Management Essay on Fundamentals Of Management Consultancy

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.

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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.