ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the teaching and application of management consultancy as part of a master’s degree in business administration (MBA) and examines its relevance in management education. Mature and experienced students, many with impressive CVs and multiple career successes, demand that the core experience of their MBA programmes provide opportunities to apply theoretical knowledge in real-life situations. Opportunities to work with blue-chip clients on some of their projects of strategic importance offers further opportunities for students to test management thinking and consultancy practise in a robust and challenging manner. Students often have previous experience working with consultants, but most have little experience managing and delivering projects for clients within a consultancy framework. The pedagogical challenge is to teach students the true value proposition of consultancy beyond the transactional relationship inherent in answering a work-based learning challenge set by the client. The basic process approach moves students from considering consultancy as a phenomenon that ‘happens’ to a client, with a solution magically appearing upon project conclusion, to a position where students recognise consultants as a true ‘change agent’, unfreezing clients from previous positions and realising new capabilities (Lewin, 1951). There is an examination of ensuring the relevance of the management consultancy approach to students as part of their MBA journey as well as relevance to the client companies in engaging with the university. There is discussion on how teaching a rigorous approach to management consultancy project management and research-orientated methodology retains the focus on the impact to the client organisation (Appelbaum and Steed, 2005). There is consideration of how true impact on client companies is achieved by ensuring that legacy forms part of expectation management (Kirk, 2000) with client companies keen to reengage with future MBA student teams. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the future development of consultancy within management education, and how that embeds theoretical learning with individual context.
