Oxford Lecturer's Book Tweaks Profession's Soft Spot
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In a freewheeling conversation with the editors of Consulting magazine, Christopher McKenna, Oxford University lecturer and author of The World's Newest Profession (Cambridge University Press, 2006), discussed everything from the origins of modern management consulting to the meaning of being a professional to the possibility of consultants rising up to demand professional autonomy separate from the firms that employ them.
McKenna, keenly aware that his book's title alludes to the world's oldest profession, questions how today's management consultants can even claim professional status. For consultants, "the corporation is professional, not the individual," he points out. Nobody certifies management consultants. There is no state-sanctioned test. A management consultant is a professional mainly because he works for a professional consulting firm.
By comparison, doctors, lawyers, and accountants have all passed various state-sanctioned certifications. As individuals, they are recognized professionals. Not so for management consultants. "This is a very modern thing — to have professionalism and professional status without actually having a profession," he says.
Ironically, "it is the firm itself that enables professionalism," he continues. Let's say that you work at McKinsey, which makes you a professional management consultant. Of course, we all know consultants who are not directly tied to a professional consulting firm, who just hung out their own shingles — and who's to say that they aren't professionals? But even these individuals often have a professional firm pedigree somewhere in their background.
There are benefits and drawbacks to this ambiguous professionalism status for both the firms that employ management consultants and the consultants themselves. The founders of modern management consulting — people like Marvin Bower, Edwin Booz, George Armstrong, even James McKinsey himself — seemed willing to leave this ambiguity unresolved.
This ambiguity has benefits and drawbacks. For example, without some form of sanctioned professional standards, anybody can declare him- or herself a consultant and open for business. However, without consultants being required to gain some kind of license, the profession cannot control the number of consultants entering, thereby enabling it to limit competition to some extent.
Well, limiting competition sounds nice, but the same sanctioning bodies that control the number of practitioners also enforce the standards of practice. The sanctioning body establishes a standard of behavior and sets up committees capable of reviewing practices, which opens up the possibility of malpractice.
Is professionalism worth becoming subject to malpractice? The accounting firms populated by CPAs can be held responsible for allowing the misdeeds of, say, an Enron. The management consulting firms whose consultants may have planted the ideas behind such disasters, however, walk away without a scratch. Maybe some reputations were tarnished by Enron, but the Justice Department wasn't knocking on any management consulting firm's door.
By not being sanctioned professionals, consultants lose the
status awarded to doctors and lawyers, but they gain freedom
from responsibility. "Consultants advise their clients. Then
something goes wrong and the consultant can say, 'I just gave advice. Nobody made you follow it.' Compare that to what
would happen if a lawyer or doctor or even an engineer gave bad advice," notes McKenna.
Today, control of the management consulting profession, to whatever extent there may be control, lies with the consulting firms, not the individual consultants. The idea of a profession, however, invests the individual professionals with control of the profession. The individual professionals hold the power and take responsibility. This isn't the case in management consulting today, which lacks a professional association on a par with the bar association or the American Medical Association.
"What if individual consultants rise up in a groundswell to take control?" asks McKenna. Consultants currently trade autonomy and control for higher pay and protection within the firm. Would they prefer autonomy? It's a question that McKenna can ask but not answer.
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