4 ms·

Quite often its not even "fancier language, accent and level of confidence", but just that management - for whatever reason - trusts these "outsiders" more than

Quite often its not even "fancier language, accent and level of confidence", but just that management - for whatever reason - trusts these "outsiders" more than their own employees. We live in a weird world. When I (used to) sit next to McKinsey consultants on a plane I always asked "what's your current outsourcing project?".

Spooky23 6y ago
Having worked as employee and manager in places doing transformation, it’s hard to trust employees because of internal political strife, etc. McKinsey (or whomever) is only motivated by money and are loyal to whomever they understand the principal to be. Given an idea or concept, you’ll have reasonably competent people running it down, backed by people who grind out tight PowerPoint stuff overnight.
- crocal 6y ago
  In other word, use mercenaries to do the dirty work in your own organisation. Ever read about the fall of the Roman Empire?
tonyarkles 6y ago
I got to experience this first hand. A consulting client was starting a big project right around the same time I was trying to buy a house. The bank was uncomfortable giving us a mortgage when our primary income was from self-employed consulting. The client hired me as an FTE, and almost immediately started completely ignoring my advice and putting me on projects that I a) thought were pretty misguided and b) were definitely not a good use of my skills. This, after 5 years of on-and-off engagement to do really great work on projects I have specific skills to address. It basically boiled down to “now that I’m a member of the engineering team, I’m expected to participate with the processes that are in place”. When I was a consultant, I was generally brought in to solve problems caused by those processes breaking down. Not sure why they couldn’t square that circle, but I went back to consulting 6 months later and retained them as a client, wherein they started taking my advice again and not throwing misguided projects at me.

Spooky23 6y ago

Having worked as employee and manager in places doing transformation, it’s hard to trust employees because of internal political strife, etc. McKinsey (or whomever) is only motivated by money and are loyal to whomever they understand the principal to be. Given an idea or concept, you’ll have reasonably competent people running it down, backed by people who grind out tight PowerPoint stuff overnight.

crocal 6y ago
In other word, use mercenaries to do the dirty work in your own organisation. Ever read about the fall of the Roman Empire?

tonyarkles 6y ago

I got to experience this first hand. A consulting client was starting a big project right around the same time I was trying to buy a house. The bank was uncomfortable giving us a mortgage when our primary income was from self-employed consulting. The client hired me as an FTE, and almost immediately started completely ignoring my advice and putting me on projects that I a) thought were pretty misguided and b) were definitely not a good use of my skills. This, after 5 years of on-and-off engagement to do really great work on projects I have specific skills to address. It basically boiled down to “now that I’m a member of the engineering team, I’m expected to participate with the processes that are in place”. When I was a consultant, I was generally brought in to solve problems caused by those processes breaking down. Not sure why they couldn’t square that circle, but I went back to consulting 6 months later and retained them as a client, wherein they started taking my advice again and not throwing misguided projects at me.