Who is next? The game of skill and scale.

Working in the strategy consulting profession, I have been fortunate enough to study the past, present and the future of a range of industries. I have always been impressed by the capacity of my own industry to absorb change and transformation - from the old days of Arthur D Little, James McKinsey, Edwin Booz, Andrew Thomas Kearney and Bruce Henderson to the era of dot.com boom when the tech firms started buying advisory services to create convergence.

Looking at the current state of affairs - strategy consulting is once again going through massive changes and once again the capacity to absorb transformation to better service our clients would be called upon.

It would appear that CA firms are back in the business of advisory - given the non-compete in most cases are over. This time round the CA firms are shying away from technology and staying more or less in the annuity based long term transformation journeys of their client.

The technology firms are digging in for business process outsourcing as the large technology projects move away to cloud based solutions.

And both of them are aspiring to increasingly guide their clients' journey towards strategic goals. This, then puts the firms that have been in the driving seat of the strategy consulting in a increasingly competitive landscape. This time the competition comes, not from the splinter groups, but from firms with fundamentally different cost structures and aspirations. So how does it get played out and how do the client's make the most of it.

It is now time for either scale or skill.

The larger firms are continuing to gain scale, following the all services, all geographies full service model. The mid tier firms that don't have the scale need to either scale up by merging or being bought - Monitor is gone, Booz bought, Diamond, Parthenon, PRTM and numerous other mid-tier firms have disappeared over time. The all opted to be bought out by larger CA firms that could provide the scale and the blended cost model that would help them better service the new client needs of operational strategy. These models of scale are based on homogenous issues based projects - where same issue faced by an industry can be leveraged across geographies. The old cookie cutter phenomenon - or as old and tired joke about consulting goes- we borrow clients' watch to tell them time.

But where consulting really provides value is in innovative problem solving - where the old solutions don't work and new solutions need to be developed. It is about getting experience to come to bear to create new out of the box thinking for new emerging challenges. This is where some of the mid tier firms will have the opportunity to excel - by moving away from the value proposition of homogeneity and scale - but distinguishing themselves on innovative thinking and client centric thinking. Arthur D. Little created the industry in 1886 - based on this hypothesis. His practice didn't succeed against the new comers to the industry as they leveraged homogeneity to create scale - but I think it is time now for both to prosper. Scale provides a value proposition that is valid and much needed by large MNC firms with global footprint - whilst the same firms need the much deeper investment from their consulting partner to really apply themselves to the deeply specific challenges facing their specific organization. It is in this space that it would be interesting to see which strategies the three last standing middle tier firms - Oliver Wyman, Bain and A.T Kearney - will adopt to prosper and better serve their clients.

The clients are well positioned to have a broad range of services that they pick from - whether it is time tested solution to global supply chain issues or a very specific segmentation in a particular market. The key is one size doesn't fit all. For consultants, it is time to chose the firm that provides the right skills development platform for future viability.

Regardless, never a dull moment in this industry.