IDEO - The emperor's new clothes?

I've generally made my career out of going the opposite way to everybody else.  This is good sense: I'll always find new things that have been missed.  Hence, I worry when everybody follows the lead of one person or organisation because the consensus is they are so special, so right and so perfect.

I get the feeling these days that IDEO, the design and innovation consulting firm, is too often pictured as walking on water.  I knew people at the chunk of IDEO that used to be Moggridge Associates in London.  They were mostly a product design business, but they'd been pioneering computer interface design, working for example on the icons for MacWrite.  Soon they introduced psychologists into their work and majored on user centred design with lots of observational reports.  It became clear that these 'extras' actually made more money than the product work and so the art of 'fee building' emerged – more and more services piled on to the core task.  Some years back, I visited the head of IDEO in London after the merger with Moggridge Associates.  He was a worried man: business was down in the recession and the Chinese manufacturers were starting to throw in product design as a freebie to clients.  As a result, the office had abandoned product design and had branched out into services, including running a lot of training and brainstorming workshops for clients.  And lo, profitability went up, up, up. 

So it is an interesting question: is IDEO the greatest fee-building organisation in design, or are they really delivering in a way that we should all emulate?  My greatest suspicion is that these guys are now telling businesses how to innovate and succeed in the market when the IDEO leadership haven't grown up as entrepreneurs through the harsh world of start-ups, failure and eventual success.  I have a lot of respect for IDEO, but they are not the role model - in fact, the role model doesn't yet exist.