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Where can you find a vertical forest?

As a former Vice Chairman of the International Council of Management Consulting Institutes, Calvert Markham was invited to contribute to  the ICMCI meeting and conference recently held in Milan, at a session relating to the formation of our own Centre for Management Consulting Excellence - CMCE...

 

The International Council of Management Consulting Institutes – ICMCI – was formed some 30 years ago to bring together national institutes of management consultants to develop common standards and share best practice. Trustees are appointed from each of the members – now representing some 50 countries – who meet each year to discuss developments and also participate in a conference run by the host country.

I was for many years a Trustee representing the UK but retired as a Vice Chairman of ICMCI in 2013. I was therefore delighted to have the opportunity of reuniting with many former colleagues at the ICMCI meeting and conference recently held in Milan, where I was invited to contribute to a session relating to the formation of our own Centre for Management Consulting Excellence - CMCE.

Some 100 delegates from 33 countries attended this event, on the theme “Making a sustainable world”. Happily the proceedings were in English – something that seems now to be expected at any international conference.

In an opening speech, the president of the Italian trade association of management consulting firms noted that although the overall compound annual growth rate of management consulting in Italy was around 4%, the larger firms were enjoying a growth rate of 9%, in an environment where there was increasing pressure on prices. He noted that new consulting competences would be required to deal with artificial intelligence and robotics – something that our recent study in CMCE has examined and which is to be presented at the Global Symposium on November 14  Register here ....

Music also to my ears was his wish to engage with R&D to help develop the consulting industry – something that is an explicit objective of CMCE.

A later presentation was from IBM picking out some of the headline items in the results of their annual CxO study (see https://www.ibm.com/services/insights/c-suite-study). One of the points made was that network orchestrators are valued highly by investors – again something that plays to the development of the CMCE Knowledge Bank.

One of the great developments in our lifetimes has been that in materials science. Professor Guglielmo Lanzani revealed a vast range of emerging technologies that will impact our lives. One of those that caught my attention was the printable solar cell.

 

And then we had a presentation about urban forests... 

 

The benefits that trees bring to the urban environment are considerable, but there can be limited space to plant them.

In Milan they are planting them up the sides of high rise buildings, as you can see.

 

 

 

And, since you ask, the presentation I gave on CMCE was very well received, with some immediate offers of support!

 

 

 

 

Calvert Markham, Father of the Livery