Foreword

How many management consultancy projects can claim to have made significant improvements to the lives of millions of people? The case studies in this book contain practical solutions to monstrously complicated problems requiring not only clever, innovative thinking and broad international experience, but tact and diplomacy qualities which would challenge the UN.

Claims are often made for the impact of consultancy projects, but all too often this is at best piecemeal and at worst anecdotal. The majority of projects described in this book employed rigorous and extensive measurement techniques to assess the effectiveness of the initiatives and policies undertaken.

Management consultants - or at least the benefits they bring - are regarded with a good deal of scepticism by big business (as measured in MORI's Captains of Industry surveys for example), and the media delight in telling us of big government project failures. This book does a great job of redressing the balance.

Professor Robert Worcester
Chairman
MORI

Acknowledgements

Books such as this are never possible without the help and cooperation of a large number of people. The authors would particularly like to thank Sarah Taylor and Joy Hewgill at the Management Consultancies Association, and the team at Kogan Page, for their energy and commitment to the project. We are also grateful to the numerous individuals in the PR and marketing departments of the firms included in this book for their help in pulling together the case study material.

Chapter 1 makes use of some material first published in the MCA report ‘The UK Consulting Industry 2003/2004'; this material is reprinted here with kind permission of the MCA. All other trademarks that appear in the text are recognized as the property of their owners.