Abstract
Abstract: In a historical retrospective, although the existing literature calls the management consulting industry an extraordinary sector and a unique phenomenon in the business context, in fact these statements are not accompanied by a number of academic studies that emphasize the importance of the effective work of the management consultants. To contest the lack of studies in this emerging area, this article aims to understand the implications of the border to the transfer of information and knowledge from management consultants to their client companies. The results of the empirical analysis in the form of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires applied to management consultants and SME managers in Portugal reveal that the competency factor must be based on the four knowledge families of business management - the know- know, the competence, know-how and know-how to be and it is only from this conjugation that any kind of constraints that can be found along the way (political, physical or cultural) are able to be unblocked.
Highlights
In a historical retrospective, the existing literature calls the management consulting industry an extraordinary sector and a unique phenomenon in the business context, these statements are not accompanied by a number of academic studies that emphasize the importance of the effective work of the management consultants
The benefits of the management consulting industry were already clear in terms of the influence and contribution they generated to the growth of industries in the 1950s (Stryker, 1954)
For this reason has Drucker (1979) twenty-five years later named this as an extraordinary sector and a unique phenomenon in the business context and by the unique, singular, objective and independent aid that translates into the resolution of concrete problems (Greiner & Metzger, 1983; Canback, 1999), and by the experience that it transports and that appears many times associated to results related to high productivity (Fincham, 2010)
Summary
As in other áreas of management domain, the evolution of the strategic disciplines in the organizations has been broadly diffused by the management consulting industry, this being the main reason why Canback (1998) describes this sector as the way to success which must be embraced by companies in the contextualization of their strategic orientation and their professionals as the true disseminators of the complex phenomenon of business evolution until today known.This same thinking has been evidenced by several authors over the past few years defending the industry as an influential and powerful tool for organizational change, bringing a new life to organizations and their procedural chains.In a historical retrospective, the benefits of the management consulting industry were already clear in terms of the influence and contribution they generated to the growth of industries in the 1950s (Stryker, 1954). As in other áreas of management domain, the evolution of the strategic disciplines in the organizations has been broadly diffused by the management consulting industry, this being the main reason why Canback (1998) describes this sector as the way to success which must be embraced by companies in the contextualization of their strategic orientation and their professionals as the true disseminators of the complex phenomenon of business evolution until today known This same thinking has been evidenced by several authors over the past few years defending the industry as an influential and powerful tool for organizational change, bringing a new life to organizations and their procedural chains. The progress and heterogeneity of the scientific studies carried out in recent decades in the area of strategic consulting by prestigious authors such as McGivern (1983), McLarty & Robinson (1998), Fincham et al (2009), Karantinou & Hogg (2009), Werr & Styhre (2002), Jackall (1988), Clark (2004), Jarzabkowski & Paul Spee (2009),and Whittington (2007) are seen as added value, and here too, the strategy workers have not received much attention in the strategic field of research. Whittington (2007) gives an example of this, noting that no article on consulting in one of the major journals of the strategy such as the “Strategy Management Journal” had been published by 2007
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