“Success in self-disruption requires at least the following six elements:

1. An autonomous business unit. The unit should have all the functional skills it needs to succeed, freeing it from reliance on the parent organization, and it must not report to the business or businesses that are being disrupted.

2. Leaders who come from the relevant “schools of experience.” These leaders have addressed a variety of challenges, especially in the kinds of problems the new growth business will face. They are often necessarily sourced from outside the organization.

3. A separate resource allocation process. This will fund the unit regardless of the fortunes of the core business.

4. Independent sales channels. These should not be required to coordinate with or defer to the existing sales organization.

5. A new profit model. In most cases it will reflect priorities different from those of the core business. You can expect the new unit to do as well as the core in terms of net profit per dollar of sales, but the formula for generating that profit (such as gross margins or asset turns) must be different.

6. Unwavering commitment by the CEO. He or she must be willing to spend an inordinate amount of time understanding and guiding the development of the new business and must protect it from the natural desire on the part of managers in the core business to shut it down and appropriate its resources.”

source link: HBR article on Disrupting Consulting

Additional disruption of consulting in Scott Berkun’s Consultants Should All Get Real Jobs

[post updated 11-21-2014 to excerpt full list, eliminating intermediate hop to my tumblr].