In the past century, the United States has made many important contributions to the global economy – in technology, in business practices, and in organizational structures. Few of these innovations, we believe, have been more significant than the subject of Christopher McKenna's book on the rise of management consulting in the twentieth century. In an era of tumultuous organizational transformations, of giant cross-border mergers and acquisitions, and of decisive transitions in public and nonprofit organizations as well as corporations, management consultants have become ubiquitous agents of organizational change, deeply embedded in all of the developed economies.

McKenna digs into the history of the leading management consulting firms and provides his readers with the best available account of the business' origins and early years. Basing his study on internal documents, interviews, and government reports, he is able to chart the evolution of this new form of professional advice over a long century of decisive change in global capitalism. As he demonstrates, transitions in the governmental context as well as in the private and nonprofit sectors had dramatic impacts on the markets and performance of the management consultancies in America and abroad.

This is a study that speaks to a variety of audiences: to all those who want to understand current problems in the corporate sector, including in particular the Enron scandal; to researchers interested in business strategy and corporate reorganization; to readers who want a better grasp of the history of modern business, of politics in the twentieth century, and of the sociology of organizations.