Disclosure: I'm a management consultant with one of the big firms. Management consulting business is built around providing knowledge to clients. There are sev

Disclosure: I'm a management consultant with one of the big firms. Management consulting business is built around providing knowledge to clients. There are several ways to get it: 1. Face a new client problem and think long and hard how to solve it. 2. Ask colleagues who have experienced similar problems before for general guidelines - "frameworks" or "best practices" in consultant-speak. 3. Share some proprietary knowledge in a disguised form, e.g. percent ranges instead of absolute numbers, or get client's data and tell them where they are versus the industry[1]. 4. Directly share proprietary knowledge. (Have I missed anything?) In my experience: (1) is usually ~80% of work, (2) is ~19%, (3) is ~1% - happens very rarely and only with explicit client's consent, and (4) is strictly prohibited - people may violate it, as people my violate any law, but any management consulting firm is very strict about such violations. To me, (1) has no moral problem whatsoever, and (2) is probably not very different from how any professional is getting experience - in McKinsey/other consultant's cases the speed of sharing the new codified knowledge is obviously much higher than in other industries, but that's part of their business. My personal opinion - grey area in consulting industry is certainly not darker than in many other professions. Author of the article probably underestimates percentages for (1) and (2) above. [1] Example: there are databases that management consulting companies keep on e.g. operational performance indicators. You can get access to some aggregate statistics from that databases in exchange for providing your own data. The individual data points are never shared.