I suspect you’re like me. The pile of books you’ve bought but not managed to read yet starts to look dangerously high. So this is the time of year I try to reduce the book mountain, by throwing as many as I can into the holiday bag.

In amongst the thrillers and celeb biographies this holiday was “The World’s Newest Profession” (Cambridge University Press), a history of management consultancy. Written by Said Business School lecturer Christopher McKenna, it came out last year. I had a quick flick through it at the time: its 100-odd pages of dense footnotes supporting 250 pages of text meant it got consigned to the bottom of the must-read pile...

So when it finally came out of the beachbag, my expectations for a ‘right riveting read’
were low. And how wrong I was. It’s hardly a potboiler, but McKenna’s story of how the management consultancies became so influential makes for compelling reading. Those who founded firms whose names still resonate down the decades – James O. McKinsey, Arthur E. Andersen, Edwin Booz - have their success explained. And some of that success was caused by US legislation.

I’d no idea, for example, the McKinsey was a cost accountant who exploited a gap in the market when in the 1930s US banks were prohibited from using internal resources to provide management advice to clients. Arthur Andersen, the auditing firm – found its pot of gold when IBM was prevented from offering computer consulting advice in the 1950s.

These and other stories are woven into a study of how consultancies have become an important part of the global economy. It’s very readable, and well researched (hence all those footnotes.) McKenna, in the foreword, tells how his wife was writing her own historical study – on prostitution. Sex and money: from the world’s oldest profession to the world’s newest...

You can buy the book from Amazon:
The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)