When Professor Peter Cochrane says that his C2G communications consultancy models itself on the SAS, an image springs to mind of blacked-up balaclava-clad warriors swinging through windows with machine guns attached at the hip. But while C2Gs weapons and war paint may differ from those of that famous regiment, their tactics are very similar. Power
Compared with other business consultancies we do twice as much in half the time at half the price hence the name, said Peter. We call this the power of 2.
Generally speaking we will come in for a week and give the client 80 per cent of the result at a small fraction of the expected price. Our philosophy is very simple: if we can make BT customers more successful, then BT itself will become more successful.
One of the shock tactics used is to take a handful of a companys top people away for a few days to play a deadly serious game.
We tell them to imagine they have just been fired by their company and they now hate it so much they make it their lifes work to destroy it. We say: we can help you do it, said Peter.
Three days later we have helped them create the business plan from hell. We take that back to the main board of the company. The company then has a choice: ignore it; build a defence against it, or the best choice empower these people to implement it.
Sometimes this can mean suggesting the formation of a new company a child that will event-ually consume its parent. This can be difficult for companies to accept and even harder to achieve while continuing existing operations and maintaining share-holder value.

Radical
Its this sort of radical approach that has already yielded many positive results for C2G with major companies beating a path to Peters door.
Merrill Lynch were being eclipsed by rivals Charles Schwab 12 months ago. Now they have just had their best quarter ever following C2G and another group instigating the appointment of a genuine innovator who has employed new people and created a new electronic trading department.
Merrill Lynchs fortunes have been reversed and Peter now has a seat on their transformation board to provide ongoing consultancy. Ideally other C2G consultants will be invited to do the same with different clients.

"Successful organisations tend to be biological and incredibly resilient. They have zero hierarchy and only a very light hand of control. Formalism just does not work in a fast moving dynamic business environment." Professor Peter Cochrane,BT chief technologist

Connect
Another recent success follows assistance given to BT Scotland in providing a design and project plan for its work on the Isle of Islay.
In such an isolated community they have skilful people but they are disconnected from the world, said Peter. They have the ability but not the connectivity. By using telecommunications particularly Internet Protocol (IP) we are able to connect them to the outside world. Now they can live in a remote place and still be part of a thriving business community.
The C2G story goes back more than a decade to the inception of BTs current research organisation at Adastral Park. At that time, Peter and a burgeoning team of experts were called in by Sir Iain Vallance and Dr (now Sir) Alan Rudge to help BT drastically reduce its size and working practices while at the same time increasing the breadth and scope of its business.
This challenge provided invalu-able experience, which was later, re-applied to external clients.
It began with informal one-on-one sessions with major BT clients such as Hewlett Packard, BP, Shell and Glaxo Wellcome. This led Peter to formulate a process of getting people to think out of the box to look at their organisations in a totally different way.
Just like with BT, he managed to influence them to transform their business thinking. They were led to think about things like reducing management layers and using e-mail extensively at a time when people didnt under-stand it and getting rid of many paper processes.
This became so successful that a conscious decision was taken in 1999 to pull Peter and his so-called seven samurai out from Adastral Parks normal research and development activities to create C2G. The samurai now total 25 experts from all fields.

Experience
C2G concentrates on the big players who can provide a good revenue flow before turning its attention to other organisations. The original objective was to have 50 percent of its work from internal BT clients, around 40 per cent from the companys customers and ten per cent from other organisations. As it trans-pires, 65 per cent of C2Gs work is now for BT clients or other external companies.
The group is made up of a wide variety of generalists and specialists. Their experience is practical, experimental and theoretical embracing a broad spectrum of disciplines including futurology, telepresence, mobile applications, switching, networks, security systems and behavioural psychology.

Versatile
Aiding them in their present-ations and workshops to clients is the Human Interaction Centre (HIC). This versatile high quality studio can be installed anywhere in the world where there are three ISDN lines available. The HIC offers a wealth of pictures, data and connectivity to a wide audience to help inform and inspire C2Gs clients. Thinking outside the box has also been employed with super-market chains Tesco, Sainsburys and Asda ideas like getting rid of the checkout, putting smart transponders onto products instead of bar codes and suggesting they consider selling cars in the car park: in effect offering motor bikes between cornflakes and baked beans.
C2G provides a practical input to help leverage the academic work being conducted into predicting customer behaviour in internet communities and is being undertaken at various academic establishments around the world. These studies adhere to so-called Cochrane rules.

Resilient
There are ten or 12 such rules, but the three main ones are self-organising chaos, inversion and exponentiation.
Self-organising chaos is about letting go, said Peter. People talk about empowerment and then put rules in the way. In fact, if you look at the most successful organisations, they tend to be biological and incredibly resilient. They have zero hierarchy and only a very light hand of control. Formalism just does not work in a fast moving dynamic business environment.
The second rule is about an inversion of accepted values in the expanding world of e-commerce and on-line business relationships. Products are now being provided free of charge and being paid for by advertising or sponsorship. Traditional questions of copyright, for example, are being eclipsed by access rights.
The third key rule is about exponentiation. For example, how a company can sell on a product to another in such a way that it then sells ten more. Its about identifying the biggest gain.

Ahead
C2Gs advice has been adopted in varying degrees.
For the BT-led consortium now providing comprehensive communication services to the military, there was 100 per cent acceptance of C2Gs solution, so they played a part in the ?1.5 billion contract won by BT and its partners. C2Gs great strength is its breadth and depth of techno-logical expertise. It spends much time evaluating new prototypes all over the world and is often between three and ten years ahead of everybody elses thinking.
Its own thinking is aided by a major research programme in the cutting edge MIT media labora-tory in the United States and it has access to Americas Harvard and Stanford Universities not to mention many UK institutions. And all this is in addition to BTs own research technology centre at Adastral Park.
We are not constrained by any thinking or past processes, nor are we constrained by day-to-day requirements to survive, said Peter. But by keeping C2G ahead of the game, we can think of radically different solutions and approaches.UK.