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.
All firms, of course, have a written code of ethics on their books, and many offer training and development courses around ethics, but McNaughton says they simply don't go far enough. "The firms do a tremendous job training the technical aspects of consulting and the industry knowledge, but they fall down on the consulting competencies and the ethics training," he says.
"It's not a tsunami yet, but I think we may have already had the earthquake with McKinsey, quite frankly, and will there be a tsunami to follow it?"
The leading firms, of course, will say they do this already. "The evidence that I've seen, especially of late, tells me otherwise," he says. "It's sad to see, I thought we were in a better state."
Ethics training is just one aspect of the competency framework IMC offers. The bigger picture, McNaughton says, is around the need for an industry standard for certification. It's never caught on here, but McNaughton points to Europe as an example of how it could work here. Europe's already passed a voluntary standard for how a consulting project should go and the European Federation of Management Consultancies Associations, (AMCF's European equivalent) has already bought into it.
"What we're doing at IMC is not so much standards but more self-monitoring of the profession, he says. "We're having a lot of meetings with firms and they are becoming more and more open to to it," he says. "It'll take about three or four firms to step up to the plate and say this is important. We've been talking about
this forever, but I think it's time we took some action."
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