"Ireland is fantastically well positioned", says Terry Neill. "We have very smart, very flexible people, who tolerate ambiguity very well and demonstrate an ability for change. When I go abroad I hear very positive views on Irish people's ability to learn and grow and perform."

Many people might think that a capacity to "tolerate ambiguity" is a rather questionable virtue. But Mr Neill sees it very differently. "When things start changing, your ability to deal with uncertainty is very important. So many people want so much structure in their life that change immobilises them."

Mr Neill seems very comfortable with change. He started out with Arthur Andersen 27 years ago, armed with a BA from Trinity College, Dublin, in mathematics and physics and an MBA from the London Business School. He became a partner in 1979 and was managing partner for Ireland from 1980 to 1987.

He moved to Chicago to become managing partner (market development) in 1987, went to London in 1989 as managing partner (government and services) and then returned to Chicago as managing partner for change management.

While still based in Chicago, he travels incessantly, keeping in touch with partners across the globe. "I don't think telecommunications will ever get to the stage where you can replace getting in a room with someone and building real friendships," he says. Nevertheless, a lot of contact is by telecommunication and he says that he finds "telephones more effective than video link. But the phone wouldn't work if you didn't know the person at the other end of the line really well".

Andersen Worldwide is an $8.4 billion (£5.765 billion) conglomerate which provides a wide range of consultancy and other services to the world's top companies. Mr Neil is the first Irishman to chair the company and only the second non-US national to do so in the its 80 year history.

Some years ago it decided to abandon the notion of a physical headquarters and sink a lot of investment into telecommunications. The board meets five or six times a year at different cities where it has significant business interests. Recent venues include Beijing, Prague, Tokyo, London and New York.

Mr Neil says the world of consultancy is growing and changing. Arthur Andersen has had growth ranging from 25 per cent to 30 per cent per year and this creates its own problems in terms of maintaining consistency and quality. But change also imposes stresses.

"Recruitment is very much the biggest challenge for us. People are our biggest resource. We need to be in the top two or three companies when it comes to the organisation graduates most want to join. If we ran out of good people it would be like Shell running out of oil."

He accepts that there is "a great deal of cynicism about consultants and some of it is well founded". "Consultant's have to help deliver change - not just reports, not just ideas, but how to implement them.

"Money may still flow for a while but if nothing much is achieved people will say, `Hold on, what are we paying all this money for?' Ninety-five per cent of what we do is implementation and execution."

Implementing change is part of Andersen Consultants core business. At an Institute of Personnel and Development conference in Dublin on Monday, held to mark the institute's 60th anniversary, he found the analogy between sport and business illuminating.

A former Irish schools cricketer, player for TCD's Phoenix team and Leinster senior referee, Mr Neill finds the sporting world better at providing effective training than the business world.

The classroom approach to training adopted by many large organisations is very wasteful, he says. "We should put people in more real life situations, like the flight simulators Aer Lingus uses to produce top class pilots."

He believes that sporting values like competitiveness are vital to the survival of organisations, but so is team spirit. Developing a culture where people share knowledge rather than guard it is the most valuable asset of the learning organisation, he says.

"Companies talk about the learning organisation as if it was a question of technology. It's not, it's a question of learning to share knowledge."

Irish culture tended to promote a sharing outlook within a team. In the Andersen organisation, Irish people were represented in senior positions out of all proportion to their overall numbers.