Matthew Stewart Business Quotations

I would eventually leave the business in 1999 to work full-time as a writer, but during the previous decade, I would advise French businessmen on how to succeed in Germany; tell Americans what to do in Eastern Europe; show the Spanish how to become more like the Americans. I spent one particularly haunting year advising bankers in Mexico.

What do you need to succeed in business? You need the ability to think critically and communicate, and those things you can get just as easily out of a philosophy degree.

Wherever I was in the world, at the beginning of every consulting project, one thing was certain: I would know less about the business at hand than the people I was supposed to be advising.

We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school.

In order to produce generalist courses, business school professors have been forced to invent subjects called strategy, called organizational behavior and so on.

The core of the consulting business is going in and essentially making yourself indispensible by eating the brain of the organization, meaning that the consultants go in and assume key functions in the organization.