What is my definition of “Management Consulting?”

If this Antigency concept, at its most root level, is a mash-up of management consulting and vaccine science, I want to be clear as possible and define what I think the principal elements are. I have been asked a lot about this as I had suspected would happen.

I know vaccine science to be just that. Its the science of designing, creating, testing and delivering vaccines. Let’s agree that is vaccine science or part of Epidemiology, Immunology and Biology. Am I right? I am sure there is plenty of debate…but for the sake of simplicity…

Now Management Consulting, on the other hand, is more squishy and ambiguous and has been molested by so many for so long. You can go out tomorrow and claim that you are management consultant. I certainly have. And for that, I have had my ass handed to me enough times to finally get it right and understand my place in it. So here it is; my open-sourced definition of management consulting. Management Consulting is:

• about the application of consulting methods to address business performance issues within companies and organizations
• it is used to help companies identify, address and improve key business performance issues across a number of industries
• typically delivered on an issue-by-issue basis over a set amount of time using a set process
• identifies and prioritizing issues, creates feasible interventions to address root-causes, tries to measure impact of interventions based on key performance issues
• seeks opportunities to sell specialized services to other businesses and organizations
• typically an analytical, left-brain exercise

So there you have it. I would love to flesh this out and gain a broader perspective in the mean time. What do you think?