Why bother repeating this seemingly unexceptional piece of news? Because it is an example of something that, according to the current conventional wisdom, happens fairly infrequently nowadays: corporate leadership teams committing to extended strategic analysis, with or without the help of consultants.

"Strategy is dead" has become a popular cry. In this fast-moving world, who has time to ruminate and plan? "Decisiveness is about timeliness," the outgoing chairman of Xerox, Anne Mulcahy, says, funnily enough in an interview with the McKinsey Quarterly. "And timeliness trumps perfection. The most damaging decisions are the missed opportunities, the decisions that didn't get made in time."

If Ms Mulcahy's point of view were shared by more executive teams, the strategy consultants would be in trouble. It is certainly shared by those consultancies that emphasise the primacy of action over analysis. The head of one told me recently that "long-winded reports that end up unimplemented need to go. Bedazzling clients ... needs to stop."

What do management consultants do, really? A recent three-year study led by Andrew Sturdy, professor of organisational behaviour at Warwick Business School, concluded that "consultants are not as innovative or different as is often thought." Indeed: "Prospective clients were unlikely to welcome consultants if their knowledge was ‘too new'." Consultants act like "knowledge brokers": helping management to embed and then implement ideas that have been lent credibility by the endorsement of the consultants themselves.

The truth is that, over the past few years, much of the mystique of management consulting has faded. There are not many first-time buyers of their services out there. Clients and consultants have a lot in common. They speak the same business language. Many clients may be former consultants themselves. And procurement teams are beating up consultants on price.

The world does not owe consultancies a living. After all, there was a time, not so long ago, when people ran their businesses without the help of strategy consulting firms. This was because they did not yet exist.

Some of the most familiar names from the world of management consulting - Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group - are relatively young organisations (less than 50 years old). Even the longer-established McKinsey did not call itself an adviser on strategy until the late 1970s.

This story is told in a new book, The Lords of Strategy, written by Walter Kiechel, formerly editorial director of Harvard business publishing and managing editor of Fortune magazine. He argues that the role of these consultancies in the invention of what we now call strategy has been underappreciated.

Planning is what business leaders used to do. Strategy is a more modern term, popularised from the 1960s onwards. But what Mr Kiechel reveals is that strategy is not merely a concept. It is also a product. It was the strategy firms' ingenuity that helped them to get established. They have been geniuses of marketing as well as of business analysis.

A dose of scepticism is thus in order. Mr Kiechel quotes from the opening chapter of In Search of Excellence (1981), the anti-strategy best-seller written by those two McKinsey mavericks, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. "An organisation chart is not a company, nor a new strategy a complete answer to corporate grief," they declared. "We all know this; but like as not, when trouble lurks, we call for a new strategy and probably reorganise." By the mid-1980s both men had left McKinsey.

As Chris McKenna showed in his study of management consulting, The World's Newest Profession, the triumph of the strategy houses was down to their inventiveness and nerve, going back over seven decades to the day when James O. McKinsey and Company rebranded itself as "accountants and engineers" from the less thrilling "certified public accountants", even though the firm employed no licensed engineers. To survive in the 21st century, strategy consultants may have to reinvent themselves again.