ABSTRACT
Lucien, a junior consultant hired in France, was writing a PowerPoint slide, meant as a rough plan for client for how to sell more private travel insurance products in Asia, over the next five years. The slide depicted a number of activity categories along the Y-axis (such as ‘ensuring market access’, ‘developing a sales team’, ‘preparing legal issues’) and the years during which they had to be implemented along the X-axis. While intra-firm knowledge exchange was actively encouraged, it was limited by two main factors. First, experienced consultants were often deeply involved in their own project work and could not spend too much of their time helping other teams. Second, the knowledge written down in simplified PowerPoint slides or spreadsheets was usually impenetrable in hindsight and therefore hard to reuse on subsequent projects. Macroeconomic accounts frequently neglect the critical function of consultants and focus excessively on how the companies bring in information from the outside.
