Management Consulting Group, PLC is a consulting company listed on the London Stock Exchange

London Stock Exchange

The London Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located in the City of London within the United Kingdom. , the Exchange had a market capitalisation of US$3.7495 trillion, making it the fourth-largest stock exchange in the world by this measurement...

 under the name MMC.

It comprises three independently managed practices:

• Ineum Consulting
  Ineum Consulting
  Ineum Consulting was a management consulting company based in France that specialized in corporate strategy, organization, and information systems issues. The company officially merged with Kurt Salmon Associates on 1st January 2011 to form Kurt Salmon....
  
   acquired 2006)
• Alexander Proudfoot http://www.alexanderproudfoot.com formerly known as Proudfoot Consulting (name change 2009)
• Kurt Salmon Associates
  Kurt Salmon Associates
  Kurt Salmon is a global management consulting firm specializing in the retail, consumer goods and health care sectors. The firm was among the first consulting firms established in the United States and remains among only a small handful in continuous operation since being founded in the early...
  
   (KSA) (acquired 2007)

The company was originally named Alexander Proudfoot PLC, after its founder. In 1993 it shortened its name to Proudfoot PLC. In January, 2001 it changed its name to the current name of Management Consulting Group, PLC.

History

Alexander Proudfoot founded the Alexander Proudfoot Company in Chicago on 25 February 1946. Fascinated by the challenges of consulting but disenchanted by the way they operated, Proudfoot decided to create a new form of consulting service. He had two main criteria:

• sell a unique, proprietary product that would produce tangible results with benefits far exceeding the cost.
• only accept assignments for which the client made him responsible for installing the programme.

The emphasis on direct involvement is characterized by this quote describing Proudfoot in the 1980s:

At Proudfoot, Peter Isaac remembers feeling slightly insulted when Sir Ian McGregor, grappling with the mammoth task of restructuring British Steel in the early 1980s, told him that what distinguished him and his colleagues from other consultants was that they had dirt under their fingernails. It was a compliment, McGregor assured him: “You work at the coalface where things really happen, other consultants work in offices.

The founder also belonged to the tradition of consultancy that uses philosophy as a guide to best practice. The consulting approach he formulated for his company was particularly influenced by the philosophy of Socrates

Socrates

Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...

, Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

, and Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

. This philosophical approach governed both consulting engagements and internal management.