ACM: Ubiquity - Why New Ideas are Both Disruptive and Necessary

ACM: Ubiquity - Why New Ideas are Both Disruptive and Necessary: "Larry Prusak: There are actually a couple of big ideas in the book. One is the whole notion of "Idea Practitioner." We wanted to identify a group of people who we felt had never been acknowledged or even written about in past management literature. And these are Idea Practitioners -- people who, for whatever reasons, are intrinsically motivated, and who latch on to new ideas and bring them into the organization and fight for them. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but they do this over and over.
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I'll tell you this: the old IBM/Accenture model of selling young programmers at X amount of dollars per hour is dead. China and India are killing that. So if consultants don't bring new ideas they'll fail, because you can't win by selling kids anymore. That can be done cheaper in China or India, so consultants have to win on new ideas. Accenture's whole advertising campaign is about that now, and I bet IBM bought Pricewaterhouse for that same reason. (Just to pick two firms I'm familiar with.) I mean, that's what I'd do: I'd look for new ideas, new methods, new approaches, new concepts, and new tools that you could bring to clients. Clients really expect that. I remember a senior vice president at General Electric telling some people I was with: 'I expect you people to come in here with new ideas. If you tell me what I already know, I don't need to waste my time with you.' I thought he was exactly right. The people he told that to were annoyed, but I figured: 'Well, why shouldn't he say that?'"

Very timely and insightful interview