So, you think you may want to work in Service Delivery as a "Leadership Partner" (LP) or "Executive Partner" (EP) for Gartner. Are you sure about that? Read on to see if this mission is for you:
What the recruiters and hiring managers will tell you:
1. The Gartner brand name is excellent and will look great on your resume.
2. Gartner is the "McKinsey of IT"
3. Being at the "Partner" level is a high-impact, high-visibility role
Notice when you're dealing with them how eager they are to move you through the process and get you to sign up. The less time you have to ask questions about the firm, the better. They will be selling you Gartner's legacy brand, and not the role itself - they know better by now than to emphasize the actual role.
The Truth:
1) That Gartner brand name finds itself where the Cadillac brand name found itself in the mid-1980's. Reducing quality at every level to achieve lower cost structure to optimize profitability. The idea of Gartner being a leader in either Technology or Strategy passed this firm by, over the last decade. In most cases, technology simply moves too fast for Gartner's survey model to provide timely, relevant advice (whether Service Delivery or Research Team). Many client inquiries are met with a "DNC" (Do Not Cover) response as the research is still focused on such semi-relevant topics like SDLC, ITIL, and Infrastructure Oversight. Leading technologies (i.e. Cyber-Security, Blockchain, AI, IoT, etc) are simply not covered at a level that Industry Leaders can glean insight in a meaningful, actionable way.
2) As far as Gartner as "The McKinsey of IT" there are certainly plenty of ex-McK Staffers residing in the Stamford, CT Headquarters, but in terms of industry leadership and innovation with the impact of, say Kenichi Ohmae's legendary strategic vision and insight, there is no plausible parallel that can be inferred. What Gartner does share with McKinsey is the current-state rigid inflexibility as to how to deliver to clients. As a client, you will have to simply accept Gartner's inflexible delivery methodology, or you'll have to go elsewhere for bespoke strategic advice.
3) EXP/EITL Executive and Leadership Partner roles are something of an oxymoron. Once hired into The Firm, you'll quickly discover that you are neither "Leader" nor "Partner" (both externally with clients and most certainly, internally with peers and executive teams). In fact, you'll have more in common with a Call-Center operator than an executive leader. There's a set playbook (The Gartner "Engagement Plan" or EP) by which you'll operate that is borne of management's desire to standardize offerings and processes and ultimately increase profitability - a noble pursuit, if only all the clients were exactly the same. However, what this approach ends up doing is reducing clients to Gartner's executive management view that clients all share the same issues and challenges regardless of Industry, Vertical, or Technology focus. Generically produced by a team in India, each Engagement Plan is aggressively presented to clients as a "uniquely developed playbook" by which their individual issues will be directly addressed. What it actually is, however, is solely a tool that drives clients to achieve Gartner Metrics and Profitability goals within the generic construct of Gartner's Service Delivery model. More about the Metrics-driven behaviorisms later in this review.
The Pitch:
If Gartner is so rigid, so profit-motivated, and irrelevant why do clients still sign up?
For many IT executives, the EXP and EITL services are much like a glorified Airline Club membership. You are offered trips to Symposium at Walt Disney World (bring the family, take a week off from work, nobody will notice!), invited to two Peer Forums per year (Florida/Disney again and always an alluring West-Coast location). And those trips certainly can be fun from a client perspective, if not informative and productive. From the LP or EP perspective, these outings are entirely different in nature. You'll soon learn how there is a double-standard as to how Service Delivery staff are treated at these off-sites.
Much like a Potemkin Village, the façade of Symposium, for example, is overt. Clients stay in 5-star hotels while you'll be bussed in from off-campus hotel of notably lesser accommodation. You're expected to be their mentor and coach, but you don't merit being treated at their level, the implicit message seems to be. Prospective clients are encouraged to join LP's and EP's in the client lounge where conversation quickly turns into a Proof-of-Concept (POC) Gartner lingo to sell you on buying into the Gartner model. Not dissimilar in nature to a ham-fisted timeshare pitch in Hawaii or the local used-car lot, (and you will be surrounded by many men in Sport Coats), the goal of Symposium is simple: close the clients and get them signed. "Tell me about your current challenges," begins the Leadership Partner for fifteenth time that day as the prospective client begins to wonder how s/he was roped into this debacle, eyes darting towards the exit door. By the 12th hour of this never-ending comedic farce, LP/EP eyes are rolling back in their heads as middle manager hover intently in an effort to create the artifice of feigned enthusiasm. This goes on all week.
But everyone has to sell things to stay in business, right?
Yes, of course. But Gartner ties its Service Delivery definition of success to a series of metrics which alter the game, quite a bit. For veteran consultants, you'll be familiar with a tried and true variant of Customer Satisfaction and Utilization as the core metrics for success in a service delivery role. At Gartner, those metrics are notably absent. Instead the key metrics are in two categories: 1) Retention, and 2) Significant Interactions (SI). What are these metrics, you ask? They are your future (and ultimate demise) as an EP/LP. Let's take them one-by-one.
Retention: Leading with retention speaks to keeping the client at all costs. At Gartner, successfully closed clients sign a one-year (in some cases two-year) contract for a subscription to EXP or EITL services typically ranging from $50K to $75K per seat, per annum depending upon how good a negotiator they may be. Gartner's intent is for the client to never leave the contract. Yes, very much like Hotel California, once you check in, you can never leave. Gartner assumes that retention is the sole responsibility of the LP/EP which means that if the client does in fact leave, you are dinged on your metrics and bonus. Gartner management does not care if the client leaves his/her role, quits the firm, retires, dies, or finishes the project they were working on that caused them to subscribe to the service in the first place (yes, all of these actually happen and more often than one may think). It is simply the LP/EP's fault if the client does not renew. Period.
No big deal, surely they will allow me to lose a few accounts if it is not my fault, right?
If you lose three or more of those 30 to 35 clients you will find yourself under serious scrutiny and most likely put on a performance plan. Double that and you're likely gone.
You will carry approximately 30 to 35 clients as a Leadership Partner. Think about that model: you will interface with 30 to 35 clients at least once per month (An SI is achieved by meeting with a client once per month in person, or by teleconference and you must have one for each client every month, whether the client wants to meet or not - may do not want to speak with that regularity). You will attempt to deliver some sense of value to 30 to 35 clients. When you figure in client-related travel, off-sites, internal meetings, administration, onerous collection of myriad data points regarding your every daily activity/call/movement (collected in a sad 1990's era Seibel database you will grow to abhor), and generation of the aforementioned Engagement Plan for each client, you have to find a way to deliver value to 30 to 35 clients. If you have an hour or two per month to do so, you will be fortunate. Oh, did you want to go on vacation or your Aunt Peggy had the indecency to pass away and now you have to go to her funeral? Good luck, because you still have to hit your numbers, regardless.
To compound issues, the notion of what Gartner Service Delivery means is typically defined to the client by an Account Executive (AE), not the EP/LP. That would be fine, if the AE is an experienced technology sales professional. And a few of them are. But, by far, the bulk of the sales staff, at Gartner are fresh college graduates with perhaps a year or two experience at Lumber Liquidators. They have no more idea about what a CISO or Network Administrator does than they know how to hand calibrate a Patek Phillipe movement. Despite being new to business and technology, they are the first contact the potential customer has with Gartner and they get to define that relationship for you. If they refer to you as a consultant that is always available to answer any question and help with deliverables production, then that's who the client thinks you are - and expects of you if/when they sign. Of course, you are at best, an advisor who can interface for an hour per month and there is no way you can even think about assisting clients with deliverables production, even if you wanted to do so - there's simply no time - you have 30 to 35 clients who all expect you to be available at the end of their speed dial.
Think about this very carefully: AE's are incentivized to CLOSE THE DEAL at any cost. This is how they eat. You are expected to KEEP the client at any cost, this is how you survive. Gartner Management has eschewed the lessons brought to us in the highly impactful Steven Kerr treatise "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B" as they create a dichotomous and divergent relationship between Sales and Service Delivery teams. The AE simply signs any client they can by any means that they can and the EP/LP is left to pick up the pieces. If you push back and escalate to management about a client that is truly unsuitable for Gartner EITL or EXP, you will find just how little "Partnership" clout you actually have. You will be overridden 99.99% of the time to close the sale. Thanks for your input Mr. or Mrs. LP/EP: you lose! Enjoy your new client! Sales simply loads the pipe with anyone they can find and you get to figure out how to keep them past the one-year renewal period. In reality, most LP's find themselves in some sort of trouble at the end of the first year, as they have also received an off-loading of clients from other savvy LP's and Domain VP's who know how to shuffle bad clients around with a semi-opaque "musical chairs" type approach in an effort to clean up their sub-par client slate at your expense. Good luck with that model!
How did this happen?
A quick glance at the NYSE for Gartner Stock (IT) will show strong performance YoY. It is truly impressive and has ridden the market wave parallel to the strong Bull Market growth of the last few years. How have they grown revenues and market capitalization? Management has been good at optimizing the once-sound brand name with ever-increasing performance metrics to corral Service Delivery staff into the slaughter pen of rote efficiency. Plenty of EP/LP's of the highest caliber have pointed out with the highest clarity of detail about the diminishing ability to serve customers at the highest level the brand name demands, and they, for their sins have been rebuffed, at best, and forced out of the firm or fired, at worst.
With a group that could easily have served as the population for Dunning-Kruger's original case study on the effects the cognitive bias of illusory superiority, Gartner's Service Delivery "Executive Management Team" rides the golden goose to ever greater heights, squeezing out lucre-filled, golden eggs for themselves as grim solace to a growing tension and ever-decreasing morale with the EP/LP staff. Middle managers are forced to respond with sycophantic praise in Town Hall meetings that begin with Mike Judge-inspired, atonal choruses of "Happy Birthday" which then devolve into a log-flume ride of metrics. With an aging, milquetoast Research Library that receives the occasional refresh yet slowly but surely degrades in market relevancy and value as technology and advisory models change rapidly in the marketplace, this is, in fact, a diseased goose that cannot fly forever. Customers have grown weary of the typical Gartner sales pitch and incessant "value" discussions that lead nowhere tangible and solves nothing for their enterprise or public-sector entity. Any effort by the EP/LP community to offer advice to management falls upon calcified thinking and deaf ears, summarily ignored, or worse openly chastised, regardless of relevancy or saliency of delivery. Gartner has no concept of a suggestion box and no appetite to listen to employees' innovative ideas. Management demands the LP/EP staff be open to coaching, Gartner's euphemism for achieving metrics by doing exactly what you are told to do, regardless of how your client wishes to interact. Frankly, it hardly matters as EP/LP's do not share in equity participation anyway.
This will be one to watch as the bloom comes off the rose. The vaunted high-water mark of the 1959 Cadillac De Ville devolved over time into the 1982 Cadillac Cimarron which signified the end of the Cadillac legacy of quality and marque distinction as most automotive aficionado would concur. As Technology changes, this model shows its inherent inflexibility more and more every month. As IT leaders outsource their back office, networks, and S/P/IaaS models then need for this type of service diminishes to all but neophyte client practitioners - and for them, the need would be temporary at best.
Potential Partner Candidates and Clients? Run as quickly as possible for the exits, clients and applicant alike. Still want to sign up? Grab a deck chair on the RMS Lusitania and set sail for the sunset! Instead of German U-Boats sinking this vessel, it will instead be a combination of managerial avarice, lack of value to clients, and a Sales and Service Delivery morale chasm deeper than the Marianna trench that does this once-great firm in for good.
Investors looking to invest in Gartner (NASDAQ: IT)? Stack up the shorts and consider the myriad alternative investment options within Technology that are structurally far more sound. The P/E Ratio is bubbled out at Gartner and exists off the backs of Service Delivery staff that are bereft of positive morale and are ready to leave at the drop of a hat. The CEB acquisition has mounted up debt that must be addressed. A precarious place to be in a market downturn, so the hope in the C-Suite is that the Bull continues to ride. But if the Bear should rear his ugly head, remember, the first thing a firm cuts in a downturn or difficult times is the Gartner subscription.
P.S. A word about other Gartner reviews: There seems to be a preponderance of reviews on Gartner's Glassdoor thread that are one to two sentences in length and are exceptionally high praise. They always seem to follow a detailed, cogent, less-than-favorable negative review. Reviews that offer something like "I love it here. Great place to work!" are dubious and seem to offer little value and no insight. It is as if these were somehow coerced to mask the real truth.
No need to hide the truth - it always reveals itself in the long run.
