Top Highlights

• The management function’s wide diffusion throughout the workforce substantially built the mid-century middle class.
• The earliest consultants were engineers who advised factory owners on measuring and improving efficiency at the complex factories required for industrial production
• A new ideal of shareholder primacy, powerfully championed by Milton Friedman in a 1970 New York Times Magazine article entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits,” gave the newly ambitious management consultants a guiding purpose
• As the business journalist Walter Kiechel put it in his book Lords of Strategy, consultants openly sought to “foment a stratification within companies and society” by concentrating the management function in elite executives, aided (of course) by advisers from consultants’ own ranks.
• They downsized in response not to particular business problems but rather to a new managerial ethos and methods; they downsized when profitable as well as when struggling, and during booms as well as busts.

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