Over recent weeks, we reviewed the global homepages of the world’s most influential consulting firms: McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and the Big Four.
Not their report libraries.
Not their opinion blogs.
Their homepages.
This distinction matters. Homepages are not thought leadership. They're commercial instruments. Every word is deliberate. Every tile reflects a judgement about what senior executives are worried about, prepared to fund, and still undecided on.
Taken together, these pages offer a narrow but revealing signal of what the advisory industry believes matters now.
The picture that emerges is familiar. The implications are not.
This is the first essay in a short series examining the gap between what leaders are being reassured about and what they're actually required to govern.
The surface story: reassurance in an anxious market
Across firms, the messaging converges quickly:
Generative AI, everywhere, framed as responsible, governed, and enterprise-ready;
Cost and productivity, repositioned as resilience rather than retrenchment;
Workforce and skills, cast as readiness gaps to be addressed;
Transformation, continuous, necessary, and unavoidable;
Risk and geopolitics, acknowledged but kept abstract;
Sustainability, present but quieter, increasingly instrumental.
None of this is incorrect.
Collectively, however, it tells a very specific story:
“You're right to be concerned, and we're safe hands.”
This isn't accidental. It reflects what the market is optimising for:
Continued relevance in the age of AI;
Legitimacy with boards and regulators;
Margin protection amid uncertain demand;
Reassurance for leaders under sustained pressure.
The industry is selling confidence maintenance.
That is commercially rational. It's not the same thing as progress.
The deeper signal: what no one is taking responsibility for
Read across firms, and a more instructive pattern appears, not in what is emphasised, but in what's consistently avoided.
Three absences stand out.
Clarity is assumed, not governed
Everyone talks about transformation. No one talks about interpretation.
AI strategies, cost programmes, and operating-model shifts all presume that the organisation shares a common understanding of:
What matters most;
Which trade-offs are acceptable;
What success actually looks like.
In practice, this is rarely the case.
Most transformation failures aren't execution failures. It's clarity decay: intent fragmenting as it moves through layers, functions, and time.
Yet clarity itself is never treated as a managed capability. It's assumed to exist and silently blamed when it doesn't.
Leadership is framed as capability, not accountability
Workforce narratives focus on skills, talent, and readiness.
What's missing is less comfortable:
Who holds decision authority when priorities collide;
What leaders must stop doing, not merely learn to do;
Where ambiguity constitutes leadership failure rather than cultural nuance.
The industry prefers to talk about building capability rather than enforcing coherence.
That preference reveals where the real risk lies.
Risk is acknowledged without consequence
Geopolitics, cyber exposure, regulation, and volatility appear everywhere, but largely as background conditions.
Rarely are they allowed to reshape strategy, sequencing, or governance materially.
Risk is named, but not permitted to constrain ambition or force trade-offs.
This isn't strategic realism. It's narrative insulation.
Why this matters now
The consulting market is responding rationally to executive anxiety.
In doing so, it's creating a second-order problem.
Organisations are changing faster than their shared understanding can keep up.
AI accelerates decisions.
Cost pressure compresses timelines.
Hybrid work weakens informal alignment.
Perpetual transformation erodes narrative memory.
The result isn't resistance. It's drift.
Strategies still exist.
Programmes still launch.
Delivery continues.
But meaning fragments.
And no amount of execution excellence compensates for that.
The opportunity most firms aren't taking
There's a growing executive concern that rarely appears on homepages:
“How do I know whether my organisation actually understands what we're trying to do, and whether that understanding is holding?”
This isn't a communications problem.
It isn't a culture survey.
And it isn't engagement theatre.
It's a governance problem.
It requires leaders to treat clarity as something that:
Can be measured;
Can be compared;
Can decay;
Can be actively managed.
That idea is conspicuously absent from current market signalling.
Which is precisely why it matters.
Where this series goes next
This essay sets the context. The next pieces will address implications leaders can no longer afford to ignore:
Why AI strategies fail before technology becomes the bottleneck;
How cost programmes quietly destroy coherence when not governed properly;
The hidden economics of misalignment, and why they now exceed execution risk;
Why boards should care about clarity as much as performance.
The consulting industry excels at telling leaders what they want to hear.
The next phase will belong to those prepared to address what leaders are actually responsible for.
That starts with clarity.
— End —
Author’s note
This analysis is based on a systematic scan of the global homepages of McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG, capturing only what those firms are actively promoting to the market at present.
