Introduction

Since its inception towards the end of the nineteenth century, and its rapid growth throughout the twentieth century, management consultancy has come to permeate modern corporations and strongly influence their performance. Fuelled by the drivers of complexity and uncertainty, a growing number of organisations are looking at the management consulting profession to assist them in navigating this pervasive change. During the 1960s, when consultancy became an international industry, the level of change was relatively incremental. Management consulting is a multi-faceted business sector and is context dependent. Management consulting has flourished throughout the twentieth century by attracting the highest calibre graduates from leading universities. Managing client expectation is just as important as the solution that the consultants provide. Another type of management consulting publication is the process-based approach to consulting, which provides methodological approaches to consulting but does not illustrate the different contexts and richness of management consulting.