The Fundamentals
of Management Consultancy (Management Studies)
Management Consulting has in recent year become a mantra
in the City and the wider financial and commercial community
in the UK. Nevertheless despite the proliferation of the name,
its meaning remains as opaque as ever.
Fritz Steele in his Consulting for Organisational Change
defines consulting as: “any form of providing help on
the content, process, or structure of a task or series of
tasks, where the consultant is not actually responsible for
doing the task itself but is helping those who are.”
The business of management consulting has grown at such astronomical
rates in recent years that the profession now boasts its own
international representative body, namely the “International
Council of Management Consulting Institutes” (ICMCI).
According to the ICMCI, management consulting: “….is
the provision of independent advice and assistance about the
process of management to clients with management responsibilities.”
According to: Management Consulting: A Guide to the Profession
(Fourth Edition), the roots of the profession can be traced
to the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of the modern
factory and the “related institutional and social transformations.”
The Fourth Edition cites the pioneers of scientific management,
including Frederick Taylor, Lillian Gilbreth and Harrington
Emerson as the early Gurus of the profession. However it is
also at pains to explain that the scientific approach to management
began to emerge as a distinct profession in the decades following
the end of WWII and the increasing internationalisation of
trade and commerce.
Management Consulting is in many ways the by-product of globalisation
in so far as its practitioners try to standardise management
and wider business practices across cultural and commercial
divides.
Moreover it is misleading to refer to Management Consulting
as a cohesive practice as this accentuates the opaqueness
of the profession. In fact management consulting can be divided
into a series of specialised practices, including, amongst
others, strategic consultancy, risk consultancy and human
resources consultancy.
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