Consultancies as Management Schools ( DRAFT , please do not quote ! )

The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between management consultancies and graduate business schools in a comparative and historical perspective. It has been recognised recently that consultancies have increasingly come to play the role of “management schools”. Many MBA graduates of the leading international business schools such as Harvard or Insead spend some time working for one of the leading global consultancies such as McKinsey or BCG and subsequently enter companies at the top management level. Examples of these career tracks abound especially in the United States, but can also be found increasingly in Western Europe. From the point of view of knowledge diffusion, this would suggest that this combination of MBA and consultancy “training” contributes to an increasing homogenisation of management practice following the mimetic process analysed by the neo-institutionalists. This paper examines the complex relationship between graduate schools of business administration and management consultancies in detail. It argues that this relationship can indeed be described as “symbiotic”, because the leading business schools and the top consultancies, mutually reinforce each other not only in terms of training, but also commercially and socially, namely by improving credibility towards potential clients and by enhancing the status of the individual graduates and consultants. But the extent to which the relationship actually contributes to a homogenisation of management practice, depends mainly on the content of the knowledge “taught” at each of these two “management schools”. Mainly based on evidence from Britain and the Iberian countries, the paper makes a first attempt to examine the evolution of the relationship and of contents diffused. It distinguishes stages in this development which occurred at different times in each of these countries, but show nevertheless remarkable similarities. Thus, historically, consultancies often acted as an alternative for general management training in the absence of graduate business schools in these countries. Subsequently, domestic consultancies often established their own training centres, both for clients and their own consultants. By contrast US consulting firms initially sent their staff to US business schools and then contributed to the establishment of similar institutions in the host countries. Given the much larger numbers trained in the domestic institutions a possible homogenisation therefore proceeded only slowly. It seems to have accelerated more recently in line with the increasing predominance of US consultancies in Western Europe which prompted the domestic consultancies to adapt their recruitment and training practices. The research for this discussion paper was carried out as part of the EU-funded project on the “Creation of European Management Practice” (TSER SOE1-CT97-1072). The paper was first presented at the 15 EGOS Colloquium, University of Warwick, 4-6 July 1999, subtheme 4: Knowledge of Management: Production, Training and Diffusion. We would like to thank all participants and especially Kjell-Arne Roevik for their helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.