News from the attic: How the management consulting industry has moved on – or not?

It is interesting that PwC and now KPMG have removed the fig leaf of “business advisory services” to reveal their activities as fully fledged consulting practices. Looking back it is interesting to see what the playing field looked like in 1985. The table below, taken from the Economist September 1987, shows the estimated worldwide revenues for the top 20 consulting firms.

	$m		$m
Arthur Andersen	477	Arthur Young	175
McKinsey & Co	350	Hay Group	142
Towers Perrin	305	Touche Ross	140
Price Waterhouse	280	Alexander Proudfoot	120
Booz Allen	260	Johnson & Higgins	118
Mercer	254	Human Resource Management	105
Peat Marwick Mitchell	240	Bain	100
Coopers & Lybrand	201	Hewitt Associates	97
Wyatt	201	Arthur D Little	90
Ernst & Whinney	188	Deloitte Haskins & Sells	78

At that time Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) was part of the late lamented Arthur Andersen. Its performance has much increased: revenues for year ended 31 August 2011 were $25.5 billion!

But the shape of the consulting industry perhaps has not changed that much. In 1997 Management Consultancy magazine published a league table of the top 100 practices in the UK by revenue (£m) and the results are shown in the graph below.

The figures may be larger, but I bet the shape of the curve remains the same – a few behemoths and a host of medium and small practices.

News from the attic: How the management consulting industry has moved on – or not?

Calvert Markham