Book review of "The world’s newest profession: Management consulting in the twentieth century"
Abstract
Management consultants are a significant social and economic force. Few people, whether as citizens or members oforganizations, will have escaped the impact of their interventions. A survey revealed that 97 percent of the top 200 companies in the U.K. and U.S. have used management consultants. The spectacular growth of the industry in the last fiftyyears is evidenced by the fact that somewhere in the regionof 80 percent of firms currently operating were establishedafter 1980. The ratio of consultants to managers, as this bookdemonstrates, has grown from one to a hundred in 1965 toone to thirteen in 1995. In this clearly written and insightfulbook, McKenna seeks to answer the question of how “theleading consulting firms come to achieve such a dominanteconomic and cultural position” (p. 7) by the end of the twentieth century.