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Although it is a known fact that companies incorporate particular kinds of knowledge in their business processes, the business of management consulting firms concentrates mainly on the creation of knowledge, as consultants have to refer to individual, social, explicit, and tacit knowledge in order to cater to the needs of their clients. Such firms make use of all the enablers cited in the previous chapters of this book, as they provide knowledge about specific topics, and knowledge enabling becomes the core of this industry. While these firms are differentiated from their competitors in terms of the value-added advice on operations, strategy, and information technology, the focus of this chapter dwells on demonstrating how a particular firm's — Gemini Consulting — operations overlap, the kinds of barriers they may encounter, and the corporate culture that best allows the cultivation of knowledge and the company's operations.

Using administrative USCIS data on approved I-129 petitions we summarize trends in H-1B employment between 1997 and 2012. We show that total annual petition counts in our micro data closely match USCIS-published records of aggregate issuances overall, by occupation, and by country of origin. We use string-matching techniques to build a longitudinal company-level dataset, of roughly 400,000 companies, for approved petitions, distinguishing between petitions for initial and continuing employment. These data show increased concentration of H-1B workers, with a 150% increase in the share of new initial-employment H-1Bs awarded to the top-20 petitioning firms between 2008 and 2012, and an increasing role played by global IT consulting companies. We match our dataset on approved H-1B petitions to Compustat data on all publicly traded companies. The data show that roughly 42% of Compustat companies had at least one approved petition during our sample period. We find firms using the H-1B program are larger on average and have higher growth rates than non-users. We show the expanding number of H-1Bs in the business services sector after 2008 is largely driven by greater use of H-1B workers (relative to overall employment in the industry), as opposed to growth in the industry’s size.

Professional organizations—such as accounting, consulting, and law firms, investment banks, hospitals, and universities—embody some of the most complex and challenging interpersonal and leadership issues that organizations present. Leaders of professional organizations must contend with ambiguous authority structures, complex interpersonal relations, and idiosyncratic professional colleagues: in other words, with the power, the politics, and the prima donnas. This chapter introduces the core themes of the book. It identifies the book’s intended audience, the kinds of practitioners and academics it will appeal to and why. It provides data on the scale and significance of the professional services sector and defines in detail what is meant by the concepts ‘professional organization’ and ‘professional services firm’. It outlines the empirical foundations, which include formal research interviews with more than 500 professionals in sixteen countries, and concludes by presenting a detailed overview of all the chapters in the book.