Management consultancy was originally set up to help businesses become more efficient and thus more successful.
Although the first of its kind was founded in 1886 in America by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Arthur D. Little, it only worked for businesses. It took another 28 years for Booz Allen Hamilton to realise that the US Government could also be a lucrative client.
Since then, management consultancy in the US has flourished to such an extent that, in 2019, the industry was employing more than 709,750 consultants.
It was much slower to take hold in Britain. It grew out of post-war ‘time and motion’ studies and then took the Japanese ‘lean’ manufacturing principles and tried to improve the country’s appalling productivity in the 1970s.
By the 1980s, McKinsey had established a formidable reputation with many blue chip private clients, employing the brightest MBA graduates and applying cutting-edge business thinking. Many of the world’s biggest accounting firms such as Deloitte and KPMG built large management consultancy practices to cash in on this growing sector. The government was still not really seen as a client.
Sourced from The Blyne Times - written by Stephen Colegrave