Annual Meeting Academy of Management Anaheim

Datum: 06-08-2008

Annual Meeting Academy of Management Anaheim

From Friday till Wednesday a happening will take place in Anaheim’s Convention Center: the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. Perhaps we will meet in Anaheim.

To introduce myself: my name is Elsbeth Reitsma. I work as a management consultant in The Netherlands. The name of the company I’m working for is C3. That stands for Cure, Care and Control. We work especially in Health Care. Before C3 I worked many years for Deloitte. That’s a more well known company, which works on a global basis. Perhaps you know this firm as well.

Beside my work as a management consultant, I’m interested in the professionalism of consultants. In the Netherlands there are about 27.000 consulting firms. Big ones, like Deloitte, medium firms and consultants who work on a single basis or in a network. For your orientation: we have more than 16 million inhabitants. That’s about 1 firm per 600 inhabitants. In Holland consulting is big business and in other countries more or less too.

As consultants we have the challenge to discuss and define what good consulting is. That’s a difficult question. We have several contexts of consulting; several types of questions from our clients; several gurus in consulting with their opinions on good or effective consulting. For me it’s a challenge to contribute to the discussion of the quality of work of consultants. To do research on consultancy gives me energy and sometimes sweat and tears – or something like that.

The research I will present in Anaheim is on competencies of management consultants. This research started after a research on change-approaches. Léon de Caluwé (Phd) and I asked ourselves: what does a consultant need to perform the approaches? What kind of behavior must the consultant show during the execution of an approach? What is the consultant good at? To give an answer to these questions, we thought that the point of view on competencies of a consultant, would give us new insights. In Anaheim we will share the results of the research with you. Or in a blog as well.