Management Consultancy Insights and Real Consultancy Projects

Graham Manville, Olga Matthias, Julian Campbell, Graham Manville, Olga Matthias, Julian Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138090132
• eBook ISBN: 9781317102069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The field of management consultancy research has grown rapidly in recent years. Fuelled by the drivers of complexity and uncertainty, a growing number of organizations – both profit and third sector alike – are looking at management consultancy to assist in their aims for development and change. Consultants have become a common feature in organizational change initiatives, involved in both providing advice and in implementing ideas and solutions. However, despite this growing recognition and influence, management consultancy is still often misunderstood or criticized for its lack of theoretical underpinning.

The book seeks to address these issues by offering applied theoretical insights from academics that both teach and practice management consultancy. Written by recognized experts in their field, the contributors combine original insights with authoritative analysis. Uniquely, this book identifies emerging themes with critical discourse and provides rich empirical case study evidence to show the reader how management consultancy projects are implemented. Real-world international consultancy projects are featured as written up cases featuring organizations from multi-national corporations to the public sector.

Written for graduate level managers or those who have practical leadership experience, this book will enable readers to apply management consultancy models beyond a classroom context

Part I
Applied academic discourse

Introduction to Part I

During the 1990s, the study of management consulting began to gain concerted attention from academia. Early research tended to be of the ‘critical’ school, largely because of the costs associated with consultants and their image as purveyors of dreams, dramaturgy, myths and story-making. Since then it has also become a highly researched industry, but little still exists that is observational, reflective or participative. This section addresses that gap and the chapters presented in this section provide a variety of perspectives on consultancy, including applied theoretical insights, that will hopefully encourage the reader to consider the profession and its practitioners in a new light, or possibly different lights.

The contributions are from academics who are, or have been, practising management consultants and who also teach management consultancy to university students, and from an invited selection of senior consultants from boutique, mid-size and global consultancy practices. The insights and shared practice by the contributors provide both a critical discourse about the industry today, a narrative considering practical implementation and the challenges and responses to that. Each contribution seeks to provide a unique perspective on the practice of management consultancy from a variety of contexts while contributing to and drawing from theoretical insights.

In the first chapter, Fouweather presents a positioning piece, considering consultancy through the lens of the gods of ancient Greece, specifically Hermes, the messenger and the god of travellers. It draws on the contradictory character of Hermes to create a mythically inspired bricolage that illuminates the ‘Janus-faced reality’ of consultancy: organisations seek out consultants to dispense wisdom and provide direction in the collective struggle for survival despite a dislike of the perceived use of a ‘one size fits all’ approach to clients. The many faces of management consultancy are explored in the chapters that follow. In Chapter 2, Agrey and Xu discuss the concept of stylised facts and how they influence the delivery of consultancy services, an approach to researching the industry and its constituent parts and as a mechanism for developing management consultancy theory. This should go some way to formalising a theoretical contribution regarding a sector which is still regarded as new. Bal and de Jong present an interesting discussion in Chapter 3 regarding adopting a human-oriented approach to consulting that could create value in a different way to present service delivery, where the focus is predominantly on standardisation and commodification. This of course has implications for knowledge accessing, acquisition, exchange and creation, all of which are key reasons why firms build or enter networks with other firms. Cordier, Marin and Cader discuss this at length in Chapter 4. Obviously, the role the client organisation plays in this, as well as their choice of consulting partner, influences method and outcome. As an internal consultant, knowledge accessing and creation plays a different role. Power and the nature of influencing the client cannot be the same, neither in reach nor depth. Yet, as Hodges explains in Chapter 5, there are unique features which make internal consulting a useful addition to the pantheon of delivery models. In Chapter 6, Scott and Matthias dissect current delivery models within the public sector and the multiple findings regarding success or otherwise in that arena. Their chapter ends with a number of proposals to improve commissioning, contracting and managing projects in the public sector for better outcomes. Chapter 7 examines the symbiotic relationship between the client, management skills of the consultant and the application and relevance of robust research methods to solve client problems in a value adding way. Manville Chudasama compares the research demands placed upon a conventional academic researcher and a consultant engaged on a typical assignment. Finally, Matthias and Campbell in Chapter 8 present how a consulting approach is adopted by MBA students for their learning, and how they later apply their newly learnt theory to practical situations provided by companies who work with universities for mutual benefit.

1 The management consultant

The Hermes of our time

Ian Fouweather

Abstract

Our need for certainty in an uncertain world is not new, but the narratives we choose must resonate with the times we imagine. In the twenty-first century, management discourses focus on rapid technological and societal changes to highlight a radically open future that is fundamentally different from the past. Where once oracles used the exploits of Zeus, Apollo and Dionysus to dispense wisdom and provide direction in our collective struggle for survival, we now look elsewhere. With the rise of scientific management in the early twentieth century, the corporate world and public institutions have looked to management consultants to provide the certainty they require. Not surprisingly with its rise, commentators and critics have sought to understand the nature of the industry and why it has become such a significant part of the business environment. Paradoxically, despite over twenty-five years of writing and many authoritative voices, the nature of the industry remains vague (Harvey et al., 2016). To shed light on why this might be this chapter draws on Greek mythology and the god Hermes, the fleet footed traveller dispatched from the heavens to dispense knowledge and wisdom to mortals on Earth - the first consultant

Introduction

The consultant Merron (2005: 7) acknowledged that his clients often wanted him “to wave a magic wand over them”. During the last forty years, the demand for corporate wand-waving has grown rapidly (Armbrüster, 2006; Poulfelt et al., 2010). Accompanying this rise has been a corresponding growth in writing on consulting practice (Pang et al., 2013). From describing and defining the industry, writers have moved on to evaluate the value and efficacy of the industry and/or profession (Hicks et al., 2009). Mainstream literature (typified by writers such as O’Shea and Madigan (1998) and Pinault (2000)) has highlighted the danger that consulting poses, exposing its murkier side. This chapter does not offer a magic wand, a theory of what consulting is or claim to expose the myth of consulting to which Clark (1995) alluded. Nor does it provide a totalising narrative written from the perspective of an industry expert or a scholarly academic who claims to provide the truth. As Heidegger (2013) acknowledged, Aletheia (or Veritas), the elusive goddess of truth, is misunderstood. She is not the arbitrator of the “correctness of vision” (truth as correspondence), but the one who discloses the nature of reality. Rather than providing certainty, this essay uses the often contradictory character of Hermes to create a mythically inspired bricolage that further illuminates the ambiguity of consulting, what Buono (2009) termed the “Janus-faced reality” of the industry.

The power of the gods

The idea of stepping back into a magical past to explore the modern industry of management consultancy might be a paradox to some. Unconstrained by the apparent certainties that both consultants and academics strive to provide, ancient myths are awash with magic, the supernatural and contradictions. Yet there are parallels between the contemporary narratives that shape how we understand organizations and the flights of fancy found in much older stories. As Feibleman (1944: 118) has highlighted: “All knowledge is of the nature of partial truths, or myths, while so called myths are simply partial truths whose partial falsehood has been exposed”. Academics, business writers and journalists may use different styles of writing in the twenty-first century, but many contemporary myths draw on a collective past. How many times has a corporate Icarus flown too close to the sun? Promethean metaphors are marshalled to explore the good and bad of technological innovation (Puschmann and Burgess, 2014) and the impact such innovation has on the global economic system (Landes, 2003). Successful entrepreneurs, innovators and speculators are bestowed with a Midas Touch. Similarly, our corporate titans are happy to draw their names from the ancient pantheon. Amazon, Mars, Nike, Olympus and Oracle all look to the gods, and what better name for a brand of luxury travel goods than Hermes the god of travellers? Yet the influence of classical mythology goes beyond selecting brand names and appropriating metaphors. As has already been acknowledged, Buono (2009) used the imagery of Janus, the two-faced Roman God of both time and contradiction, but Buono was not the first. Handy’s (1978) Gods of management: How they work, and why they will fail, marshalled four Greek gods to shed new light on different forms of management. Two decades later Handy (1995) updated his ideas (though not his gods). Cowsill and Grint (2008) followed suit, employing Orpheus, Prometheus and Janus to explore contemporary leadership styles. Gabriel (2004) brought together several authors (including Gehmann, Grint, Guerrier, Höpfl, and Winstanley) in an attempt to show how a pantheon of mythical actors might shape our understanding of contemporary organizations. At the same time, Sturdy et al. (2004) and Clegg et al. (2004a, 2004b) created a scholarly dialogue exploring the nature of consulting from the (dis)comfort of a rather overcrowded Procrustean Bed. Procrustes was a mythical blacksmith, who was happy to offer passing travellers a bed for the night. The smith, who had made the bed from iron, found his guests did not fit his bed. To resolve the problem, Procrustes used his blacksmith’s tools to amputate the limbs of those who were too tall, and stretched the limbs of those who were too short (as if on a medieval rack). As in so many myths, justice ensued. The heroic mortal Theseus killed the blacksmith, forcing him to lie in his own bed where he suffered the same treatment that his victims had suffered. The story draws attention to the tendency of consultants to apply predefined generic tools and techniques when working with clients. Just as with Procrustes, a “one size fits all” approach fails to embrace the needs of the particular client, with potentially dire consequences. Merron (2005) reused the same Procrustean metaphor to reinforce the shortcomings of the “one size fits all” approach to consulting.

Yet the question remains, why use ancient fantastical stories when we have modern research and empirical evidence at hand? Gabriel (2004: 20) asked: “But is it possible for fiction to be truer than reality?” Ancient myths, he argues, “reveal a deeper truth, that pertains to the general rather than the specific”. Within such stories truth is revealed by drawing parallels with the present, in order to make sense of the current situation and to imagine how the future might unfold.

Yet the question remains, “Why Hermes?” Out of all the mythological characters, be they gods or titans, mortal heroes or mythical beasts, what makes Hermes the most suitable travelling companion? Whilst Buono (2009) used Janus with his two faces, the choice of characters available within the ancient pantheon is huge.¹ Procrustes has already been mentioned. Handy referred to Zeus, king of the gods. The all-powerful and omniscient Zeus might be a suitable choice for the big consulting firms offering strategic wisdom to the world’s largest corporations. Apollo, god of reason and medicine, could represent the technical expert offering diagnoses and cures to ailing companies. In the titan Prometheus, who enraged Zeus with his repeated trickery, we can see the consultant who “steals your watch and then tells you the time” (Kihn, 2005). We might even want to embrace the harm that consultants can cause and look to Hades, god of the underworld and bringer of earthquakes, who according to Sophocles grew rich on the tears of mortals. Alternatively, to question the status of consultants as experts one could look to Koalemos, the spirit of stupidity and foolishness. All these characters have merit, but it is Hermes who best reflects the contradictory and sometimes confusing world of management consultancy.

The many faces of business consulting

The growth and significance of management consulting is well documented (McKenna, 1995; Ernst and Kieser, 2002; Kipping and Clark, 2012; David et al., 2013), but quite what consulting involves is open to debate. A range of approaches have been adopted to attempt to make sense of consulting. Authors (such as Kipping, 2002) have created historical chronologies that describe the origins of the profession and its evolution. Topological approaches map the consulting terrain (Faulconbridge and Jones, 2012), establishing boundaries between a range of discrete functions. Similarly, typologies and frameworks disaggregate and aggregate the role of consultants and the different types of consultancy firms. Models of the client-consultant relationship have been developed to understand the function of consultants (see Nikolova et al., 2009). Elsewhere we find a host of metaphorical roles from rain makers, to brain surgeons, to mountain lions (Maister, 2007). Many “how to” books tap into the demand of aspiring consultants for practical advice. Typically, these present consultants as change agents skilfully using a range of (sometimes Procrustean) tools that claim to transform organizations. Although sometimes dismissed, such texts are significant in shaping our collective perception of consultants, and hybrid texts (Wickham and Wilcock, 2016) seek to combine the theoretical and the practical for a more intellectual readership. Critical evaluations of both the practices and efficacy of the profession add a further layer of understanding and complexity. Work by authors such as Clark and Greatbatch (2011) makes us aware of the performative or theatrical nature of consulting: the actors, the costumes and props, even the smoke and mirrors (Stewart, 2009) used by ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Applied academic discourse
• Part II Practical implementation: case studies in management consulting