PA Consulting Group (formerly Personnel Administration) is a professional services firm that works with public, private and third-sector organisations. It was founded in 1943 by Ernest E. Butten, Tom H. Kirkham and Dr David Seymour, who used a new approach to people management to increase productivity in munitions factories during World War 2. PA grew to become the world’s largest management consultancy by headcount in 1970. Today, PA employs more than 4,000 people globally. It has also acquired seven specialist consultancies since December 2017: Nyras, a UK-based international aviation consultancy; Sparkler, a London-based digital insight and strategy consultancy; Essential Design, a Boston, Massachusetts-based innovation strategy and product design business; We Are Friday, a London-based digital service design and engineering agency; 4iNNo, an innovation company based in Cincinnati, Ohio; Astro Studios, a brand strategy and product design agency based in San Francisco, California; and Cooper Perkins, a technology development and engineering company with offices in Boston and San Francisco. PA works with organisations of all sizes across seven industries: consumer and manufacturing; defence and security; energy and utilities; financial services; public services; healthcare and life sciences; and transport. It operates in these industries from offices across the UK, US, Nordics and Netherlands. It is also a member of the United Nations Global Compact, a non-binding UN pact that encourages businesses to adopt sustainable practices, and the WePROTECT Global Alliance, a network of governments and companies aiming to tackle online child exploitation and abuse. PA produced the first two Global Threat Assessments for WePROTECT. The company is privately held, with 65% of shares owned by Jacobs Engineering Group and the remaining 35% owned by current and former employees. Staff can buy shares during an annual share-trading period. History 1940–1950 PA was founded in 1943 as Personnel Administration by 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 based on the 'scientific management' theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth. Butten sought to take the mechanistic and task-orientated concepts