Tom 2 (2019): Zeszyt 1 (June 2019)

In 2018, a research project was initiated by a team connected with the International Council for Management Consulting Institutes to analyse the factors that account for the relative strength of country’s management consulting sector. The results of this project, the Consulting Readiness Index (CRI) were reported in the previous issue of the Management Consulting Journal (Haslam et al, 2018). Since the development of the CRI, further investigation has been conducted to enable the ingredients of the CRI to estimate the financial value of national management consulting markets. This paper describes the approach, the results and the implications.

The focus of this article is the critical role of management consultancy in providing a rich basis to understanding the mechanisms by which knowledge management and operations risk is influenced. This article raises vital questions as to how management consultants can successfully contribute to knowledge management and subsequently improve performance at all levels of the organization. I extended the literature by showing how management consultants can contribute to knowledge management, facilitating and fostering a firm’s capabilities. Insufficient consideration of the impact of management consultancy on the effectiveness of knowledge management has been exposed and I attempt to address this concern for the first time.

The Consulting Skills for 2030 research project, conducted by the Centre for Management Consulting Excellence, took place in 2018 and involved 157 participants from the consultancy profession, academics and clients. The aim was to understand the skills that consultants will need to sell and deliver services, at a time of considerable technological and societal change. The research consisted of face-to-face interviews and a survey, exploring drivers of change including AI, Big Data, Cyber, Robotics, IoT, increased self-employment and globalisation. We also asked to what extent “timeless” skills of consultants such as Change Management would still be relevant in 2030. Finally, we invited unprompted insights from our respondents. The results ranked Cyber Security, AI, and Self-Employment as having the highest impacts, and we investigate the reasons and consequences. We also address the impact of clients seeing a more radical requirement for a skill shift among consultants than do consultants themselves.