Ivy Exec Study: What Leaders Value

There is plenty of information on the web about how employees view their employers and how they describe the culture of their firms.  We wanted to take a different approach and find out how the leaders of these companies view themselves, what leaders value and what they try to project to their organizations.

Over the past six months, Ivy Exec has been interviewing executives from mid-sized and smaller consulting firms to find out where they are going and what makes them tick.  These interviews have been published as Ivy Exec Company Spotlights on our website at blog.ivyexec.com.

We had a hypothesis as we began the interviews about what we would hear about consulting firm culture based on my recollection of many conversations with consulting leaders over the years. I was convinced that the word “entrepreneurial” would come up over and over.  As it turns out, I was wrong.  The description of companies as entrepreneurial appeared sixth from the top among the cultural attributes we measured, although the word itself did appear third most often as a specific descriptor.

Our methodology for this analysis was to take the descriptors offered by consulting executives and group them according to a general definition based on our understanding of what they refer to.  It would be laborious to read through every descriptor used by our interviewees, but as a brief appendix to this article, we have listed terms that appeared more than once for those an interest in some of the raw data.

Our interviewees were all asked to provide three cultural attributes, and most did, although some offered more and some less.  This breakdown is based on the overall number of descriptors used.  For more information about the participants and their full answers, click the link for Company Spotlight on the right side of this page.