> but running them ragged is a mechanism of control. This is actually wrong. I used to think that, but again, the world has changed. Running your team ragged i

> but running them ragged is a mechanism of control. This is actually wrong. I used to think that, but again, the world has changed. Running your team ragged is purely a dog and pony show to win follow-up work. When you go into a client you don't know at all, and you do 6 weeks of work and develop a business strategy... the only way that works is if you walked in with a strategy. Which you always do. You then proceed to run your team ragged over the next 6 weeks to produce mountains of work and show the executive team at the client "Hey, look at our guys and how hard they work!" The work itself is usually just 120 slides full of busy work with so many assumptions baked in it's all but meaningless, but you make a great first impression and cemented your company's brand perception at the executive level of that client. You can then sell much lower-quality follow-on work for years on the strength of that one 6 week project. In consulting (ESPECIALLY strategy consulting) politics, perception and packaging are far, far more important than the quality of the output. Therefore, running your people ragged isn't about control or producing quality output. It's about impressing the client by working your ass off, and establishing a brand perception that hopefully will extend down to the other types of work your company does (which may or may not be of very high quality). Anyway, I firmly believe that most strategy consulting work in 2016 is really just pipeline development for operations consulting. Important for sure, but not really what most strategy consultants signed up for.