Home advantage for management consultants in China

"If you just simply applied the US or UK development market practices without being aware of the local specifics, you would fail and that is also true of China."

One of the major questions is whether management consultancy itself is largely an American phenomenon and does not translate to Asia or other regions.

The very concept of the management consultancy certainly began in the United States in the late 19th century, allied to the birth of management theory as an academic subject.

Booz &Co (which has recently been rebranded as Strategy& after its acquisition by PriceWaterhouseCoopers) was formed exactly 100 years ago.

The 1920s saw the launch of McKinsey &Co by James O. McKinsey, a managerial accounting professor at Chicago University, as well as other firms. AT Kearney itself grew out of McKinsey itself with Andrew ThomasKearney being McKinsey's first partner.

Simon Learmount, a lecturer in corporate governance at the University of Cambridge, UK, has spent a lot of time in China and has recently been involved in a research project looking at management in Shenzhen.

He believes there is something fundamentally Western about the whole idea of management consultancy.

"The idea that you send external people into an organization to fix it is to some extent anathema in Asia. It has been a problem for American firms in Japan where an organization is more like family that you belong to and is not therefore open to outsiders coming in and bossing everyone around.

"There are similar kindsof issues in China where relationships are very important and also issues such as (Chinese) face. In the United States, an organization is just a machine, people come and go and bosses come and go."

Learmount, who is director of both the MBA and Executive MBA programs at Cambridge, believes there are dangers in some of Tse's ideas that there needs to be new thinking applied to China and other places.

"My anxiety－and this, to some extent, has already happened in business schools with EMBA programs－is that you come up with an American style of things, a Chinese style of things, an Italian style of things and even something specific for tech firms. You end up with this compartmentalization, which I believe is counterproductive.

"The principles of management are universal. What might be different in a country like China is the context and that is what you have to deal with. The differences are more in relation to applying ideas."

Back in China, James B. Heimowitz, the former China chairman and CEO for Asia of public relations giant Hill and Knowlton, is also a new player in the management consultancy arena.