Aristotle and the Management Consultants: Shooting for Ethical Practice

A growing body of academic literature about management consulting, written from the critical perspective, raises questions about the ethics of management consulting practice. Management consultants routinely describe themselves as professionals (Harvey et al. 2017), and there is a large body of literature on professional ethics that can shed light on the ethics of management consulting. Nevertheless, management consultancy is different from established professions such as medicine, law and accountancy, and literature that focuses specifically on management consultancy as a distinct kind of practice from an ethical perspective is sparse. A paradox lies at the heart of management consulting, which distinguishes it sharply from the established professions. Although management consultancy is routinely described as a knowledge-intensive industry (Alvesson 2000), there is no generally accepted body of management consultancy knowledge (Fincham 1999; Visscher 2006). Moreover, whereas members of the established professions form communities who share their knowledge for the benefit of the people whom they serve (Pellegrino 1989), management consultancy knowledge is typically proprietary and constitutes a basis of competition between management consultancy firms. The pressure on management consultants to provide relevant, practical assistance to their clients at the pace at which managers have to make decisions inhibits the deployment of a verifiable body of knowledge (Kieser and Leiner 2009). Much management consultancy knowledge is socially constructed, and may take the form of management fashions whose benefits are not susceptible to objective evaluation (Nikolova et al. 2009; Wright et al. 2012). The ability of management consultants to secure the trust of clients, in circumstances in which the outputs of their work are frequently beyond the reach of objective assessment, is a central requirement in management consulting (Glückler and Ambrüster 2003). These distinctive characteristics give rise to ethical questions in respect of management consulting that are substantially distinct from those arising in normal professional settings. This paper seeks to examine these questions, using Aristotle’s (1934) Nicomachean Ethics as a guide, in combination with literature on the ethics of the professions that builds upon Aristotle’s work. Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Thrace; he was the son of the physician to the King of Macedon (Russell 1967) and, perhaps because of this, he frequently draws upon analogies from medical ethics in his work. Management consultancy has some points of comparison with medicine in the sense that it too is a kind of helping profession, and this paper draws particularly on comparisons between the ethics of management consulting and medical ethics, in order to identify and shed light upon the distinctive ethical characteristics of management consulting.

Acknowledging that it is impossible to provide a precise definition of good and ethical action, Aristotle sets out to provide a target so that, by aiming at it, we may have a better chance than otherwise of shooting in the right direction. This paper draws upon the Nicomachean Ethics so as to set up a target at which, like good archers, management consultants may aim, so as to shoot for ethical practice. In applying ideas from virtue ethics in the Aristotelian tradition to the professions, Pellegrino (1989, 1995), a more contemporary scholar of the ethics of medicine and other established professions, acknowledges the problems involved in using virtue ethics as the basis for a general ethical theory. The virtue ethics approach focuses attention on the kind of person that someone needs to be in order to be good. Problems arise from the circularity of virtue ethics arguments that assert that, on the one hand, the virtuous person does what is good and, on the other hand, that the good is what the virtuous person does. While acknowledging these difficulties, however, Pellegrino (1989, 1995) argues that they can, to a large extent, be overcome in respect of the ethics of the professions, such as medical ethics, because there are fewer difficulties in defining what is good in the medical profession than in human life in general. It will be argued in this paper that the virtue ethics approach has promise also as a way of examining management consulting. In the absence of any generally accepted body of knowledge of the kind that is used in the established professions to assess the quality of a professional’s work, clients and other stakeholders must rely heavily on management consultants’ character to assess the help that they provide. Aristotle (1934, p.3) begins the Nicomachean Ethics by observing that ‘every art or science aims at some good’, so that ‘for instance, the end of the science of medicine is health’, and that the practitioners of any art or science have their own particular function. If professionals’ functions, and the ends towards which their work is directed, can be defined, it should also be possible to define the virtues that would enable them to be good practitioners of their profession. What then is the function of the management consultant? How should a management consultant act in order to be a good management consultant? Aristotle (1934, p. 149) also draws attention to the boundaries between practitioners’ and clients’ responsibilities, pointing out for example that it may be the case that a patient’s ‘illness is voluntary, in the sense of being due to intemperate living and neglect of the doctors’ advice’. Where then does the boundary lie between the ethical responsibilities of the management consultant and those of the client and other stakeholders with an interest in good management consulting? Each of these three questions is considered in turn below.

The process of consultation clearly lies at the heart of the function of a management consultant. Aristotle (1934, p. 137) provides a specific observation in the Nicomachean Ethics on the nature of consultation, which points the way towards defining what that function is:

Deliberation then is employed in matters which, though subject to rules that generally hold good, are uncertain in their issue; or where the issue is indeterminate, and where, when the matter is important, we take others into our deliberations, distrusting our own capacity to decide.

The nature of deliberation (bouleusis), and of the closely connected intellectual virtue of prudence (phronesis), which is sometimes translated as ‘practical wisdom’, are central themes in Aristotle’s work and in scholarly commentaries on it. Brief though this passage is, therefore, it connects the topic of consultation with some of the major ideas in Aristotle’s work.

A number of propositions as to the function of the management consultant flow from Aristotle’s observation. First, management consultants assist clients who are uncertain as to how to act in important matters. Second, management consultants assist clients who ‘[distrust their] own capacity to decide’. Third, management consultants are taken into their clients’ deliberations, so that they have a privileged position in the clients’ decision-making that is weighted unduly towards neither the clients nor the consultants. Fourth, management consultants must exercise prudence (phronesis). Aristotle (1934, p. 337) says that ‘it is held to be the mark of a prudent (phronimos) man to be able to deliberate well about what is good and advantageous for himself’, so management consultants will only be of use to their clients if they have the intellectual virtue of prudence (phronesis). Fifth, the work of management consultants is focused essentially – but not entirely exclusively, as discussed below - on implementation, that is, on means and not on ends, because as Aristotle states (1934, p.137), ‘we deliberate not about ends, but about means’.

The scope of Aristotle’s concept of prudence (phronesis) is the subject of debate. Aristotle appears to say that the exercise of prudence (phronesis) is a purely rational activity that is concerned with determining how particular ends are to be achieved, and that the desire for those ends stems solely from the non-rational, moral virtues (Moss 2011). This suggests that the domain of prudence (phronesis) is limited to matters of implementation. While Aristotle is clearly committed to the distinction between the intellectual and the moral virtues, prudence (phronesis) may yet have crucial roles in the detailed specification of the ends for which the non-rational, moral virtues have produced the desire (Irwin 1975; Wiggins 1975–76). On Aristotle’s account, moral virtue involves striking a mean between opposed moral errors, an idea that is discussed in more detail below; someone may have a general wish to show liberality (eleutheriotes) to another who is in need, but it is a matter for prudence (phronesis) to determine how much to give so as to strike the mean between the opposite errors of meanness (aneleutheria) and prodigality (asotia) (Moss 2011). Thus, it seems reasonable to suppose that there is a role for prudence (phronesis) in the detailed specification of the ends for which the moral virtues have produced the desire, and not purely in the means for achieving those ends. The practical realities of management underscore the reasonableness of the proposition that management consultants should not be confined to advising solely on matters of implementation. Whipp et al. (1989) explain organisational change as the outcome of interplay between the content of the change that is to be brought about, the context in which that change is to occur, and the process by which it is to be implemented. When viewed from the perspective of such interdependencies, it is difficult to see how management consultants could reasonably withhold their best advice as to the desirability of the particular ends that their clients have specified (the content of the organisational change), in the presence of problematic means (the processes of organisational change) and an unfavourable context within which to implement them, especially if these might give rise to costs that the ends specified by the client would not justify.

The above five propositions about management consulting may appear to be a matter of plain common sense and applicable, with appropriate adjustments, to the function of any professional person. Not all of them, however, can simply be taken for granted. In relation to the first of these propositions, for example, clients sometimes appoint management consultants, not because they are uncertain how to act, but because they want external experts to legitimise in the minds of other organisation members the action that they have already decided to take (Sturdy et al. 2009). It will be argued later that, while this may be a common practice, it is not an ethical one. The second of these propositions, however, relating to clients ‘distrusting [their] own capacity to decide’ (Aristotle 1934, p.137) highlights a key difference between management consulting and the established professions that has ethical implications. While clients may distrust their capacity to decide because they lack the necessary knowledge and expertise to make a well-informed decision, their self-distrust may equally stem purely from a sense of anxiety or lack of confidence. In other words, the benefits that clients seek from their management consultants may consist of reassurance and moral support rather than accreditable knowledge and expertise (Sturdy 1997). Whereas patients might reasonably expect their doctors to act upon an established body of knowledge, management consultants do not and – by virtue of the nature of their work – could not have access to such a body of knowledge. Several consequences flow from this, which distinguish management consulting from the established professions. There is no generally accepted system of regulation of management consultants (Greiner and Ennsfellner 2010; Harvey et al. 2017; Poulfelt 1997). Management consultants must engage in organisational politics in order to effect change since, in the absence of a body of knowledge through which particular management actions can be validated, intervention in organisational change involves participation in organisational politics in order to secure acceptance of new ideas (Schein 1988). Management consultants must be active in managing their clients’ impressions of themselves and of their work in the absence of objective means of assessing them (Clark and Salaman 1998). Management consultants perform a diverse range of roles, and have a diverse range of relationships with their clients, which is associated with their clients’ perceptions of the extent of their access to scarce, specialist knowledge (O’Mahoney and Markham 2013; Schein 1997). These distinctive characteristics of management consulting are elaborated below.

It might be argued that, just as the end of medicine is health, and the function of the doctor is to cure patients, so the end of management consulting is effective organisational performance, and the function of the management consultant to facilitate improvement in organisational performance. Indeed Schein (1988) specifically suggests the doctor-patient relationship as one model for management consulting. The doctor-patient model, however, assumes the existence of a generally accepted body of knowledge upon which the management consultant will rely in formulating objective advice and plans of action. O’Mahoney and Markham (2013, p.11) highlight the definition of management consultancy adopted by the UK’s Management Consultancies Association, which embodies this assumption:

The creation of value for organisations, through the application of knowledge, techniques and assets, to improve business performance. This is achieved through the rendering of objective advice and/or the implementation of business solutions.

The superficial similarity, however, of the function of the management consultant to that of the doctor cannot be accepted so readily. In the absence of a generally accepted body of management consultancy knowledge, management consultants’ claims to specialist knowledge are largely unverifiable (Fincham 1999; Visscher 2006). Management consulting is widely described as a knowledge-intensive industry (Alvesson 2000), and the use of knowledge management systems is a central feature of management consulting firms’ practices and a basis of competition between them (Hansen et al. 1999). The nature of that knowledge, however, is wholly different from the kind of scientific knowledge that underpins the practice of medicine. Whereas scientists seek knowledge about whether particular propositions are true or false, managers seek relevant and timely knowledge that will help them take practical decisions upon which they must act (Kieser and Leiner 2009). Whereas, for example, scientific knowledge of what is true or false in the areas medicine or engineering has great practical value, the same cannot in general be said of similar knowledge in the field of management (Kieser and Leiner 2009). Some management scholars advocate evidence-based management, which draws inter alia upon systematic reviews of the sort that medical researchers use to bring together the best evidence on medical questions (Briner et al. 2009). While systematic reviews in the field of management science are rigorous, it typically takes many months to complete them, and their outputs are unlikely to be in a form that is immediately accessible or relevant to a manager with a decision to take. The timescales on which managers have to make decisions, and the practical focus of the information that they seek to help make them, constrain the likely value of systematic reviews (or even of rapid evidence assessments) in a management consulting setting. Management consultancy firms use their knowledge management systems to store and disseminate an evolving body of information based on their consulting experience, including standardised methods, tools and techniques for carrying out particular kinds of management consultancy projects, and documentation of particular kinds of consultancy project that the firm has completed (Werr and Stjernberg 2003). These systems enable management consultants to capture learning from their current experiences as they encounter new problems and situations, and in consequence to be conversant with current management developments and trends, but that learning is not susceptible to the kind of rigorous review that would enable it to be embodied in a generally accepted corpus of scientific knowledge.

The absence of a generally accepted body of management consultancy knowledge has contributed to the failure of attempts to regulate the management consulting industry (Glückler and Ambrüster 2003; Harvey et al. 2017; Kirkpatrick et al. 2012). Greiner and Ennsfellner (2010) record a claim that simply being recruited by McKinsey & Co. is sufficient to confer professional status on a consultant, while Furusten (2013) argues that management consultancy is a modern form of profession whereby the claim to professional status depends largely on market acceptance. Clients have to determine for themselves whether or not to trust particular management consultancy firms and their consultants, and there is no widely recognised system of regulation upon which they can rely in determining where to place their trust.

In advancing the doctor-patient model, Schein (1988) draws attention to some of its limitations. These include the likelihood that organisational politics may lead ‘patients’ to distort the information that they give to their ‘doctors’ in pursuit of purposes that may serve the interests of individual organisation members but not those of the organisation as a whole. It might be argued that this limitation of the doctor-patient model is not a very serious one. If doctors have made the best interventions that they can on the basis of the information that their patients have given them, they have performed their function conscientiously, and their patients’ failure to improve is to that extent their own voluntary choice. As Pettigrew (2012) points out, however, organisational change is a political process, involving the delegitimisation of old ideas and the legitimisation of new ones, in which organisation members may be expected to pursue their own particular visions of what is good both for their organisation and for themselves. There is neither truth nor falsehood in organisational change, only ideas that are either adopted or discarded. Organisational politics cannot be dismissed as an incidental distraction in the pursuit of improved organisational performance. They are the very stuff of organisational change, and management consultants have to engage with them if they are to be an effective force for organisational performance improvement.

The outputs of management consultancy are to a large extent intangible, and clients must therefore rely heavily on subjective impressions to evaluate what their benefits may be (Alvesson et al. 2009; Fincham 1999). By contrast with medical science, there is no management science that can evaluate with any precision the effect that a particular management consultancy intervention has had. In the absence of objective means of demonstrating their contribution, management consultants devote effort to managing the impressions that their clients form of themselves and their work (Alvesson et al. 2009; Clark and Salaman 1998; Fincham 1999; Glückler and Ambrüster 2003; Werr and Styhre 2003; Wright and Kitay 2002). Sturdy (1997) argues that managers’ anxieties about the effects on their organisations and on their own careers of failing to keep up with current management thinking can be important in opening their minds to the impression that they need management consultancy support. The appeal of particular management fashions may flourish in managers’ minds in the absence of objective means of appraising their value (Molloy and Whittington 2005; Wright et al. 2012). Glückler and Ambrüster (2003) highlight the importance of trust in clients’ decisions on appointing management consultants and, as a consequence, the importance for management consultants of forming the impression in clients’ minds that they are to be relied upon and trusted (Kitay and Wright 2004; Maister 1993). Consultants’ use of impression management skills may be important in influencing clients to form a fair and reasonable view of what management consultancy interventions can do for them and it may equally, of course, influence them to adopt an unjustifiably favourable view (Clark and Salaman 1998).

There is great diversity in the kinds of work that management consultants perform and the relationships that arise between management consultants and their clients. O’Mahoney and Markham (2013) observe, for example, that consultants’ roles include providing expert advice and assistance to clients who lack the consultants’ expertise; acting as coaches or facilitators who help clients to identify and act upon the issues facing their organisations; forming friendships with senior executives that involve relationships of mutual support and learning; being actors in organisational politics who assist their clients in winning political battles with their peers; and often simply providing ‘pairs of hands’ to perform work which the staff of the client organisation are too busy to do. Management consultants may also have to interact with many different types of clients in a large organisation. Schein (1997, pp. 202–203) identifies several different client roles, including ‘contact clients’ who establish the initial relationship with the consultant, ‘intermediate clients’ who become involved only after that initial contact has been made, ‘primary clients’ who are the managers with responsibility for addressing the issues with which the consultancy project is concerned, ‘unwitting clients’ whom the consultancy project will affect but who are unaware of this, ‘indirect clients’ who know they will be affected but of whom the consultants are unaware, and ‘ultimate clients’ who have fundamental interests in the consultancy project as stakeholders in it. In a long-running project a range of different people may perform client roles at various times, and even people who are actually opposed to the organisational change towards which the consultancy project is directed may become clients of it. Coalitions of managers who are either in favour of a particular organisational change or opposed to it may enlist management consultants to support them in their cause (Alvesson et al. 2009). While the expertise of management consultants may sometimes give them power and influence over their clients, just as doctors may seem to have power and influence over their patients, competition among management consultancy firms, questioning of consultants’ claims to specialist expertise, and sometimes the relatively lowly status of the work that they are asked to do, may place them in subservient roles and induce them to accept long hours and other unfavourable conditions of work that employees of the client organisation would not tolerate (Alvesson and Kärreman 2004; Alvesson and Robertson 2006; Fincham 1999; Kitay and Wright 2004; Nikolova et al. 2009).

Against the background of the above discussion, the function of the management consultant might be defined as being to:

Advise and assist clients, as a practical, intelligent partner in their decision-making processes, on the detailed specification, and means of attaining, important objectives that the clients wish to achieve, in circumstances in which the clients feel uncertain how to act.

The good management consultant will fulfil this function to an excellent standard. It follows from the foregoing discussion that, as a practical, intelligent partner, the management consultant may be expected to be knowledgeable about current management trends that are relevant to the clients’ issues, and experienced in the kinds of management consultancy intervention sought by the clients. The management consultant would not normally, however, be expected to have access to scientific knowledge - or any other generally accepted body of knowledge - of direct relevance to the intervention to be made that could assure its success in the clients’ particular circumstances. It also follows that the management consultant would support the clients in making decisions and acting upon them, whatever the source of the clients’ uncertainty, for example both as an adviser with specialist technical knowledge and as a facilitator with coaching skills. In order to perform their role, management consultants must command the trust of their clients in the absence of access to any generally accepted body of management consultancy knowledge. The consequences for the ethical obligations of the management consultant of the distinctive characteristics of management consulting discussed above are considered in the following section.

Aristotle (1934) provides a catalogue of the intellectual and moral virtues that apply to people in general. He distinguishes sharply between the intellectual and the moral virtues, in that the intellectual virtues may be acquired through instruction and experience, whereas we acquire the moral virtues through habituation. Pellegrino (1995, 2002) draws upon Aristotle’s work in defining virtues that should be expected of medical practitioners. Comparison of the function and the virtues of medical practitioners with those of the management consultant offers a basis for assessing how far the virtues of management consultancy are similar to or distinct from those of medicine as an example of an established profession. Such a comparison, drawing upon Pellegrino’s analysis, is set out below, together with a proposition as to what the virtues of the management consultant should be. In discussing the moral virtues, Aristotle advances his doctrine of the mean, which proposes that the moral virtues should be regarded as forming part of a triad consisting of the moral virtue itself and two opposed vices – one of deficiency and one of excess – just as liberality (eleutheriotes) may be associated with the opposed vices of meanness (aneleutheria) and prodigality (asotia). The potential value of this doctrine of the mean, for the management consultant who is shooting for ethical practice, is also discussed below.

The actions of management consultants have considerable influence, not only on the ways in which particular client organisations manage themselves and perform, but also on society at large through their influence, for example, on the organisation of government institutions and on the vocabulary of management decision-making (O’Mahoney and Markham 2013). While individual management consultants clearly have a responsibility for the outcomes to which that influence leads, other stakeholders also have responsibilities. Either the government or, collectively, the management consultancy industry itself, might regulate the ways in which management consultants operate so as to protect clients and society at large from unethical practice. Individual clients might adopt rigorous selection processes so as to appoint the best management consultants for the work that they need done; they might include specifications in their contracts with their management consultants that are designed to ensure that consultancy projects meet their organisational needs; and they might monitor their consultants’ performance against those specifications so as to hold them to account for fulfilling their contractual obligations in full. The senior management teams of management consultancy firms also might put in place processes and systems to ensure ethical behaviour on the part of the management consultants whom they employ, both as a matter of good corporate citizenship and in order to maintain and develop their reputations with their clients.

Management consulting, like the established professions, is a knowledge-based industry (Furusten 2013). By contrast with the established professions, however, the knowledge upon which it relies is uncertain, emergent, often socially constructed, the property of the individual management consultancy firm that deploys it, and therefore not assessable against any generally accepted body of management consultancy knowledge (Nikolova et al. 2009). It has been suggested that management consulting is a modern form of profession, in which the only test of membership of that profession is market acceptance (Furusten 2013). Attempts to introduce a universal system of regulation of management consulting, in the manner that has been adopted by the established professions, have always been resisted by the management consultancy industry and have been unsuccessful (Greiner and Ennsfellner 2010; Harvey et al. 2017; Kirkpatrick et al. 2012). This reflects the fundamental barriers to regulation that arise from the nature of management consultancy knowledge (Alvesson and Johansson 2002). How could a regulator determine whether or not management consultants had done their work to an acceptable, professional standard when there can be no general agreement as to the body of knowledge that they should be applying to their work?

Clients must to some extent observe the principle, caveat emptor. The projects that consultants undertake for their clients are governed by commercial contracts. Clients are free to choose which management consultants to appoint to help them, and indeed whether or not to use their services at all. They can specify clearly in the contracts with their consultants what they expect their consultancy projects to produce for them and to achieve, and can monitor their consultants’ compliance with those contracts. Yet there is a sharp distinction between project management success and project success; the consultants may complete to the letter every project task that the contract requires, yet the desired project outcomes may not be achieved (De Wit 1988). Moreover, whether or not the required outcomes that have been specified in a contract have actually been achieved typically can be assessed only on the basis of the clients’ subjective impressions (Wright and Kitay 2002). Without doubt there are steps that clients can take to improve their confidence in the value for money that they obtain from their consultants. Some client organisations have been increasing the involvement of procurement specialists in selecting the management consultants who work for them, as a means of introducing more objective, criterion-based methods of selection (Werr and Pemer 2007). Clients might invest in tightening the processes for managing their contracts with management consultants. Clients might demand transparency from their consultants as to the evidence base, derived from their knowledge management systems, upon which they base their work. Yet the subjective impressions that senior managers in client organisations form of their consultants is a material factor in how effectively they are likely to work with them (Chelliah and Davis 2010). There are also limits to the investment that it would be worthwhile for clients to make in contract management, and in investigating the evidence base that supports their consultants’ work.

In the absence of a generally accepted, formal system of regulation, and of objective means whereby clients can reliably appraise the contribution of their consultants, clients and other stakeholders have to rely on the character of management consultants themselves. Aristotle (1934) says that human beings have a natural capacity for both the intellectual and the moral virtues. Whereas the intellectual virtues can be developed through instruction and experience, however, the moral virtues are developed by habit. In the Greek city-state, it is the responsibility of law-givers to enact laws that will habituate people to moral virtue. Moral virtue is not simply a matter for each individual; a human being ‘is by nature a social animal’ (Aristotle 1934, p. 29), and the leaders of society have a responsibility for habituating those whom they lead to moral virtue. The leaders of management consulting firms similarly have a responsibility for habituating their consultants to ethical conduct. O’Mahoney (2011) argues that, so far from doing so, leaders of management consulting firms increasingly treat responsibility for ethical conduct as a matter for individual consultants, while at the same time operating performance management systems that privilege commercial requirements above ethical ones. Codes of ethical practice are widespread in the consulting industry, but such codes are widely recognised as largely ineffectual (Allen and Davis 1993; O’Mahoney 2011). While management consulting firms set their consultants clear and specific targets for sales and utilisation (that is, the proportion of their time that consultants spend on work for which clients can be billed), the ethical codes that they prescribe tend to be vague and general. It is natural in these circumstances for management consultants to pay closer attention to meeting the specific performance targets upon which their careers depend than to observing vague and general strictures as to ethical practice. O’Mahoney (2011) suggests that management consulting firms benefit financially from these arrangements, which place accountability for any ethical misdemeanours upon the individual consultants involved rather than the firm as a whole. If management consultants are to be habituated to ethical practice in their work, the leaders of management consulting firms have to institute management practices and systems, such as systems of recognition and reward, that can realistically contribute to an organisational culture that embodies strong ethical values. The literature suggests that these leaders have much to do if management consultants are to be fully committed to high standards of ethical practice, and if ethical concerns are not to be crowded out by pressures to meet financial performance targets.

The function of management consultants is different in numerous ways from those of members of the established professions. These differences stem in particular from the nature of management consultancy knowledge. As a consequence of the unique characteristics of management consultancy knowledge, management consulting has no generally accepted system of regulation; necessarily involves itself in its clients’ organisational politics; embodies management of clients’ impressions of its consultants as a core skill; and is implemented through a vast array of different kinds of consultancy roles and consultant-client relationships. These distinctions of function lead to ethical differences between management consultancy practice and the practice of the established professions.

Because of the distinctive characteristics of management consulting, and the difficulties involved in attempts to make objective assessments of the quality of management consultancy work, the character of individual management consultants is especially important in ensuring that they are worthy of the trust of their clients and other stakeholders. Because of the importance of the management consultant’s character, Aristotelian virtue ethics offer a promising approach to considering ethical practice in management consulting. A particular strength of Aristotle’s (1934) approach is that adopting ethical values is considered to be among the many good things that constitute a happy life, and not in conflict with the enjoyment of good things that people might reasonably desire. This stands in contrast with other approaches to ethics, including ethical codes in management consulting, which tend to emphasise prohibitions of various kinds (Solomon 1992). These include, for example, prohibitions against conflicts of interest, taking on work for which you do not have appropriate expertise and capacity, and poaching clients’ staff; there is nothing here to which exception could reasonably be taken, but the whole tenor is about what consultants should not do. Aristotle (1934) does not simply require you not to take more than your due, he positively enjoins you to take what is your due. Aristotle’s (1934, p. 337) intellectual virtue of prudence (phronesis) enables people to ‘deliberate well about what is good and advantageous for [themselves] … what is advantageous as a means to the good life in general’. This approach to ethics, therefore, is a call to human flourishing, not to puritanical abstention from the good things of life, and as such is likely to have more traction than the lists of prohibitions embodied in typical ethical codes.

Aristotle (1934) anchors his approach to ethics to examination of the function that the individual performs. While his project of determining the function of a human being, and thus what the virtues of a human being might be, remains problematic, it is a simpler matter to determine what the function of a management consultant might be, and therefore what constitutes ethical practice in management consulting. The relationships between management consultants and their clients are often compared with the doctor-patient relationship. Analysis of the limitations of this comparison is instructive in identifying what is distinctive about the function of management consultants from the perspective of ethical practice. Management consultants’ clients in any consultancy engagement are likely to be numerous and divergent in their expectations; their clients’ reasons for appointing them may arise from some tangible business threat or opportunity, but equally may stem from their attraction to, or anxiety about missing out on, new, intangible business ideas or trends; and management consultants will deploy their firms’ own proprietary, but unverifiable, knowledge in their client interventions.

Despite these limitations of the comparison, there are some points of similarity with the circumstances and obligations of doctors from an ethical perspective as well as differences. Management consultants must earn the trust of their clients; they must approach their consultancy projects with a clear intent to do good for their clients; they must not give priority to their own interests over those of their clients in carrying out their consultancy projects; and they should be willing to take reasonable risks for the good of their clients by intervening boldly where necessary when that might expose them to moderate reputational and legal risks. The differences are, however, substantial. Although superior knowledge and expertise may sometimes place management consultants in a position of power relative to their clients, this is by no means always the case; clients have wide, realistic choices as to whether to employ consultants at all and, if so, which ones; management consultants may engage with large numbers of clients with divergent views and interests in any project, giving rise to complexity in determining what outcome will be for the overall good of the clients; while management consultants may be expected to empathise to some extent with their clients in their concerns, the number and diversity of their clients, and the typically less direct effect of their concerns on their personal well-being, weakens this expectation in relation to any particular client; it is not only proper but often necessary for management consultants to exert influence on clients by participating in their organisational politics; management consultants enter into commercial contracts with their clients, and they have no duty to go beyond their contractual obligations in the interests of their clients, in the way that doctors might be expected to do; and management consultants necessarily rely on unscientific knowledge, so it is reasonable for them to intervene in clients’ organisations despite uncertainties as to the outcome.

In the light of these comparisons with ethical practice in medicine, seven virtues that management consultants should have are proposed. While similar in form to some of those that are appropriate to medical practitioners, the differences in circumstance between management consultant-client and doctor-patient relationships significantly affect the character of the ethical responsibilities that are associated with them. These virtues are: first, exercising prudence (phronesis) in their work for their clients, based on the training and experience necessary to complete the work effectively; second, fulfilling in full the promises embodied in their contracts with their clients; third, acting in the overall interests of their clients; fourth, never giving priority to their own financial or other interests over those of their clients; fifth, taking considered risks in their consultancy interventions in the interests of their clients; sixth, engaging actively with their clients and their interests; and seventh explaining clearly to their clients the extent and limitations of their ability to help them. Aristotle (1934) argues that every moral virtue forms part of a triad, encompassing also opposed vices of deficiency and excess. While this doctrine of the mean has often been the subject of scholarly criticism, it is argued in this paper that the idea has practical value, providing that there is no insistence on a quantitative or very precise interpretation of it. For the management consultant who is striving to shoot for ethical practice, a notion of what is deficient or excessive can be helpful as a practical guide. For this reason, this paper locates the six moral virtues that it proposes within Aristotelian triads.