Booz Bares All

Kudos to Booz & Co. CEO Shumeet Banerji for standing out among his consulting brethren by speaking openly about the crisis in the financial services sector that so many consulting firms serve.

Banerji’s comments appear front and center on Booz’s home page. They’re refreshing at a time when so many consulting firms that serve the industry are clamming up. I know this because I’ve been trying to get some of the risk-management and financial services consultants I respect most on the phone to hear their takes on what happened and how things might play out (and I’m not alone). Unfortunately, few consultants are returning my or anyone’s calls asking for their views. Mostly, the consulting firms’ PR professionals have responded by apologizing that they can’t get a spokesperson and explaining that their folks can’t speak publicly about this topic because they have – or at least had – clients in the sector. That’s weak.

Banerji deserves credit for posting his take on the crisis and for his candor in this note, which is directed to the firm’s staff. What strikes me as most interesting about his insights is his reporting on how the “BRIC” countries (that’s Brazil, Russia, India, and China) perceive the U.S. crisis. He says he heard three themes from his discussions with financial experts in the BRIC bloc:

“First, there was bewilderment at the regulatory and corporate governance failure in the U.S. … Second, there was a sense of relief that their banking systems are fairly insular, so their exposure to these ‘sub-prime’ assets is comparatively small. And third, there is a general confidence in the fundamentals of their economies to live through this downturn as a correction rather than a recession.”

Gosh, was that so hard (Deloitte, BCG, Bain, Oliver Wyman, etc.)?