When you hear the term "consultant," you most likely conjure up images of suits instructing high-level management on strategy. But the trade of consulting is so much more-and so much bigger-than you might imagine. In fact, the $425 billion industry is on pace to double in the near future, meaning a majority of professionals will one day be consultants instead of employees. Luckily, if you have marketable skills and an entrepreneurial spirit, you can join this booming business now and build the profitable and flexible career you've always wanted. In The Consulting Economy, Jonathan Dison, founder of Lightrock Consulting and BenchWatch.com, explores the realm of consulting, teaching both aspiring and experienced consultants, contractors, and freelancers how to find a niche within their industry, start a business, develop a clientele, maximize income, and create a career that is vibrant, challenging, and rewarding. Whether you're a millennial just starting out, a midcareer worker looking to spend more time with family, or a retiree hoping to find a new vocation, The Consulting Economy will give you the tips and tools you need to successfully transition into the world of consulting, maximize your wealth and profitability, and begin enjoying the freedom and excitement of working for yourself.

academic disciplines. --Book Jacket.

Consultants work in all fields. They operate from offices and from home, work for investment firms and as personal trainers, or have expertise as accountants and wedding planners. The independence, flexibility, and potential income it brings make for an exciting and satisfying career. And it’s an increasingly popular one for highly skilled, motivated professionals who’ve been laid off in this unstable economy. This guide features tips and tricks to help beat the competition, including how to: Set—and keep—personal and financial goals Organize important paperwork Price and market specific services Create advertising and publicity plans Grow a business, from finding a partner to managing employees Minimize and eliminate business risks Consultants are paid well for their advice—if they know how to operate a successful business. With advice from experts in a variety of areas, this valuable guide helps you create the business of your dreams!

In The World's Newest Profession Christopher McKenna offers a history of management consulting in the twentieth century. Although management consulting may not yet be a recognized profession, the leading consulting firms have been advising and reshaping the largest organizations in the world since the 1920s. This groundbreaking study details how the elite consulting firms, including McKinsey & Company and Booz Allen & Hamilton, expanded after US regulatory changes during the 1930s, how they changed giant corporations, nonprofits, and the state during the 1950s, and why consultants became so influential in the global economy after 1960. As they grew in number, consultants would introduce organizations to 'corporate culture' and 'decentralization' but they faced vilification for their role in the Enron crisis and for legitimating corporate blunders. Through detailed case studies based on unprecedented access to internal files and personal interviews, The World's Newest Profession explores how management consultants came to be so influential within our culture and explains exactly what consultants really do in the global economy.

Management consultants of various kinds play an important role in the world of business, and within other types of organization. The Oxford Handbook on Management Consulting is a comprehensive overview of thinking and research on management consultancy with contributions from leading international scholars. The first section provides an account of the historical developments in management consulting research, and how current thinking has evolved from prior work. The second section focuses on disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, their diversities, areas of synergy, and parallel concerns. The following sections examine consulting as a knowledge business, consultants and management fashion, and the relationship between management consultants and their clients. The Handbook concludes with an assessment of areas of future research and debate. By bringing together a wide range of research and thinking on management consulting across different disciplines, sub-disciplines, and conceptual approaches, the Handbook provides a comprehensive understanding of both current thinking and future directions for research.

"Schragenheim, Camp and Surace, three leaders of TOC community, are tackling one of value destroyers of corporations—the misuse and abuse of traditional cost accounting. This book develops a practical methodology for better decision making by looking at the impact of certain types of decisions on a company’s bottom line. This well-defined methodology allows mid-managers, higher level managers and financial staff to create real value by concentrating on what truly matters." Boaz Ronen, Professor Emeritus, Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel "Throughput Economics is a must read for entrepreneurs and managers who want to make their organizations more and more antifragile." Andrea Zattoni, CEO of Antifragility, Italy "Management accounting is a dry topic. Throughput Economics is not—managers can learn a lot they can apply to their company from it." Rudolf Burkhart, Business Development Director, Vistem Gmbh, Germany Throughput Economics challenges the current thinking of how to evaluate cost, risks and rewards of any deal or any other new market opportunity being considered, especially the practice of calculating cost-per-unit. Instead, this book offers a process that directly answers the critical question: If we accept the proposed decision, will the performance of the organization improve? The process involves the intuition of the key people in the organization, together with the relevant data, to come up with the best available information from which to form a reasonable range of net profit, when the considered decision is added on top of all the other activities undertaken by the organization. The process is explained and demonstrated using a variety of cases where the organization faces a new non-trivial idea, along with a detailed explanation of how it should work, including software support that provides very quick response to many what-if suggestions. This book offers a new and well-defined process, applicable to every organization, that considers both financial impacts and capacity limitations and, also, includes the impact of uncertainty by providing the range of reasonable results rather than one number, which is always proven wrong in the end. Overall, the book provides a holistic method for simplified decision making in seemingly complex or shifting environments using a constraints mindset to facilitate companies’ realization, for the first time, their true potential.