Exerpt from  the upcoming book:  the Funny business of executive search

According to the association of executive search firms the global search business is about $7B. This maybe less than Google’s payroll. Small of course does not mean insignificant or unimportant. In fact: the more elitist a business is the smaller it should remain – at least when it comes to the number of players. Based purely on numbers, if a $7B industry disappeared nobody would notice.

How companies would hire strategically important managers without the search business is a different question altogether. Since search really wants to be perceived as a consulting business, I asked a few people this question a little differently: what would happen if the consulting business disappeared. Two types of answers emerged:

- Great: managers would grow balls
- It would mean demise

The first consulting companies emerged almost immediately after the first private corporations had been registered (from the mid 1800’s). This fact sheds light to something significant:

business is a mechanical organization.

This means it’s been put together to achieve an artificial goal. I prefer to say: an inorganic goal. It is not by accident that the registered private corporation came to the scene right after the industrial revolution. The registered private company was perhaps the first completely mechanical organization in the history of mankind.
Of course it can’t survive without help! In fact: it needs all the help it can get not to disintegrate. There is no organic force that keeps it together. This is not a great exaggeration! There is of course always a little organicity in any organization; it’s unavoidable, since we are talking about people, right?

So back to the question of what would happen if the search business all of a sudden disappeared: It may mean simply one less mechanical process and a little more organicity. Growing balls is something organic; leadership is definitely something organic: there is no such thing as business leadership!

Let’s look at some hypothetical scenarios in the world of business without executive search:

Externally:
- Advertising would become more intense and diverse.
- Passive candidates would not be approached or would be approached significantly less often; this means that
- The overall quality of candidates would drop; this means two things:
     Lower business performance AND/OR
     More focus on hiring for potential, more training, mentoring, internal promotions
- The significance of business clubs would increase

Internally:
- Boards’ role and composition would change significantly. At the very minimum, boards would take MUCH MORE responsibility for recruiting and retaining the CEO, but also for all other areas (strategy, compensation, etc.). They would also have more skin in the game.
- The CEO would become much more difficult to replace but it would also be more difficult for him to change jobs.
- The team dynamics in top management would change significantly.
- Shareholder’s expectations would change
- HR would change

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