Five principles, one method: the operating manifesto of consulting that works

The most recent research on the consulting industry points to a reversal that long-standing operators tend to underestimate. Source Global Research, in its 2025 European market report, registers double-digit growth in the "fractional executives" and "interim leaders" segment, alongside a structural contraction of traditional consulting mandates exceeding twelve months. Mid-market companies, in particular, are migrating toward shorter, more operational, more measurable engagement formats.

Behind this shift is a question that the classical model struggles to accommodate: why should an entrepreneur pay for a PowerPoint when they can pay for a result.

The GD IC operating manifesto, articulated in five principles, attempts to answer.

First principle. "I always start from the P&L, not the sales funnel."

There is a widespread vice among commercial consultants: starting from the funnel. Leads, conversion rate, sales cycle. They are useful metrics, sometimes indispensable, but they are effects, not causes. The P&L is the cause. It is the document where commercial strategy becomes economic outcome, or fails to. Starting from the funnel means treating the symptom. Starting from the P&L means treating the disease.

Peter Drucker wrote that what gets measured gets managed. The chosen metric drives the conversation. Consulting that starts from the P&L imposes from day one a common language with the CFO and the board: margin, EBIT, working capital, cash conversion. Only then does the commercial funnel make sense, because it becomes the tool to move a number that actually counts.

Second principle. "In the first 2 weeks I reduce complexity, I don't add to it."

The principle is Hippocratic in spirit: primum non nocere. Most transformation projects fail not for lack of ideas, but from excess. Adding tools, processes, reporting layers and alignment meetings is the conditioned reflex of those who don't have time to understand before intervening.

The first phase of a serious engagement is eliminative. Three or four things that drain managerial time without producing value are removed: recurring reports nobody reads, committees born for problems that no longer exist, systems duplicating the work of other systems. This recovery of capacity is the first dividend management perceives. It builds trust. It opens the space for the harder choices that will come next.

Third principle. "I measure progress in weeks, not in quarters."

The quarter is a unit of measurement inherited from public finance and tax reporting. It is not the unit of measurement of operational change. Festina lente, Augustus advised those who brought him overly ambitious projects: hasten slowly, but hasten. Consulting that measures in quarters has diluted its own clock for reasons of convenience, not rigor.

Measuring in weeks imposes a different discipline. Every Friday there is a metric that has changed, or has not. The weekly cadence immediately exposes projects that don't produce and protects those that work. It is the opposite of classical project management, where problems emerge only at the monthly steering committee, when it's too late to correct.

Fourth principle. "AI is a multiplier of human intelligence, not a replacement."

The public debate on artificial intelligence is trapped in a false dichotomy. Replacement vs. coexistence. Layoffs vs. job protection. The operational truth is more subtle: well-governed AI multiplies the value of the people already in the company. A manager who today spends sixty percent of their time on non-managerial activities (filling out reports, status meetings, sorting information) returns to doing their actual job when an AI agent absorbs that sixty percent. The company's know-how, built over years and held in people's heads, stays in the company. EBIT improves anyway, because the same team produces much more.

The Humlum and Vestergaard study published in 2025, based on Danish administrative records (one of the few datasets in the world that cross-references real ChatGPT usage with actual wages and hours worked), finds substantially null effects on wages and employment up to 2024. The Yale Budget Lab confirms the data at the US macro level. Empirical evidence supports the "multiplier" reading, not the "replacement" one.

Fifth principle. "My success is measured when I become dispensable."

This is the principle that separates consulting from consulting that works. A consultant who remains indispensable is selling dependency. A consultant who makes themselves superfluous is selling capability building. The first model is economically more convenient for the consultant in the short term, but erodes market trust in the long term. The second builds reputation, generating the referral flow that fuels subsequent engagements.

Aristotle wrote that the beginning is half of the whole. It applies to transformation projects: those who set up the first month well will not need the consultant in the sixth. The ultimate KPI of a good mandate is the speed at which company management becomes autonomous in sustaining the change.

The grid that precedes the engagement

These five principles are not a positioning slogan. They are a grid that filters clients, projects, decisions. Companies that don't want to start from the P&L, don't want to reduce complexity in the first two weeks, don't want to measure in weeks, don't want to use AI as an amplifier of their people, don't want the consultant to disappear: for those companies a wide traditional offer exists. GD IC is not the right choice.

For the others, those looking for a senior partner with P&L responsibility, cross-border experience across Europe, North America and MENA, and an operational discipline that produces results measurable in weeks instead of quarters, the offer is articulated in four phases (Diagnostic, Execution, Transformative, Ongoing) and eight engagement formats sized to the client's actual need.

The editorial route over the next months will follow the same grid. We will discuss AI agents applied to commercial and operational processes in building tech, distribution channel governance, internationalization toward MENA, cost reduction without erosion of the productive base, new KPIs entering board agendas. Each article will take one of the five principles and decline it on a real case.

The goal is not to build an audience. It is to build conversations with those who recognize in this discipline a working method consistent with the challenges on their table. In the words of the ancient Delphic precept, know thyself. That principle applies to consulting too. Knowing who you are, and declaring it, is the first way to attract the right clients and repel the wrong ones.

The rest is execution.