Chasing new ideas can be a distracting obsession, Larry Zentner, co-founder of Inzenka, tells Mick James, Top-Consultant.com’s management consultancy columnist.

We’ve talked a lot in these columns recently about a dearth of innovation in the business landscape, but is innovation really the issue? For Inzenka, a rapidly-growing global consultancy based in North London, an obsession with seeking out new ideas is distracting companies from the main challenge: execution.

“Most firms don’t think there’s a ‘crisis of creativity’ at all,” says Larry Zentner, co-founder of Inzenka. “They say they have lots of ideas, and they probably do. But either they are too small, or too ‘me-too’, or they have no decent process for acting on them. In that respect, innovation has become a false god.”

Zentner explains: “Businesses run workshops and generate loads of ideas but one year down the line nothing has been translated into the market.”

The Inzenka approach is different, he says. “We’d rather talk about growth: it’s the more commercial flavour—how to get revenues onto the books though new products, services, and new businesses.”

So, despite bursting with ideas, corporations struggle with growth.

“They don’t put enough of the right people on the case, they don’t fund it adequately, they don’t lead, and they don’t put it at the top of their company’s agenda,” says Zentner.

“They put someone in charge and then say: ‘I want you, from a zero start, with no balance sheet and no people, to put your career on the line in the belief that there is something out there’.”

Inzenka’s approach to circumventing the inertia and lack of confidence that stifle innovation in large corporations is through something they call “transactional learning.”

“We say, let’s put something in the market in a test form but also in a real form,” says Zentner. “Let’s prove that customers like it enough to pay real money for it, and once we’ve proved that we can make it pay, then scale it up.”

By using “skeletal” IT, begging and borrowing resources, and involving appropriate external partners from an early stage, Inzenka creates projects that are both low-risk for the client, yet are impressive in the market. And by the time the project comes back as a serious investment proposal, not only has the case for it been made but much of the hard work has already been done.

Inzenka’s target market is large corporations, and it sometimes targets them in a way that is probably still anathema to most consultants—cold-calling.

“We love speaking directly with potential clients when there’s something worth talking about,” says Zentner. “If you’ve got a big business challenge around growth, then it’s good to have someone with a perspective of how to move forwards.”

It seems that many do indeed take the call. Since its launch by Zentner and co-founder Andy Katz in 2004, Inzenka has grown to around 30 consultants and a second office in New York and a third in Paris is on its way later this year.

Inzenka has found clients in fields as far apart as energy, telecoms, defence, business services, and healthcare, but it’s keen to avoid being seen as sector specific.

“Most consultancy is about being more effective about what you do,” says Zentner. “We’re not about that. We‘re about moving into new and adjacent spaces.”

This is reflected in the firm’s office, an airy post-industrial space in a pleasant backstreet in Primrose Hill. It’s more reminiscent of a boutique ad agency or design studio than a management consultancy.

Zentner says his main motivation was simply to find “somewhere clients would feel good about,” but also a space that would encourage the collaborative work with clients that underpins Inzenka’s work: “It’s very important to get clients out of the business-as-usual mentality and get them to immerse themselves in the project.”

Katz says that Inzenka’s preferred method is to form small joint teams, pairing clients with its own people, most of who have come from large corporations ranging from Carphone Warehouse to Coca-Cola, and who have experience of growing brands and creating new businesses within companies such as McGraw Hill, MTV, Pepsico, Post Office, Unilever, T-Mobile and Virgin Media.

“Our issues are much more around where to get the people than where to get the work,” says Katz. “It’s not just a question of getting hold of the smartest people, but those with the ability to really connect with clients.”

Katz says that although most of Inzenka’s current fee-earners have not come from ‘classical’ consulting backgrounds, the firm has begun to recruit from name consultancies such as AT Kearney, Capgemini, Deloitte, KPMG, and PA Consulting.

“It’s increasingly important to find people who know how to present things and how to bring things to life,” he says. “It’s about those small “c” consultancy disciplines, and also having the energy and passion to go off and do these projects.”

Because Inzenka works in small joint teams, the firm is always on the lookout for people who can lead, and will fast-track them.

What is vital, says Katz, is the ability to combine strategy and execution, to do what you said you would. A word that crops up repeatedly in conversation with Katz and Zentner is hustle. Where other companies talk about process and IP, with Inzenka it’s all about movement and activity.

“We make growth happen,” says Katz. “There are no points awarded for PowerPoint, no prizes for Excel: the prize is out there in the market.”

All views expressed in this article are those of Mick James and do not necessarily reflect the views of Top-Consultant.com and Consultant-News.com.

Source:  www.top-consultant.com