9 ms·

“The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in areas they’re advising in”

231 points by taubek 4y ago

NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
https://archive.ph/0fi0K https://archive.ph/0fi0K
- taubek 4y ago
  Thank you for the link!
Manjuuu 4y ago
She could have listed the others too.
TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
Consultants do seem kind of useless. But then why are CEOs constantly hiring them? There must be some political/internal dynamic reason for this if you can't find an external/efficiency reason. I'd be interested in seeing a list of consultants' greatest wins. I mean the projects proposed by consultants that enhanced company values by the most. There's plenty of stories of consultant-driven disasters ... but I wonder how many of those are just the rank and file grousing about over-paid outsiders. But if there's anything worse than consultancies, its bureaucracies. I have a lot of experience dealing with bureaucracies in health care and aviation. And my god, bureaucrats can be some of the worst of human capital. Nowhere else can you get such a marriage of apathy, laziness, and unchecked power as you see in bureaucracies. At least in the private sector one has to be an avaricious asshole and possess a type of animal cunning at the very least to climb to the very top of the power hierarchy. In bureaucracies you might find a guy with absolute power over regulatory decisions and he has the motivation and intellectual capacity of a well-fed water buffalo. How did he get there? He just stuck around longer than everyone else.
- Freedom2 4y ago
  In my experience, consultants are a good, easy CYA policy, as well as being able to look good for promotions and whatnot if you get the big names.
- looping__lui 4y ago
  Maybe if company politics outweigh objective facts!? Or you need someone to give you an independent perspective? For companies it can be like a bit of therapy…
- sharemywin 4y ago
  That's how you sell the Board on a project. You know Jon from IT thinks this will save us a bunch of money. versus We engaged Deloitte and if we allocate $XXM on this project to using XYZ solution which is part of the "gartner magic quadrant" we can see a ROI of XX. the point of a consultant is to get you money from who ever holds the purse stirngs.
  - pablobaz 4y ago
    It's often more to provide backup and justification for a decision. Even if it then goes wrong you can say "Deloitte told me to do it". While this may be true, it still doesn't take away two strengths consultants can bring: - never underestimate the value an independent view can bring, especially to a big company suffering from group think - secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can be invaluable.
    - bob1029 4y ago
      > secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can be invaluable. This is basically our business model, combined with a B2B product that supports it. We have developed a very good recipe for a few clients and are now applying it everywhere. Today, about 80% of our business is a consulting package. The 20% technology setup piece comes after we figure out how to conform the customer to our capabilities.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        Yep, do a successful project, write a case study, and resell it to everyone. "We here at [consulting inc] have previously implemented [solution] for [fortune 500] in [the same industry] and they experienced [big number]% increase in [metric] as a result."
    - juve1996 4y ago
      I don't buy this argument at all. At the end of the day, consultant backed or not, you're responsible for the implementation. If it fails it's not on the consultants. They're long gone. And someone needs to carry the blame.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  Some companies (mainly those which actually produce physical stuff) may lack the knowledge for fairly elementary process optimization. That's the stuff they teach the upcoming consultants at school. And that's the stuff that actually saves everybody's money.
  - eecc 4y ago
    If that's all, we can simply add a couple Operations Research classes to ant engineering curriculum and we'd be done.
    - mach1ne 4y ago
      That’s not all, and that might be true, but that’s an example of how consultants in some cases do earn their pay. That being said, they generally don’t seem to.
- penguinvondoom 4y ago
  To be fair, CEOs are also kinda useless... on a more serious notes, these consultants are more like priests of capital, there to prosletize whatever new cargo-cult framework is popular (without actually making any real change mind you). I kind of like some old consulting literature from the 70s and 80s,especially the cybernetics stuff, as it seems like it's genuinely scientific and trying to improve things. Just the quality of writing in i.e. "Brain of the Firm", is so much more complex and erudite than what you see coming out in the field now.
napolux 4y ago
I guess that’s part of their business: make who hire them believe that they are experts
zwieback 4y ago
The problem isn't public vs. private or in-house vs. consultants, the problem is bad or missing metrics. In most situations where work gets distributed to other entities there's also a lack of understanding the problem space and an inability to measure progress. The article mentions that for the vaccine rollout - who's to say that it would have worked out better done in a different way?
lesdeuxmagots 4y ago
Of course MBBs and others have expertise. It's just that most of that expertise is not in the industry domain. They have expertise in crafting and creating compelling arguments, in selling ideas. They have expertise in maintaining an industry-wide view and synthesizing general trends across the industry (or across industries). They have expertise in parachuting in as third-party and the politics that are associated with that. These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice. The problem with strategy consultants is that they are not hired to be objectively valuable to an organization, an industry, society, etc. They are mercenaries who apply their skills to be valuable to specific people. And because they know how to be more compelling, even if they are not actually correct, it becomes deeply problematic over time, or at scale.
- lmm 4y ago
  > These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice. That would certainly be valuable to those people; would it actually help the organization though?
TrackerFF 4y ago
We're currently working with a McKinsey consultant, seems like a great guy - really polished fella, but I'm not sure why he was brought in. We're working on a organization-wide project, so there's lots of moving parts - and he's mostly just joining in on our meetings, taking notes. One boss said he's there to develop strategy for a part of the organization, another said he's there to help with developing project management, so I don't know - someone above them brought McKinsey in. Looked him up on LinkedIn, and it seems he graduated last year. Probably costs a pretty penny.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  They're getting paid to drive a narrative for whomever's budget is being charged against. sharemywin provides more depth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779586
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  You'll get a lot of cynical takes on the internet because a lot of people have had bad experiences with consultants. Or more accurately, bad experiences with management who hire consultants for some goal. The underlying goal in a lot of consultant engagements like you describe is to get something done outside of the inertia of your org structure. As companies grow, people get set in their roles and become resistant to change. Trying to make change things, start new initiatives, or shake things up will often fail if it doesn't fall neatly into the inertia of the company. Hiring a consultant is like inserting someone out-of-band who can generate some outside analysis without feeling obligated to respect all of the hidden politics, histories, and strong personalities that can come to shape a company. Now whether or not that goal is inline with your own goals at this company is a different question. It could be that the outcome involves a new initiative that makes your work better by removing some of the painful organizational cruft that has built up over the years. Or it could become an effort to reshape the parts of the organization that you personally liked. Or maybe the consultant is taking notes for some entirely unrelated initiative that you'll never see. You don't know, but I would suggest making a good faith effort to work with this person while they're in your company.
Havoc 4y ago
Always amusing to see people view consulting like that. It does nominally bring expertise yes but the primary benefit is ass covering and sounding board. If you're an exec that needs to implement something new & complicated you can either wing it and then the blame is on you if it goes wrong. Or you can bring in consultants and lean on their advice. That gives you someone to blame. And the consultants happily absorb said blame cause they're getting paid either way. And finally - cross pollination. If you ask them how to do XYZ there is a good chance that the answer is at least in part inspired what they saw at other places/competitors.
- belter 4y ago
  Classical Weinberg: https://learnbusinessfaster.com/2018/09/15/secrets-of-consulting-gerald-weinberg/ https://learnbusinessfaster.com/2018/09/15/secrets-of-consul... Common reason to hire consultants: - Already made decision and want to blame it on outside agent - Already made decision but want to say considered alternative
  - cmh89 4y ago
    I work for the government and a lot of the consultants I've come across have been hired by incompetent leadership to try and fix broken processes that said leaders truly can't solve. The government regularly hires consultants to try and fill deficits caused by poor/weak leadership. We have a consultant right now doing 'process improvement' on one of the easiest processes I can think of, simply because no one wants to handle a difficult conversation with some powerful people who are gumming up the works with their inane power maneuvering. Of course, no consultant is ever going to point out that the problem is leadership to the people who hired them.
    - Smoosh 4y ago
      Government (here at least) also hires consultants to given them the answer/solution they want so they can claim that they aren't just pushing their own ideology, or making decisions in their own interest (rather than in the public interest) when they actually are.
smfjaw 4y ago
I worked previously at one of these places. It's quite interesting, they create solutions that are really only 'happy path' solutions that work in a perfect world and it's honestly kind of expected. You pay $100k a week for a bunch of ivy league/top uni graduates who are very intelligent but lack any real world experience who ultimately only deliver a slide deck and some recommendations so they don't have any real liability, a 21 year old grad can't navigate a lay off round properly and can only provide these 'happy path' recommendations, similar to how a lottery winner won't make good business owner, they have all the money but not the knowledge, the Mckinsey junior has all the knowledge but no experience. Execs hire them because they don't want to be the decision maker only the proxy decision maker and can say 'McKinsey advised this was the only solution to do layoffs/restructure/unpopular thing and they're the ones that know' when in reality all the exec needed was a short stop to back them up. Obviously this only relates to their management consulting/advisory arms
- kneebonian 4y ago
  My understanding was they were brought in to validate the opinion of the hirer. As I once said before "This was one of those big eye opening moments for me. Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling. You pay them a bunch of money to come run roughshod over your enemies by producing reams of analysis and Powerpoints, to fling the arrows of jargon, and lay siege to your enemies employees by endlessly trapping them in meetings and then they depart. Consultants are brought in to secure your flank, to provide air cover and to act as disposable pawns in interoffice combat. They are not brought in to solve problems, to find solutions, or because of their incredibly acumen. It's because they have no loyalty or love but money."
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    I think I saw this the first time you wrote it. It’s genius, and I think perfectly accurate. (Although, speaking as a consultant, we are not all like that. It is of course the big consulting companies being hired into the big-end-of-town companies. Some of us little guys really do care about our customers.)
college_physics 4y ago
Quite seriously, they capitalize at both the corporate world and the public sector being brain-dead, cost insensitive organisations (somebody else pays: the clients of the business entity, the taxpayer etc) and culturally unable to embrace concepts such as open source and collaborative platforms. Think about it, their main service is moving around and promoting "best practices" by copy pasting and incrementally improving (at high cost) what ultimately is solved via diffusion by the sector / domain as a whole. Essentially an expensive, backdoor way to engineer consensus.
deleted 4y ago
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legitster 4y ago
"A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time." During my time as a consultant I can affirm that this is 100% true. But it cuts both ways - you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist. Most of my time as a consultant was asking low-level employees very obvious questions: What are you wasting your time on? What's the bottleneck on X? What could you be doing that made the company more money? Then we would compile a bunch of squishy numbers into some fancy looking charts in a slide deck for the executives. In my mind this is more of a symptom of a crisis of leadership in business. Absolutely none of the value we provided couldn't have been replaced if executives actually learned to trust their own teams. But MBAs are trained to be drawn to the shiny allure of "data" over quality insight. Or they are so myopic that they need outside help to find solutions they are not bothering to look for.
- eunos 4y ago
  > you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist Some more cynical view. You are only there because your boss doubt that you know how to look at your wrist.
  - pempem 4y ago
    You're only there because there's been no visible effect of whether you look at your wrist or not.
    - gffrd 4y ago
      You're only there because instead of quantifying work, boss worries about whether or not employees are looking at watches.
      - pempem 4y ago
        If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound (make a difference)? Some would argue yes. Others won't know until something is broken.
- 4y ago
lq9AJ8yrfs 4y ago
It's substantially true, at least in part. Source: I worked at one of them for a few years. In my preferred niche I was surrounded by a mixed bag of peers senior and junior. In turn I wrote proposals, sold work, and was staffed on projects outside my niche I wasn't experienced or qualified in, but if you squinted hard enough you could say I had transferable skills toward. For the most part my projects were successful, in the sense of we didn't get fired overall and the customer paid for the work. The biggest ways to screw up were the easily caught stuff like missing deadlines, exceeding the expenses policy or padding hours, which was harder to catch but some folks were brazen and/or cunning about it. "Yes we're an expert in that" was a phrase that wasn't ever taught but I heard often. Saying yes to anything buys you time to find the solution either by skilling up or connecting to someone with actual knowledge across the very large and well-connected employee base, or fake it if you can't. Saying no ends the opportunity. Some of the work was mutually convenient, hey can you take care of this one weird project for me, cheaper and easier to go with a fudged service from an existing and recognizable supplier than to wade into an unfamiliar niche, go through the trouble of onboarding the supplier, and not know whether you're getting good service or not. Go with the big 4 and you'll likely get a solid C or if you're lucky a B grade service. Just the act of getting a new consultant onboarded as a supplier can take months or years at large companies. The big 4 are on the supplier lists everywhere already. Tbh a lot of this contract and relationships stuff is valuable, you're much less likely to get a complete service delivery or billing nightmare out of one of these large firms. You can call them up in the middle of the night and they'll sell you anything. It's a little like Alibaba or Amazon but for business services. Probably the weirdest part was finding the land and expand playbooks, in some of which they'd find and dine a "type b" personality and prop up their career in exchange for a steady stream of contracts. Basically quid pro quo, but none of it made explicit or overtly conditional, more an open handed game theory type of thing. I took this mentality with me to a boutique shop. It works pretty well.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- neilv 4y ago
  > Probably the weirdest part was finding the land and expand playbooks, in some of which they'd find and dine a "type b" personality and prop up their career in exchange for a steady stream of contracts. Like geopolitical spycraft? How far did the playbooks go?
olivermarks 4y ago
Professor Mazzucato's argument is that the big three are weakening government's ability to innovate because that function is outsourced. Although she is confident this can be remedied by bringing more innovative projects in house the reality is the same as in large companies: entrenched cultures, fiefdoms, silos, budgets make change very hard due to entrenched interests. It takes outsiders to be the Piñata in the room at some point, they can say things FTE management can't. I'm a consultant, my beef with the big three is the 'nobody gets fired for hiring Mckinsey/Deloitte/x' syndrome. You will get a lot of cut and paste boilerplate slide deck read outs from the big players, smaller more specialized consultants tend to provide a lot more value for much lower costs. Ironically government departmental efforts at innovation/change/evolution are typically expensive, big players too...
lormayna 4y ago
My previous executive come from one of those companies. She was the worst leader that I ever had, she left after less than 2 years with a completed failure from organizational standpoint and many people disgruntled.
- dcl 4y ago
  She probably got an awesome new role though.
  - lormayna 4y ago
    Of course. She moved from an F500 to an F100 company in a global leadership position. It's crazy how a person like that, without any kind of skills (neither human), can have an amazing career only for the right name on the resume. But at least my company replaced her with someone better.
bluedino 4y ago
At F100_NAME we have piles of developers from Deloitte. They put a couple of them on this medium-sized Python project that a now-retired employee created. The first one re-wrote a lot of it and screwed it up, the next one started fixing it (not sure why they didn't just roll it back), the one after that didn't do anything for 4 months (then they left), and I recently spent two afternoons with the current one where they were trying to trick me into doing their job. I'm from another contractor/consulting firm. Haven't heard from them in a while so I'm not sure what the current status is.
- rvba 4y ago
  In the past consultants were paid well since they were the experienced people. They worked on the interesting projects, they saw things, they really were good at something - so they would bring best practice from one company to another. Now the business model has changed. It is much easier to know what is the best practice. So what they do is hire juniors and sell them as mids or seniors. Good programmers dont really go to consulting firms anymore. It is not worth their time. Why work at BIG4 when you will get paid better in FAANG? If you say are a developer at crypto (ignoring that it is a scam) all the good projects are at crypto companies. Best that consultants can do is some slides or trick some company to implement blockchain instead of a database. Consulting companies lost their edge. They dont really play the game anymore. They can take some bad project and then outsource it to a cheap team. Or get a very bad project that is a total mess - ans then fail to repair that mess. If you want good software you go to a software house (that can still deliver crap). Apart from very specific skills, consultant programmers mostly do the shit projects - that nobody wants to touch. Or they are "staff augmentation" - headcount outside of salary budget. Also the consulting lifestyle just sucks: constant overtime, burnout, travel. Some people like it. Most dont. Most people in consulting search for an exit opportunity after few years. Programmers can exit faster, so the good programmers will leave consulting firms fast (it is different for business consultants - they have it much harder to leave, so they stay longer). But coming back: if you are in finance, or project management then sure - consulting can help your career at big personal cost. For skills like programming it is completely not worth it. If you are a junior programmer just try to go to a FAANG to earn 3x more. A "normal" company will pay you similar as big4. So why bother with all the travel and stress? If you are really experienced programmer, say 15 years - again you dont want to go to consulting. You can land a senior job, be paid well and not travel at all. So all those companies take people who are still smart but couldnt get better. Also consulting companies lie all the time: juniors are sold as seniors (especially programmers, but normal consultants too). And the development there is hard - due to travel and overtime they have it jard to learn on their own (no spare time). They also focus on closing a project, not on doing it well. What I try to write is that if you want to be a programmer nowadays it is better to do it in a software company from day one. Being a programmer at a consulting company is not worth the stress. Also doesnt pay better. It is a bit different if you are in finance or project managent, but even here it seems that the ability to boost your career by doing few years of consulting is becoming less worth it. The exit opportunities seem to happen less. Consulting is much less elite as it used to be. The consulting companies dont really have much edge anymore.
api 4y ago
They're experts at getting money out of large corporations.
paulsutter 4y ago
They have extensive expertise at selling very large consulting engagements. If they needed other expertise they'd develop it, but they don't need it
slackfan 4y ago
Consultants are paid to be the fall guys in the games of corporate politics.
cainxinth 4y ago
Charlie Munger: "I've never seen a management consultant’s report in my long life that didn’t end with 'What this situation really needs is more management consulting.'”
- robocat 4y ago
  Charlie used a quote from George Bernard Shaw's play “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” I personally wonder how many therapists say “you’re fixed, I don’t need any more of your money”. The quote on management consultants was just one example of how many professionals act this way towards businesses, and how it wasn't only about money but also a subconscious, psychological tendency. “The guy tells you what is good for him, and he doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than that doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal gallbladders.” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY Transcript: https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-misjudgment-by-charlie-munger https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-mi...
sbaiddn 4y ago
The role of these companies is to be corporate sin eaters for the board. Through consultants they can blame all the bad/immoral/incompetent decisions on the consultant. This is why every corruption story in the West features a McKinsey or a Deloitte grad.
runnerup 4y ago
McKinsey is currently hiring a lot more for experience than they used to. My ex-wife works there as a manufacturing expert based on her decade of on-the-ground experience inside chemical plants. Internal teams really fight to get her on their projects so that its not just "a bunch of ivy league/top uni graduates who are very intelligent but lack any real world experience who ultimately only deliver a slide deck". The culture may be changing, at least at McKinsey.
zabzonk 4y ago
i've come across any number of consultants who simply conspire with management to get what management wants in the short-term, usually to the ultimate detriment of the project. mind you, i've been a consultant myself. not my favourite job, but i like to think i was honest.
zabzonk 4y ago
i've come across any number of consultants who simply conspire with management to get what management wants in the short-term, usually to the ultimate detriment of the project. mind you, i've been a consultant myself (and i used to work for deloitte, though not as a consultant). not my favourite job, but i like to think i was honest in my recommendations.
say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
Where would customers be without 4x4 decision tables for prioritization, though?
Eumenes 4y ago
the only thing i've found them useful is passing compliance like soc2. which is really just busy work. back during the in the office days, it was always funny to see a group of 20 of them crammed into some conference room doing tedious compliance work.
hgsgm 4y ago
Why do people who think it makes perfect sense to hire a website consultant or a database consultant or a thousand different SaaS plugins for optimizing their app, but think it's crazy to hire a management consultant to help improve management?
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
Well...no shit. Consultants aren't hired for expertise, as a rule. They're hired to cover for unpopular decisions.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
My org has found that we are preferred over consultancies for certain classes of work, exactly for this reason, consultancies produce garbage systems.
supergeek133 4y ago
The most interesting part about consultants to me is something I heard the CEO of my current company say once to a bunch of product leadership: "I think I know the answer they're going to give, and I think you all know it, but if I have to pay a consultant a bunch of money to get you to listen to it and do it then so be it." I've found this true in current and past companies, when was the last time you had a consultant tell you something you COMPLETELY didn't know yourself? Something surprising?
sarewoo 4y ago
I'm convinced this industry runs on kickbacks. There is literally no other reason to hire these people.
manv1 4y ago
One thing for sure, if you want to understand how billing/invoicing/payments work at a company go talk to the consultants that feed on them. I'm sure they know the names of every clerk, mail room person, and admin assistant on the payables team.
Woodi 4y ago
Reading comments sums to: management is useless - they fail exactly on what they suppose to do - no value added to company. - flatten org chart - make CEOs talk to low level workers a lot so things will came up - hire yo-corporation-domain specialists as managers, not suits specialists

231 points by taubek 4y ago

NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago

https://archive.ph/0fi0K https://archive.ph/0fi0K

taubek 4y ago
Thank you for the link!

Manjuuu 4y ago

She could have listed the others too.

TheMagicHorsey 4y ago

Consultants do seem kind of useless. But then why are CEOs constantly hiring them? There must be some political/internal dynamic reason for this if you can't find an external/efficiency reason. I'd be interested in seeing a list of consultants' greatest wins. I mean the projects proposed by consultants that enhanced company values by the most. There's plenty of stories of consultant-driven disasters ... but I wonder how many of those are just the rank and file grousing about over-paid outsiders. But if there's anything worse than consultancies, its bureaucracies. I have a lot of experience dealing with bureaucracies in health care and aviation. And my god, bureaucrats can be some of the worst of human capital. Nowhere else can you get such a marriage of apathy, laziness, and unchecked power as you see in bureaucracies. At least in the private sector one has to be an avaricious asshole and possess a type of animal cunning at the very least to climb to the very top of the power hierarchy. In bureaucracies you might find a guy with absolute power over regulatory decisions and he has the motivation and intellectual capacity of a well-fed water buffalo. How did he get there? He just stuck around longer than everyone else.

Freedom2 4y ago
In my experience, consultants are a good, easy CYA policy, as well as being able to look good for promotions and whatnot if you get the big names.
looping__lui 4y ago
Maybe if company politics outweigh objective facts!? Or you need someone to give you an independent perspective? For companies it can be like a bit of therapy…
sharemywin 4y ago
That's how you sell the Board on a project. You know Jon from IT thinks this will save us a bunch of money. versus We engaged Deloitte and if we allocate $XXM on this project to using XYZ solution which is part of the "gartner magic quadrant" we can see a ROI of XX. the point of a consultant is to get you money from who ever holds the purse stirngs.
- pablobaz 4y ago
  It's often more to provide backup and justification for a decision. Even if it then goes wrong you can say "Deloitte told me to do it". While this may be true, it still doesn't take away two strengths consultants can bring: - never underestimate the value an independent view can bring, especially to a big company suffering from group think - secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can be invaluable.
  - bob1029 4y ago
    > secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can be invaluable. This is basically our business model, combined with a B2B product that supports it. We have developed a very good recipe for a few clients and are now applying it everywhere. Today, about 80% of our business is a consulting package. The 20% technology setup piece comes after we figure out how to conform the customer to our capabilities.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Yep, do a successful project, write a case study, and resell it to everyone. "We here at [consulting inc] have previously implemented [solution] for [fortune 500] in [the same industry] and they experienced [big number]% increase in [metric] as a result."
  - juve1996 4y ago
    I don't buy this argument at all. At the end of the day, consultant backed or not, you're responsible for the implementation. If it fails it's not on the consultants. They're long gone. And someone needs to carry the blame.
mach1ne 4y ago
Some companies (mainly those which actually produce physical stuff) may lack the knowledge for fairly elementary process optimization. That's the stuff they teach the upcoming consultants at school. And that's the stuff that actually saves everybody's money.
- eecc 4y ago
  If that's all, we can simply add a couple Operations Research classes to ant engineering curriculum and we'd be done.
  - mach1ne 4y ago
    That’s not all, and that might be true, but that’s an example of how consultants in some cases do earn their pay. That being said, they generally don’t seem to.
penguinvondoom 4y ago
To be fair, CEOs are also kinda useless... on a more serious notes, these consultants are more like priests of capital, there to prosletize whatever new cargo-cult framework is popular (without actually making any real change mind you). I kind of like some old consulting literature from the 70s and 80s,especially the cybernetics stuff, as it seems like it's genuinely scientific and trying to improve things. Just the quality of writing in i.e. "Brain of the Firm", is so much more complex and erudite than what you see coming out in the field now.

napolux 4y ago

I guess that’s part of their business: make who hire them believe that they are experts

zwieback 4y ago

The problem isn't public vs. private or in-house vs. consultants, the problem is bad or missing metrics. In most situations where work gets distributed to other entities there's also a lack of understanding the problem space and an inability to measure progress. The article mentions that for the vaccine rollout - who's to say that it would have worked out better done in a different way?

lesdeuxmagots 4y ago

Of course MBBs and others have expertise. It's just that most of that expertise is not in the industry domain. They have expertise in crafting and creating compelling arguments, in selling ideas. They have expertise in maintaining an industry-wide view and synthesizing general trends across the industry (or across industries). They have expertise in parachuting in as third-party and the politics that are associated with that. These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice. The problem with strategy consultants is that they are not hired to be objectively valuable to an organization, an industry, society, etc. They are mercenaries who apply their skills to be valuable to specific people. And because they know how to be more compelling, even if they are not actually correct, it becomes deeply problematic over time, or at scale.

lmm 4y ago
> These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice. That would certainly be valuable to those people; would it actually help the organization though?

TrackerFF 4y ago

We're currently working with a McKinsey consultant, seems like a great guy - really polished fella, but I'm not sure why he was brought in. We're working on a organization-wide project, so there's lots of moving parts - and he's mostly just joining in on our meetings, taking notes. One boss said he's there to develop strategy for a part of the organization, another said he's there to help with developing project management, so I don't know - someone above them brought McKinsey in. Looked him up on LinkedIn, and it seems he graduated last year. Probably costs a pretty penny.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
They're getting paid to drive a narrative for whomever's budget is being charged against. sharemywin provides more depth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779586
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
You'll get a lot of cynical takes on the internet because a lot of people have had bad experiences with consultants. Or more accurately, bad experiences with management who hire consultants for some goal. The underlying goal in a lot of consultant engagements like you describe is to get something done outside of the inertia of your org structure. As companies grow, people get set in their roles and become resistant to change. Trying to make change things, start new initiatives, or shake things up will often fail if it doesn't fall neatly into the inertia of the company. Hiring a consultant is like inserting someone out-of-band who can generate some outside analysis without feeling obligated to respect all of the hidden politics, histories, and strong personalities that can come to shape a company. Now whether or not that goal is inline with your own goals at this company is a different question. It could be that the outcome involves a new initiative that makes your work better by removing some of the painful organizational cruft that has built up over the years. Or it could become an effort to reshape the parts of the organization that you personally liked. Or maybe the consultant is taking notes for some entirely unrelated initiative that you'll never see. You don't know, but I would suggest making a good faith effort to work with this person while they're in your company.

Havoc 4y ago

Always amusing to see people view consulting like that. It does nominally bring expertise yes but the primary benefit is ass covering and sounding board. If you're an exec that needs to implement something new & complicated you can either wing it and then the blame is on you if it goes wrong. Or you can bring in consultants and lean on their advice. That gives you someone to blame. And the consultants happily absorb said blame cause they're getting paid either way. And finally - cross pollination. If you ask them how to do XYZ there is a good chance that the answer is at least in part inspired what they saw at other places/competitors.

belter 4y ago
Classical Weinberg: https://learnbusinessfaster.com/2018/09/15/secrets-of-consulting-gerald-weinberg/ https://learnbusinessfaster.com/2018/09/15/secrets-of-consul... Common reason to hire consultants: - Already made decision and want to blame it on outside agent - Already made decision but want to say considered alternative
- cmh89 4y ago
  I work for the government and a lot of the consultants I've come across have been hired by incompetent leadership to try and fix broken processes that said leaders truly can't solve. The government regularly hires consultants to try and fill deficits caused by poor/weak leadership. We have a consultant right now doing 'process improvement' on one of the easiest processes I can think of, simply because no one wants to handle a difficult conversation with some powerful people who are gumming up the works with their inane power maneuvering. Of course, no consultant is ever going to point out that the problem is leadership to the people who hired them.
  - Smoosh 4y ago
    Government (here at least) also hires consultants to given them the answer/solution they want so they can claim that they aren't just pushing their own ideology, or making decisions in their own interest (rather than in the public interest) when they actually are.

smfjaw 4y ago

I worked previously at one of these places. It's quite interesting, they create solutions that are really only 'happy path' solutions that work in a perfect world and it's honestly kind of expected. You pay $100k a week for a bunch of ivy league/top uni graduates who are very intelligent but lack any real world experience who ultimately only deliver a slide deck and some recommendations so they don't have any real liability, a 21 year old grad can't navigate a lay off round properly and can only provide these 'happy path' recommendations, similar to how a lottery winner won't make good business owner, they have all the money but not the knowledge, the Mckinsey junior has all the knowledge but no experience. Execs hire them because they don't want to be the decision maker only the proxy decision maker and can say 'McKinsey advised this was the only solution to do layoffs/restructure/unpopular thing and they're the ones that know' when in reality all the exec needed was a short stop to back them up. Obviously this only relates to their management consulting/advisory arms

kneebonian 4y ago
My understanding was they were brought in to validate the opinion of the hirer. As I once said before "This was one of those big eye opening moments for me. Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling. You pay them a bunch of money to come run roughshod over your enemies by producing reams of analysis and Powerpoints, to fling the arrows of jargon, and lay siege to your enemies employees by endlessly trapping them in meetings and then they depart. Consultants are brought in to secure your flank, to provide air cover and to act as disposable pawns in interoffice combat. They are not brought in to solve problems, to find solutions, or because of their incredibly acumen. It's because they have no loyalty or love but money."
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  I think I saw this the first time you wrote it. It’s genius, and I think perfectly accurate. (Although, speaking as a consultant, we are not all like that. It is of course the big consulting companies being hired into the big-end-of-town companies. Some of us little guys really do care about our customers.)

college_physics 4y ago

Quite seriously, they capitalize at both the corporate world and the public sector being brain-dead, cost insensitive organisations (somebody else pays: the clients of the business entity, the taxpayer etc) and culturally unable to embrace concepts such as open source and collaborative platforms. Think about it, their main service is moving around and promoting "best practices" by copy pasting and incrementally improving (at high cost) what ultimately is solved via diffusion by the sector / domain as a whole. Essentially an expensive, backdoor way to engineer consensus.

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legitster 4y ago

"A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time." During my time as a consultant I can affirm that this is 100% true. But it cuts both ways - you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist. Most of my time as a consultant was asking low-level employees very obvious questions: What are you wasting your time on? What's the bottleneck on X? What could you be doing that made the company more money? Then we would compile a bunch of squishy numbers into some fancy looking charts in a slide deck for the executives. In my mind this is more of a symptom of a crisis of leadership in business. Absolutely none of the value we provided couldn't have been replaced if executives actually learned to trust their own teams. But MBAs are trained to be drawn to the shiny allure of "data" over quality insight. Or they are so myopic that they need outside help to find solutions they are not bothering to look for.

eunos 4y ago
> you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist Some more cynical view. You are only there because your boss doubt that you know how to look at your wrist.
- pempem 4y ago
  You're only there because there's been no visible effect of whether you look at your wrist or not.
  - gffrd 4y ago
    You're only there because instead of quantifying work, boss worries about whether or not employees are looking at watches.
    - pempem 4y ago
      If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound (make a difference)? Some would argue yes. Others won't know until something is broken.
4y ago

lq9AJ8yrfs 4y ago

It's substantially true, at least in part. Source: I worked at one of them for a few years. In my preferred niche I was surrounded by a mixed bag of peers senior and junior. In turn I wrote proposals, sold work, and was staffed on projects outside my niche I wasn't experienced or qualified in, but if you squinted hard enough you could say I had transferable skills toward. For the most part my projects were successful, in the sense of we didn't get fired overall and the customer paid for the work. The biggest ways to screw up were the easily caught stuff like missing deadlines, exceeding the expenses policy or padding hours, which was harder to catch but some folks were brazen and/or cunning about it. "Yes we're an expert in that" was a phrase that wasn't ever taught but I heard often. Saying yes to anything buys you time to find the solution either by skilling up or connecting to someone with actual knowledge across the very large and well-connected employee base, or fake it if you can't. Saying no ends the opportunity. Some of the work was mutually convenient, hey can you take care of this one weird project for me, cheaper and easier to go with a fudged service from an existing and recognizable supplier than to wade into an unfamiliar niche, go through the trouble of onboarding the supplier, and not know whether you're getting good service or not. Go with the big 4 and you'll likely get a solid C or if you're lucky a B grade service. Just the act of getting a new consultant onboarded as a supplier can take months or years at large companies. The big 4 are on the supplier lists everywhere already. Tbh a lot of this contract and relationships stuff is valuable, you're much less likely to get a complete service delivery or billing nightmare out of one of these large firms. You can call them up in the middle of the night and they'll sell you anything. It's a little like Alibaba or Amazon but for business services. Probably the weirdest part was finding the land and expand playbooks, in some of which they'd find and dine a "type b" personality and prop up their career in exchange for a steady stream of contracts. Basically quid pro quo, but none of it made explicit or overtly conditional, more an open handed game theory type of thing. I took this mentality with me to a boutique shop. It works pretty well.

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neilv 4y ago
> Probably the weirdest part was finding the land and expand playbooks, in some of which they'd find and dine a "type b" personality and prop up their career in exchange for a steady stream of contracts. Like geopolitical spycraft? How far did the playbooks go?

olivermarks 4y ago

Professor Mazzucato's argument is that the big three are weakening government's ability to innovate because that function is outsourced. Although she is confident this can be remedied by bringing more innovative projects in house the reality is the same as in large companies: entrenched cultures, fiefdoms, silos, budgets make change very hard due to entrenched interests. It takes outsiders to be the Piñata in the room at some point, they can say things FTE management can't. I'm a consultant, my beef with the big three is the 'nobody gets fired for hiring Mckinsey/Deloitte/x' syndrome. You will get a lot of cut and paste boilerplate slide deck read outs from the big players, smaller more specialized consultants tend to provide a lot more value for much lower costs. Ironically government departmental efforts at innovation/change/evolution are typically expensive, big players too...

lormayna 4y ago

My previous executive come from one of those companies. She was the worst leader that I ever had, she left after less than 2 years with a completed failure from organizational standpoint and many people disgruntled.

dcl 4y ago
She probably got an awesome new role though.
- lormayna 4y ago
  Of course. She moved from an F500 to an F100 company in a global leadership position. It's crazy how a person like that, without any kind of skills (neither human), can have an amazing career only for the right name on the resume. But at least my company replaced her with someone better.

bluedino 4y ago

At F100_NAME we have piles of developers from Deloitte. They put a couple of them on this medium-sized Python project that a now-retired employee created. The first one re-wrote a lot of it and screwed it up, the next one started fixing it (not sure why they didn't just roll it back), the one after that didn't do anything for 4 months (then they left), and I recently spent two afternoons with the current one where they were trying to trick me into doing their job. I'm from another contractor/consulting firm. Haven't heard from them in a while so I'm not sure what the current status is.

rvba 4y ago
In the past consultants were paid well since they were the experienced people. They worked on the interesting projects, they saw things, they really were good at something - so they would bring best practice from one company to another. Now the business model has changed. It is much easier to know what is the best practice. So what they do is hire juniors and sell them as mids or seniors. Good programmers dont really go to consulting firms anymore. It is not worth their time. Why work at BIG4 when you will get paid better in FAANG? If you say are a developer at crypto (ignoring that it is a scam) all the good projects are at crypto companies. Best that consultants can do is some slides or trick some company to implement blockchain instead of a database. Consulting companies lost their edge. They dont really play the game anymore. They can take some bad project and then outsource it to a cheap team. Or get a very bad project that is a total mess - ans then fail to repair that mess. If you want good software you go to a software house (that can still deliver crap). Apart from very specific skills, consultant programmers mostly do the shit projects - that nobody wants to touch. Or they are "staff augmentation" - headcount outside of salary budget. Also the consulting lifestyle just sucks: constant overtime, burnout, travel. Some people like it. Most dont. Most people in consulting search for an exit opportunity after few years. Programmers can exit faster, so the good programmers will leave consulting firms fast (it is different for business consultants - they have it much harder to leave, so they stay longer). But coming back: if you are in finance, or project management then sure - consulting can help your career at big personal cost. For skills like programming it is completely not worth it. If you are a junior programmer just try to go to a FAANG to earn 3x more. A "normal" company will pay you similar as big4. So why bother with all the travel and stress? If you are really experienced programmer, say 15 years - again you dont want to go to consulting. You can land a senior job, be paid well and not travel at all. So all those companies take people who are still smart but couldnt get better. Also consulting companies lie all the time: juniors are sold as seniors (especially programmers, but normal consultants too). And the development there is hard - due to travel and overtime they have it jard to learn on their own (no spare time). They also focus on closing a project, not on doing it well. What I try to write is that if you want to be a programmer nowadays it is better to do it in a software company from day one. Being a programmer at a consulting company is not worth the stress. Also doesnt pay better. It is a bit different if you are in finance or project managent, but even here it seems that the ability to boost your career by doing few years of consulting is becoming less worth it. The exit opportunities seem to happen less. Consulting is much less elite as it used to be. The consulting companies dont really have much edge anymore.

api 4y ago

They're experts at getting money out of large corporations.

paulsutter 4y ago

They have extensive expertise at selling very large consulting engagements. If they needed other expertise they'd develop it, but they don't need it

slackfan 4y ago

Consultants are paid to be the fall guys in the games of corporate politics.

cainxinth 4y ago

Charlie Munger: "I've never seen a management consultant’s report in my long life that didn’t end with 'What this situation really needs is more management consulting.'”

robocat 4y ago
Charlie used a quote from George Bernard Shaw's play “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” I personally wonder how many therapists say “you’re fixed, I don’t need any more of your money”. The quote on management consultants was just one example of how many professionals act this way towards businesses, and how it wasn't only about money but also a subconscious, psychological tendency. “The guy tells you what is good for him, and he doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than that doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal gallbladders.” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY Transcript: https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-misjudgment-by-charlie-munger https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-mi...

sbaiddn 4y ago

The role of these companies is to be corporate sin eaters for the board. Through consultants they can blame all the bad/immoral/incompetent decisions on the consultant. This is why every corruption story in the West features a McKinsey or a Deloitte grad.

runnerup 4y ago

McKinsey is currently hiring a lot more for experience than they used to. My ex-wife works there as a manufacturing expert based on her decade of on-the-ground experience inside chemical plants. Internal teams really fight to get her on their projects so that its not just "a bunch of ivy league/top uni graduates who are very intelligent but lack any real world experience who ultimately only deliver a slide deck". The culture may be changing, at least at McKinsey.

zabzonk 4y ago

i've come across any number of consultants who simply conspire with management to get what management wants in the short-term, usually to the ultimate detriment of the project. mind you, i've been a consultant myself. not my favourite job, but i like to think i was honest.

zabzonk 4y ago

i've come across any number of consultants who simply conspire with management to get what management wants in the short-term, usually to the ultimate detriment of the project. mind you, i've been a consultant myself (and i used to work for deloitte, though not as a consultant). not my favourite job, but i like to think i was honest in my recommendations.

say_it_as_it_is 4y ago

Where would customers be without 4x4 decision tables for prioritization, though?

Eumenes 4y ago

the only thing i've found them useful is passing compliance like soc2. which is really just busy work. back during the in the office days, it was always funny to see a group of 20 of them crammed into some conference room doing tedious compliance work.

hgsgm 4y ago

Why do people who think it makes perfect sense to hire a website consultant or a database consultant or a thousand different SaaS plugins for optimizing their app, but think it's crazy to hire a management consultant to help improve management?

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

Well...no shit. Consultants aren't hired for expertise, as a rule. They're hired to cover for unpopular decisions.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

My org has found that we are preferred over consultancies for certain classes of work, exactly for this reason, consultancies produce garbage systems.

supergeek133 4y ago

The most interesting part about consultants to me is something I heard the CEO of my current company say once to a bunch of product leadership: "I think I know the answer they're going to give, and I think you all know it, but if I have to pay a consultant a bunch of money to get you to listen to it and do it then so be it." I've found this true in current and past companies, when was the last time you had a consultant tell you something you COMPLETELY didn't know yourself? Something surprising?

sarewoo 4y ago

I'm convinced this industry runs on kickbacks. There is literally no other reason to hire these people.

manv1 4y ago

One thing for sure, if you want to understand how billing/invoicing/payments work at a company go talk to the consultants that feed on them. I'm sure they know the names of every clerk, mail room person, and admin assistant on the payables team.

Woodi 4y ago

Reading comments sums to: management is useless - they fail exactly on what they suppose to do - no value added to company. - flatten org chart - make CEOs talk to low level workers a lot so things will came up - hire yo-corporation-domain specialists as managers, not suits specialists