Frederick Taylor's business card read "Consulting Engineer."
Arthur Dehon Little, a chemist trained at MIT, founded what is widely considered the first management consulting firm in 1886. The company, Arthur D. Little Inc., initially specialized in technical research, applying scientific methods to industrial processes before gradually expanding into organizational advice.1
In 1893, Frederick Taylor opened an independent consulting practice in Philadelphia. His business card identified him as a "Consulting Engineer" with a specialty in "Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs."2 Taylor's scientific management methods generated an entire class of practitioners who traveled from factory to factory, timing operations and redesigning workflows.
In 1926, James O. McKinsey, an accounting professor at the University of Chicago, founded McKinsey & Company. Under the subsequent leadership of Marvin Bower, who served as managing director from 1950 to 1967, the firm established the model of the modern strategy consultant. Bower insisted that consultants maintain the professional standards of lawyers and doctors, recruiting from top MBA programs and charging fees rather than commissions.3
Boston Consulting Group followed in 1963, founded by Bruce Henderson, a former Arthur D. Little employee. Bain & Company arrived in 1973. Together with McKinsey, these three firms became known as MBB, the most prestigious tier of strategy consulting.4 By the 1990s, the industry had expanded to include information technology consulting, with the Big Four accounting firms entering the advisory market.
The profession grew from a novel idea, that expertise could be purchased from outside the organization, into a global industry. The concept that a company might need an external expert to tell it how to operate its own business would have been unrecognizable to any factory owner in 1885.5