Professional Management Consulting

1 The Profession

DOI: 10.4324/9781003466987-1

The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

(Winston Churchill, 1874–1965)

The Beginnings

Management consulting emerged as a viable industry in the late 1800s during the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps best known of the consulting pioneers was an American engineer and the father of the Scientific Management movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor (Figure 2)2F2F.¹

Figure 2 Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915). British Library collection.

Notable exponents of the scientific approach were engineer and consultant Frank Gilbert and psychologist and industrial ...