Professional Services

Keeping Your Edge

Managing a professional services firm is a challenge like no other. Recruiting the best and brightest, retaining top performers and managing growth through difficult economic cycles are just a few of the challenges keeping management up at night. Axiom is the consultant’s consultant, helping some of the world’s largest and most successful firms keep their edge by ensuring that their organizations’ capabilities and talent management practices are right for the times.

Read Dave Kuhlman's perspective on "Pipes, Pressure and the Secret of Talent Flow at Professional Service Firms."Among his insights, Dave writes: "In a firm, the hydraulic pressure of talent flow is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.  When an individual is ready to move to a certain, higher point in the flow, there’s a limited period of time to promote them there before energy and enthusiasm are lost.  Having the right opportunities (for work or promotion) can be key to success.

In "Creating Alignment in a Professional Service Firm: The Three Superpowers of the CEO," Dave Kuhlman makes the case that CEOs have three underutilized powers at their disposal: The power of attention, the power of uncomfortable questions, and the power to elevate.

Responding to reporting in The Economist  about audit independence  and accounting firm's providing other consulting services, Dave Kuhlman writes: "Simplistic solutions like banning public company auditors from performing other services for clients risks putting them at a serious talent disadvantage. That, in turn, makes it even harder for them to deliver the high quality services they (and their clients, and the capital markets) aspire to."