Do you know how many management consultants it takes to change a light bulb?
It depends how big your budget is — or so the old joke goes, and it’s one of many that Ray Manganelli, a professor in the MBA program at Mercy College, has heard over the course of his career.
Those who tell the jokes, Manganelli said, “really don’t understand the uses of consulting.”
But to Manganelli, a consultant-turned-professor who holds an MBA and a Ph.D. from Columbia Business School, consulting builds important leadership skills for business, and Mercy College’s Strategic Consulting Institute gives MBA students the opportunity to build those skills hands-on.
- Professor Ray Manganelli and student Aranka Vitarius of Mercy College’s Strategic Consulting Institute. Photo by Leif Skodnick
“To be an excellent consultant, you have to have excellent communication skills, very good quantitative skills and very good problem solving skills,” Manganelli said, who said that Mercy’s faculty combines consulting experience with the desire to bring that experience to the academic world. “The whole idea at Mercy was to do something that was first in the United States, and that is have a consulting institute to allow students to learn consulting skills.”
Management consulting is a $500 billion a year worldwide industry, if you include outsourcing of business segments such as logistics or information technology, Manganelli said. Consulting, especially so-called advisory consulting, continues to grow, especially in emerging markets such as Asia and Africa.
“(Consulting) is an imprecise term,” Manganelli said. “If you add up all the advisory consulting work of the type that we do with the Strategic Consulting Institute, all the outsourcing work, all of the specialty work … you get that half-a-trillion dollar figure.”
Mercy’s MBA students who participate in the institute get hands-on experience while still in school, and if they don’t want to be consultants Manganelli said that the students gain skills that will enhance their profiles as leaders wherever their career might lead.
“Consulting is business-to-business, so an average consumer won’t use a consultant,” Manganelli said. “Businesses, especially big businesses, use consultants for capacity or complexity. If there’s a lot going on and we can’t handle everything at one time, such as during a merger or acquisition, we’re going to bring in somebody who’s a pro — or when something is very, very complex, and that’s what our students have begun to do.”
So far, through the institute, the college’s MBA students have taken on projects helping a neurosurgery practice explore the impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, helping IBM manage information technology funding, and consulting with the city of White Plains on a pedestrian plaza in the city.
“This gives (the students) an opportunity to demonstrate the skills,” Manganelli said. “It’s really a practicum, in the way that the medical (students) have a practicum. You get out and you do it.”
“The goals for the students are to give them an edge, where they’re going out after a job that they’ve already done meaningful and significant work that ordinarily, a student doesn’t get to do,” Manganelli said.
At the moment, Mercy College is the only MBA program that is a member of the Association of Management Consulting Firms, which speaks to the weight it places on consulting.
Since its inception in 2014, the institute has trained more than 50 students, completed 10 consulting assignments and has several more high-profile projects upcoming, according to a press release provided by the college.
One project this year is with the Westchester County Association, the business advocacy organization that is launching a Hudson Valley Workforce Academy to train workers for available jobs in health care and other industries. WCA officials at a recent press conference said they are working with the institute to interview WCA’s member employers to identify additional needs for job training and skilled workers.
“The real secret is Mercy College’s Manhattan campus,” said Manganelli, because of the multitude of companies that maintain corporate headquarters in the city. Students in the MBA program can take classes at Mercy’s campus in Dobbs Ferry or in Manhattan. The college has two other campuses, one in the Bronx and one in Yorktown Heights.
Manganelli sees growth in Westchester County for the business community, the MBA program and the institute. He expects the MBA program to grow to 500 students within the next two years and 1,000 students by 2020, with approximately one-third participating in the institute.
“Westchester is where many of our students are from, and our strong relationships are in Westchester County,” Manganelli said. “The county offers a unique opportunity for the consulting institute because of its positioning geographically, economically, because of its role in the seven-county (Hudson Valley) region.”
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