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0:00
Hello.
Welcome to Ethics
in Management Consultancy.
My name is Joe O'Mahoney,
I'm a Reader
in Organizational Studies
at Cardiff University,
and Management Consultancy
is my specialism.
0:14
I'm going to introduce
why we want to look
at consultancy first of all.
A lot of the press
recently has been looking
at management consultancy
and there's been
a lot of critique of consultancy
and especially
the use in the private sector.
On this slide
we've got a couple of examples.
First is Alan Leaman,
who's the chair
of the Management
Consultancies Association
arguing that NHS spending
on management consultants
is not wasteful.
On the other side
we've got a number of pieces
by all types
of media outlets arguing
that consultants
are a waste of money,
and especially
in the public sector
when public money
is being spent on them.
In addition to that, you've got
a whole load of books
that have come out recently
which are really the sort of
'kiss and tell' exposes
of ex-management consultants
telling the general public
about the tricks that they
used to get extra money.
So, it's a fairly topical issue
which is why
we want to look at it.
Also, it makes a big
difference to the world
when consultancy goes wrong
or bad things happen,
people can lose their jobs,
companies can go bankrupt,
and economies
can occasionally be shaken.
So that's why we're
looking at this lecture.
1:25
Okay, so I'm going to talk briefly
about what we're going to cover.
First of all, we're going
to look at an example
that many of you will remember.
And this is the
example of Enron,
which was a big, big mistake
but many people don't realize
the role of management consultants
in making it the disaster
that it was.
Secondly, we're going to look
at some ethical dilemmas
and ethical codes,
which is the way
in which most consulting firms
attempt to manage ethics.
Then we're going to ask
the question,
do these things work
in terms of managing ethics?
The argument
I'm going to be giving is
that they have
a very limited success.
One of the reasons for this
is the structural issues
that are involved in ethics.
We'll deal more
about this later.
But really, the high level
socio-economic
conflicts of interest,
the ethical dilemmas that codes
don't succeed in making better.
And then, finally,
we're going to look
at the personal cost
of consultancy,
which is something that
many people don't examine
and I think is quite important.
