12.1Nature and scope of consulting in corporate strategy and general management

A considerable amount of management consulting concerns the very existence, the basic goals or mission, the business policy and strategy, and the overall planning, structuring and control, of an organization. These problems were at one time defined as general management, but are now more commonly referred to as corporate strategy or strategic management. Consultants who concern themselves with these issues are strategy or general management consultants – as distinct from specialists who intervene in one functional area (e.g. finance), or deal with a particular technique such as computerized production control or employee incentive schemes.

But how does a company know if it requires the assistance of an all-round management consultant? In some cases this is quite obvious from the state of the business: a deteriorating overall performance, growing dissatisfaction of the staff, the generally bleak prospects of the industrial sector, and so on. The business may be in crisis, or close to it, and it is not clear how to restore prosperity. In other cases, a problem that seems at the outset to be a special or functional one (inadequate marketing methods, say) may have ramifications in