Management consultancies like McKinsey and BCG are nearly always at the top of the first job wish list of young US and European MBA gradua-tes. Over a third become management consultants (Cox, 1997).In the course of the last thirty years, the relationship between manage-ment consulting and management education1 has become more complex, and the dividing line between the two has become less stable and incre-asingly difficult to define. The business world is in a state of continuous change; and education systems cannot always keep up.One major development is the higher level of complementarity between academic education and consulting. The big consultancies are increasin-gly taking on the role of ‘postgraduate business schools’. Many MBA gra-duates from the most prestigious business schools, such as Harvard and the Insead, start their careers in a leading consultancy firm (e.g. McKin-sey, Booz Allen, Ernst & Young, BCG) before going on to take up high level positions in one of the large multinationals such as American Ex-press, Westinghouse, or Lufthansa. That’s how Henry Mintzberg, at the end of the last century, described the best strategy for a young graduate who aimed to become part of the top management of a large corporation: «After the MBA, you work as a consultant with some prestigious firm for a time, skipping from one client organization to another. And then you leap straight into the chief executive chair of some company, making ju-dicious moves to others in the hope that you may one day end up running a company like IBM» (Engwall, 1998).There is to some extent also greater integration between the two worlds. In the US, and also in Europe and in Japan, the main business schools have started to run executive development programs, i.e. tai-lor-made training programs for middle and top managers, which are designed to meet the specific requirements of the firms that have com-missioned the courses. At the same time, the main consultancy firms are taking an increasingly active part within academic institutions. They provide funds for special training projects, for master’s degrees and for complete undergraduate degree courses. McKinsey has long been a key sponsor of Harvard Business School, and the British Management Con-sultancies Association has given financial backing for the London Busi-ness School. And the representatives of the big consultancies are on the boards of many business schools.