Consultant Nation

By the early 1970s, though, the culture of elite American business was starting to change. Brand-name corporations were losing some of their cachet. In their place was a rising new group of firms that did not sell goods and services to American households but instead sold advice to other companies.

These firms — consulting firms and, to a lesser extent, investment banks — paid more money and cast themselves in the same exclusive sheen as Harvard. They pitched themselves as a kind of Ivy League of adulthood.

As the good-looking son of a former presidential candidate, who finished in the top 5 percent of his Harvard Business School class, Mr. Romney had his pick of jobs upon graduation. He chose the Boston Consulting Group, which was only 12 years old at the time. Two years later, an upstart rival, Bain & Company, recruited him away.

In the 30-plus years since, Mr. Romney and his chosen profession have enjoyed a striking, dual-track rise. Consulting became the most popular career choice not only at top business schools but also at many liberal arts colleges. Lawyers, doctors and scientists rushed into the industry as well. Consulting, with its rapid succession of different assignments, is the prototypical industry for a job market in which instability and change appear to be the norm.

The current chief executives of Boeing, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Morgan Stanley and PepsiCo are all alumni of either Bain, Boston Consulting Group or the most prestigious consulting firm of all, McKinsey & Company. So are the prime minister of Israel, the governor of Louisiana, Chelsea Clinton and the rhythm-and-blues star John Legend.

Even so, Mr. Romney remains the beau ideal of consulting. He used his career as a springboard — just as the industry’s college-campus recruiters promise is possible — to both a high-profile private-sector job (running the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City) and a public-service career. He has built his presidential campaign on a narrative that comes directly from consulting: he is a problem solver who understands business, he says. His pitch to voters sounds an awful lot like the pitch that Bain or McKinsey consultants make to prospective clients.

And one final — darker — parallel exists, too: the chance that both Mr. Romney and the consulting industry have peaked.

Despite a thin field, Mr. Romney has struggled in the polls, with many Republican voters looking for any alternative, the latest being New Gingrich. If Mr. Romney wins the nomination, as many observers expect, President Obama’s campaign awaits with a barrage of messages that depict him as an out-of-touch, profit-maximizing, flip-flopping friend of the rich.

Of course, any presidential candidate runs the risk of defeat. The problems facing the consulting industry, however, are both troubling and unexpected. Its popularity has slipped on both college campuses and in business schools in the last few years. Some students have decided that the work is not meaningful enough, perhaps influenced by college presidents who, like Mr. Obama, have urged young adults to pay less attention to their starting salaries. Others students have decided that if they are going to make money, they want to make real money — and have joined hedge funds instead.

The fact that consulting delivers something short of true riches was a subtext of the recent indictment of Rajat K. Gupta, who once stood atop the profession as the managing partner of McKinsey (and also attended Harvard Business School in the early 1970s). Mr. Gupta, who says he is innocent, is accused of passing corporate secrets to a friend and hedge fund manager. Testimony suggests that Mr. Gupta, disappointed by the mere millions he had made at McKinsey, was hoping to strike it rich.

FOR the industry, perhaps the most damaging part of the case — which also led to charges against a second McKinsey partner — was the questions it raised about the nature of consulting. Critics have argued that Mr. Gupta became accustomed to sharing privileged information because he was already doing so as part of his normal work as a consultant.

“The scandal goes to the heart of McKinsey’s business model,” John Gapper, a columnist, wrote in The Financial Times. What consulting firms describe as “best practices,” Mr. Gapper argued, is just a euphemism for the information they gathered at one company and passed on to another. Felix Salmon, a widely read finance blogger at Reuters, went one step further and called the business model “corrupted.”

Consulting executives reply that they are careful not to share confidential information. With everything else, they say, their clients are well aware that information flow is part of the bargain.

Compared with dutifully ascending the ladder at a single employer, a consultant’s life has some obvious appeal, even glamour.

The top consulting firms hire an array of the nation’s best-trained, sharpest minds: not just M.B.A.’s and business-minded college graduates but people from nearly every type of graduate school. About 20 percent of Boston Consulting Group’s new consultants, for example, come from law schools, medical schools, public-policy schools, Ph.D. programs or other nonbusiness schools. That is up from about 5 percent in 1995.

After they are hired, consultants parachute into big companies, often meeting with top executives who are decades older. “People see it as a way to get a tremendous amount of experience in a short period of time,” said Mel Wolfgang of Boston Consulting Group, who has a doctorate in ocean engineering from M.I.T. Pulin Sanghvi, a former McKinsey consultant who runs the career office at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, added, “It’s especially useful if you don’t know exactly what you want to do.”