Consulting: The Agents of Change

Management consultants serve diverse roles, ranging from providing top-tier strategic advice to addressing peak workloads in administrative settings or acting as an extension for routine tasks. Consultants rarely work exclusively for one company but are typically engaged on a contractual basis for specific tasks. The insights gained during the current project will be carried forward when the project concludes and the consultant moves on to a new assignment. Thus, generally speaking, the consulting industry serves as an accelerator for the dissemination of ideas and is, nowadays, much closer to the actual driving forces of management than academia. In this chapter, amongst others, we give an outline over the activities of management consulting, a reorganization case, as well as a survey of basic analysis techniques.