the consulting profession, from launch to high growth, from marketing to implementation. We talk a lot about “smarts” and “big data,” but we don't focus enough on knowledge and wisdom.
I'm hoping to share that knowledge and wisdom that I've been fortunate to gain over my career with you, so that you can share it with others. That's not a job, or career. It's a calling.
And that's why this is The Consulting Bible.
—Alan Weiss
East Greenwich, RI
March 2021
Section I Genesis: Consulting as a Profession
The origins, evolution, and basic requirements of successful consulting. Some realities are self-evident and eternal.
Chapter 1 Origins and Evolution: From Whence We Came
The Role of a Consultant
One day, somewhere in the mid‐Pleistocene Epoch, after the last glacial period, a man was trying to create a stronger point on his stone spearhead so that he could better hunt and slay the peccaries that fed his clan and protect himself from dire wolves that fed on his clan. He did this in the only way he knew how, which he learned watching his father—he laboriously abraded the sides of the point on a larger rock.
On this day, however, a stranger happened by who might have been seeking more interesting surroundings, or was exiled from his clan, or, one could readily assume, simply was lost. Observing the work on the spearhead, the stranger demonstrated that the point had to be ground on a harder rock, not a softer one, and indicated how to choose them. Not just any rock would do. And, indeed, his method worked and the hunter fashioned a sharper spearhead more quickly. The stranger was offered thanks, provided with food, and bestowed with a lion's tooth. He then went on his way once again, well fed, and with a talisman.
Consulting had been born.
The Gospel
The role of a consultant is to improve the client's condition.
It may or may not have happened that way, but you can't prove it didn't. Consulting—advice, counsel, suggestions—has been around since people began living together. Claims of “the oldest profession” have been misapplied to another career, though some would claim that consulting can also be somewhat meretricious if performed with poor motives or lack of skills.
Our job is to improve the client's condition. Doctors are consultants, and one of the first things they learn in medical school is primum non nocere (first to do no harm). When we walk away from a client, the client's condition should be better than it was before we arrived, or we've failed. (That “we” may mean both the client and we have failed, but we share in the failure in any case.)
It's that simple.
However, we are engaged in management consulting as solo practitioners and small firm principals (or consultants and partners in large firms). And that pursuit did not begin when sloths as large as a tree waddled about the earth. It began and then flourished within some of our lifetimes.
The first management consulting firm was A.D. Little, founded in 1886 by a professor from MIT. It was mainly a technical research firm at the outset. Booz Allen Hamilton was founded by Edwin G. Booz of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in 1914 and was the first to serve both industrial and governmental clients. (It wasn't until after the Great Depression's onset that these independent consultancies expanded to embrace more professionals and offices.)
Many, perhaps most, chroniclers of management consulting trace the origins to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the famed guru of time‐and‐motion studies in the early 1900s who purportedly spawned the industrial engineers and consultants who measured efficiency. There are two things wrong with this simplistic Genesis. First, it was governmental regulation combined with the exigencies of World War II that established consulting as we know it. And second, Taylorism was based on a great lie—Taylor fudged his numbers. In measuring efficiency (say, of a man shoveling coal), Taylor would calculate the size of the shovel, the distance to be traversed, lifts possible per minute, and so on. But he never did calculate the fatigue factor inherent in virtually all physical labor. People tend to get less efficient the more they work. When this became apparent, Taylor simply made up numbers out of thin air to accommodate this inconvenient reality. His work was discredited during his lifetime.1
From those beginnings2 management consulting grew dramatically, primarily in the United States. The egalitarian nature of U.S. democracy was conducive to the belief that even senior people could use help (as opposed to, say, the European belief that high office was to be held by family ties, school connections, nobility, or bestowal by absolute authority), and that it was a sign of strength and insight and not weakness or incompetence to ask for help.3 Only after the global transformation as a result of World War II was management consulting transported overseas from the United States.
Prior to the war, however, governmental regulation actually promoted independent consulting. As opposed to the shop mentality of Taylor, management consulting was more focused on dealing with organizational structure—bureaucracy, if you will. The outside experts (see Figure 1.1) were accountants, engineers, lawyers, and similar professionals who worked for merchant banks.
FIGURE 1.1 Relationship of Skills and Content
In the mid‐1930s, New Deal legislation such as the Glass‐Steagall Act prohibited banks from engaging in nonbanking activities, so they could no longer employ and bill out the experts. Yet the banks continued to urge their clients to utilize experts to protect their loans and investments and ensure effective management.
Hence, independent management consulting was boosted by Depression‐era government regulation.4 James McKinsey, for example, assiduously pursued banking relationships to secure the consulting business that the banks themselves had once provided for their clients.
The war also represented seismic shifts in demographics and learning, most relevant for our purposes because of the large movement from an agrarian to an urban culture, and the introduction of mass training for people who had never been developed in such a manner before, nor so quickly, including women in manufacturing jobs. World War II actually necessitated the creation of the training “industry,” for both military and domestic requirements. After the war, management consulting clearly had two components, shifting from merely specific, content‐related expertise to also embrace processes that consultants mastered that were applicable in a variety of public and private enterprises.5
You can view the relationship in Figure 1.1. A consultant who is strictly a content expert (brake pads, air traffic control, medical malpractice) and has no
