| IMC USA History - Preface |
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The history of IMC USA is the story of the hundreds of people who gave ceaselessly of their energy, time, and money over many decades to ensure that management consultants could learn, share and prosper in an ethical manner. Whether its management was paid or volunteer, internal or outsourced, located in New York City or Washington D.C., IMC indomitably persisted. It showed it was an organization able to accommodate a change in its member profile (as when the AMC entrepreneurial infusion supplanted the large firm IMC membership), in technology (both when IT replaced industrial engineering as a chief specialty of the membership and when greater technology investment was required to administer to and for the membership), in organization (when CCO supplanted IMC and ACME), a divorce (when IMC broke off from CCO and ACME) and the cyclical consulting environment in general.
What follows is the story of the Institute as it evolved from its early days to the contemporary organization representing management consultants in this information age. This story is at times compelling, at times frustrating, but at all times the story of our peers’ survival, as the voices of the past speak to the future consultants and leaders of IMC. The story contains all the necessary elements for contemporary readers: sex, fraud, theft, waste, Shakespearian flaws in the leaders – and a passionate love for the profession. It exemplifies the hard work that went into keeping IMC alive for you, the reader, and for generations of consultants to follow.
We’ve put into the appendices documents that may be useful to future IMC Boards, to save time in re-inventing wheels and to provide the basis for developing that ‘better’ wheel. Where we have quoted or attributed to a specific author herein, we’ve taken the liberty of correcting grammar and typographical errors for the readers, but we have not changed the author’s intent. Such quotes are shown in a different font. Also, we have eliminated the CMC and FIMC designations, for ease in reading, but all principals are CMCs; most are FIMCs. Likewise, we have kept IMC to refer to the Institute, although IMC became IMC USA at the millennium to conform to ICMCI member institute naming conventions, except when referring to ICMCI or the IMC of the future, when we use IMC USA.
We have tried to incorporate the many voices of the consultants who led the profession, without inserting our own ego too forcefully. We have included under separate cover individual histories contributed by Stew Washburn, Dave Norris (AMC), Michael Shays (IMC and AMC through 1985, from the Journal of Management Consulting). They and their authors are worthy of being part of the IMC archives.
This effort was spearheaded by the Legacy Task Force, comprised of the following Fellows of the Institute: Bill Altier, Jack Chapin, Ian Jacobsen, Jerry Savin, Teri Selcoe, Jim Soudriette, Edward Stone, Dick TenEyck,, Stew Washburn, and myself.
Special thanks go to Steward Washburn, Jack Chapin, Ed Stone, Jerry Savin, and Michael Shays for writing, to Baldwin Tom for sponsoring this initiative and for his critical and questioning eye, to Ron Wohl for copy editing, to Alex Zabrosky for his legal review, and to Bob Kahn and Jim Kennedy, whose perspectives on the profession I miss so very much. Prepublication review, coordination, and production of the copies for reviewers were provided through The Baldwin Group, Inc. The rationale for including appendices, and documents within those appendices, has been to retain historical documents for subsequent use (such as research memos on merging associations, focus group results) and to provide a record of what did, in fact, occur (lists of presidents, fellows). Space constraints limited including much more, for each of us had considerable personal files amassed over our decades of service to IMC.
Marsha D. Lewin CCP CMC, FIMC |
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