27.1 The management challenge of the professions

As a relatively young profession, management consulting should be able to draw some lessons from the management experience accumulated by older and better-established professions, such as law or accounting. Unfortunately, management is a relatively new and underdeveloped field in all professions. Professional firms historically have been managed in one of two ways – badly or not at all.

Management, as a distinct function and approach to running an organization, starts being practised systematically and consistently only when it becomes a