填空题

Growing up in a small town in the Uttar Pradesh region of India, Ram Charan learnt his most valuable lesson while he was working behind the counter in his family’s small shoe shop. Watching his elders as they advanced credit to customers, who had little money until the next harvest came in, and then resorted to the shop’s finances to make ends meet, he developed a respect for the importance of carefully managing cash flow. Now a successful consultant, the 69-year-old Mr. Charan is using that experience to help his clients in unstable times.
Although big consulting firms such as Accenture and McKinsey (which this week named Dominic Barton as its new managing director) like to claim that their services are fairly immune to downturns, there are already signs that demand for consultancy is declining. Siemens, a German industrial giant, recently said it would give up all external advisers to save hundreds of millions of Euros. Other firms are likely to follow its lead.
Mr. Charan, however, says he is still as busy as ever. That may be because he is something of an oddity in the consulting world. Tom Davenport, a professor at Babson College in Massachusetts who has studied the consulting industry, says it is typically divided between individual genius who come up with big ideas, publish books, give speeches and undertake the occasional consulting job on the one hand, and the giant consulting firms that take these big ideas and apply them inside corporations using armies of consultants on the other.
The division is not quite so clear-cut in practice. The consultancies, for example, also like to think of themselves as "thought leaders", publishing much boring research. Mr. Charan bridges both worlds as well, producing plenty of management books--his 16th book, "Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty", has just been published--and giving lectures, but also acting as a hands-on consultant to leaders of a host of companies, including Wipro, an Indian outsourcing firm, and DuPont, a chemicals company. It is this immersion in the world of business, through his consulting, that distinguishes Mr. Charan from most other popular management thinkers, who often come from academic or journalistic backgrounds. And rather than boasting big-picture themes, his lectures and books often focus on practical suggestions to help managers improve their performance. What has made Mr. Charan distinct from the other management thinkers