This book on management consulting is based on several sources of inspiration, and it is hard to say which the most important one has been. A first source was my own employment as a management consultant, first at a medium-sized information technology (IT) and organizational consultancy in Berlin, then at a small mergers and acquisitions (M&A) consulting firm in London, and eventually as a summer associate at a large strategy consultancy. The vicissitudes of these firms inspired my interest in management consulting as an academic topic, and after completing my PhD thesis on a different subject I started doing research on the advice sector. Without personal involvement in the consulting sphere and the insights gained there, I would have been unable to write the book.

A second source was my journey between academic disciplines and exposure to the ongoing discussion between economics and sociology. As an undergraduate and graduate student in management and industrial engineering, I attended lectures and tutorials in micro- and macroeconomics. I was disappointed by them and felt that daily newspapers and weekly magazines taught me more about the economy than the models I learned at university. I felt that these models, and thus economics as an academic discipline, were mere skeletons that contributed little to the explanation of ongoing events in the real world. Courses such as organizational behavior provided much more stimulation for me, and I finished my first degree by focusing on behavioral aspects without economic modeling.