PA Consulting Group
PA Consulting Group is a consultancy specialising in management consulting, technology and innovation. It has clients in both the private and public sector including local and national Governments and the defence sector. It has offices in Europe, the Nordics, the United States, the Persian Gulf and Asia Pacific and operates as an employee-owned company.
History
1940-1950
Founded in 1943 as Personnel Administration by three Englishmen: Ernest E. Butten, Tom H. Kirkham and Dr David Seymour. Britain's war effort created great demand for munitions and goods, which had to be produced by a relatively unskilled workforce. Butten and his colleagues formed Personnel Administration Limited to provide advice to industry as to how to improve the productivity of their workers. Like the other three firms that dominated consulting in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, PA was an offshoot of the pre-war Bedaux Company. Bedaux in turn had been developed from the time and motion 'scientific management' theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth. Butten sought to take the mechanistic and task-orientated concepts of scientific management and add a human dimension to them. The chief idea, along the lines of Douglas McGregor's 'Theory Y', was that by involving the worker in the process of change and a suitable form of ownership, greater gains could be made both by the worker and the organisation.
