Whether it's last year's front-page headlines about McKinsey or this year's House of Lies , management consulting's dirty laundry airing weekly on Showtime, there's no denying ethics—and more precisely, the lack of ethics—are top of mind in management consulting.
And that's just fine with Drumm McNaughton, the Immediate Past Chair of the Institute of Management Consultants USA. That's because IMC has been leading the charge for ethics and standards training and certification in consulting for more than forty years now. "Marvin Bower was one of the founding directors of IMC," McNaughton says. "One of the reasons for our founding was to set ethical standards in consulting."
Since then, the ethics ethos has ebbed and flowed, but McNaughton says the profession is clearly moving back to where "it's becoming more of a focus because there's been a pattern of negative behavior over the last few years. It's shedding a negative light on the entire profession," he says.
