SITUATION

When they created Round Table Group (RTG) Inc.. Russ Rosenstein and Robert Hull envisioned a company of-fering one-stop shopping for intellectual expertise. They wanted to help businesspeople. management consul-tants. and litigation attorneys get answers to important questions from top-notch thinkers anywhere in the world through the Internet. RTG s plan was to have a kind of SWAT team of pro-fessors who would answer questions based on their ex-pertise. A team might consist of one or two professors. who would communicate with the client via e-mail, phone. or videoconferencing on projects that might Waive a few hours or a few weeks of input. In the traditional managementeonsulting model work on a project often lasts as long as a couple of wars.

and the team consists of a group of junior analysts, managers, and partners. RTG assembled a database made up mainly of 3.000 university professors available to consult on an asneeded basis. The firms fixed costs would be low because the professors would be paid onlywhen they did billable work. But an unexpected wrinkle soon emerged. RTG s custom-ers wanted RTG to start acting more like a traditional consultingfirm.

Business executives wanted face-to-face contact with the professors giving the information. They also wanted number crunching and follow-up analysis. And they wanted current. customized research. That has left RTG at a crossroads. Should it try to become a more traditional managementconsulting firm or continue to pursue its original mission of providing advice through Internet content and virtual links? Taking the first path would mean providing support to clients, adding infrastructure and formalizing its opera-tion by dividing it into distinct specialties. That would have the downside of making RTG s competitive point of differentiation murky. But the second path would risk putting off clients who Sal they want mole.

1. what is the basic problem that Rosenstein and hull need to resolve

2. what are the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed online consulting and the traditional approach to consulting ?

3. what do you think rosentein and hull shoulk do ?