure but if
the leadership team
doesn’t have the
ability, it doesn’t
matter how great the
processes are. Equally,
it’s no good if you’ve
got sclerotic
processes.”
Typically, clients
would look to a
consultancy for process
work and a headhunter to
build its leadership
team. Chocqueel-Mangan
sees this split in | |
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| | approach—between
building infrastructure
and developing
leadership capability—as
having been imposed by
the professional
services industry.
“Clients in main don’t
split them, it’s
artificial,” he says.
“We work to build
process and
capability.”
A large part of Tyler
Mangan’s business comes
from private equity
firms, who are very
alive to the idea that
due diligence should
encompass HR issues.
“We help them assess
whether this management
team can deliver their
investment strategy,”
says Chocqueel-Mangan.
“For example, one CEO
was very good at team
building; but we saw
that as a weakness,
because he wouldn’t be
very good at building
the new, virtual team.”
Sometimes this means
challenging clients;
effectively, telling
them “we don’t think you
are up for this.”
“That’s the joy of
being a small firm, we
can tell them what we
really think,” says
Chocqueel-Mangan. “We
only need a few clients
but they have to be
great clients—we can’t
afford to have bad
clients.”
This also means
ignoring what
Chocqueel-Mangan calls
the “little devil that
sits on your
shoulder—the one that
says ‘sell them a
project.’ There may not
be a project.”
Unsurprisingly, Tyler
Mangan is not pursuing
the headlong growth
strategy of other
consultancies:
“We think we can get
to 40 with an artisan
feel,” he says. “That’s
still tiny, and there
might be several offices
around the world, we
could have three offices
of 15 or 20 people.”
That means a slightly
different proposition to
staff: “We don’t hire
everyone in the
expectation they will
become a partner,” says
Chocqueel-Mangan. “Lots
of people say ‘I love
consulting and I love
working with clients but
I don’t want to abandon
my craft to climb the
ladder.’”
The people who would
struggle, he says, are
those who don’t love
their craft enough or
who don’t have enough
content to operate at
board level. “We want
artisans, people who
love their craft and
have content they are
passionate about, he
adds.
The trade-off is a
better quality of live,
without excessive travel | |
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| | and weekend working:
“Everyone gets a
research week—like a
reading week at
university—because we
are here to have
something to say,” he
says. “You can go where
you want, if you want to
just read and think,
there are no
deliverables.”
Tyler Mangan tends to
hire people with masters
degrees rather than
MBAs, which adds a
certain intellectual
rigour to their
approach: “We understand
what we are reading,”
says Chocqueel-Mangan.
“For example, an article
in the McKinsey
Quarterly might be a
very good article and
very high in relevance,
but useless as a piece
of research. We want
work that is highly
rigorous and highly
relevant and we strive
to find people who worry
about things like that,
who don’t see the world
simplistically.”
Fully understanding
that the problem is
central to Tyler
Mangan’s approach: “We
need to understand the
problem before we start
charging you,” says
Chocqueel-Mangan.
“Consultants in general
are pretty clueless
about how clients think
about price. We say,
read the proposal. If
it’s more expensive or
less expensive than you
were expecting then one
of us doesn’t understand
this. Once we get to a
situation where we all
know what the problem
is, we very rarely have
any fee discussions.”
Tyler Mangan also
offers an unconditional
client satisfaction
guarantee (which,
Chocqueel-Mangan points
out, is every
consultancy client’s
legal right in any
case).
“We offer this
guarantee as a way of
making sure we are
really confident in the
client and that we can
work with them,” he
says. “If you think
we’ve only achieved 80%
pay us 80%. There are no
metrics—the only
provision is that you
sit down and tell us
what we could have done
better.”
Can the artisanal
approach work in the
growth-obsessed
consultancy business?
Tyler Mangan has
certainly nailed their
colours to the mast.
When I ask
Chocqueel-Mangan why the
firm has based itself in
the largely
consultant-free
Clerkenwell area of
London he delivers the
answer like a
punchline:
“We’re artisans—we
live in the jewellery
quarter.” | |
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