>The flip side is that it is also bad for morale for someone to be recommending a solution for some time, the recommendation is ignored, a consultant is hired,

>The flip side is that it is also bad for morale for someone to be recommending a solution for some time, the recommendation is ignored, a consultant is hired, the consultant recommends the same solution, and then the recommendation is implemented. Speaking as a consultant, my experience has been the opposite. I have walked into many organizations, said <obviously good thing>, and been hailed as a hero by the handful of folks who had been saying <obviously good thing> all along because FINALLY someone gets it! These are people who have been killing themselves in the trenches fighting this fight forever. When you finally show up and resolve it it's like the Army of the Dead in Return of the King. Fight's over, you can go bask in your "told you so" afterglow now. It also turns out that most of the time, those people may have been smart enough to get <obviously good thing>, but were pretty bad at communicating the value of <obviously good thing> to anyone who mattered or at making a plan for how to get from <bad thing> to <obviously good thing>. All of this is not to credit McKinsey or any of big consulting. They mostly provide a "signature method" to launder your your obvious observations into a glitzy powerpoint presentation to make it look like you applied rigorous testing and experience to what was really a cursory observation your entry level analyst made. All the people with actual experience are too busy killing themselves at business development and facilitating this "observation laundering" process to apply their brain power to developing actual insights.