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I worked at Accenture as an MD for several years, primarily on innovation and transformation programs. I have plenty to say about them, but I think the key driv

• chinabot 4y ago
  Lets face it, the answer from chatGPT would be almost identical to what these consultants say, however the main reason for consultants is to CYA so if the decision is bad, you can blame someone else.
  • number6 4y ago
    ChatGPT is not that old. So someone had to do the writing
  • sizzle 4y ago
    Their consultants are probably utilizing ChatGPT now to 10x their buzzword bingo outputs
  • 23B1 4y ago
    I won't deny that I've been using it as a research assistant to investigate a lot market forces and conditions, but as always I have to support it with quality data and citations if it's gonna play in the board room and with savvy institutional investors.
  • denlekke 4y ago
    just repackage chatGPT as a new consultancy, McKenzie, and hope no one notices actually, brb
    • 23B1 4y ago
      My savviest clients are already on this - why hire a consultant for strategy when you can just suss out what the competition is doing and improve incrementally on that? My only (personal) hope is that it’ll free guys like me up to soar through ‘creative configuration space’ and come up with those truly unique and unexpected tactics that are new to an entire segment or industry. Sure I don’t get to be a millionaire MD with two hundred reports billing hourly, but maybe I can do value-based or outcome-based pricing and get my clientele to take ‘healthy’ risk - instead of sitting around fretting about shaving half a point off labor costs through a mindless re-org :/ Related anecdote: if you see someone on the airplane rejiggering a public company’s org chart - short the stock!
    • hestefisk 4y ago
      You mean McKinsey?
• unixhero 4y ago
  Ex accenture here, left and started my own. M u c h better and my clients love that I am not from a big shop. Money is good and life is smiling.
  • 23B1 4y ago
    Congrats man feel free to reach out if you ever want to collaborate. 05-trivet.turner@icloud.com I'm pure strategy, most of my clients are 'intraprenurial' CIOs, CSOs, CFOs.
• benatkin 4y ago
  Part of the grift is that roughly one of ten of these unproven low-paid MBAs will be exceptional. So when one does a good job they'll use it as an example of typical performance. I see this happen with dev talent agencies and unproven software engineers. Only the great projects go in their portfolio and the satisfied clients are happy to appear on their website because they don't realize they just got lucky. With software engineers some of the remaining 90% really are talented but spend most of the project learning on the job, fixing an issue in a few hours that a senior engineer in their stack could fix in 30 minutes with their arcane knowledge. Meanwhile the senior engineer goes to the scrums (they love to hide behind agile). It's a solid grift.
  • 23B1 4y ago
    Yeah I mean I don't blame people for celebrating their successes and sexiest projects – I certainly don't include all my fails in my portfolio, heh. What's interesting about this article (and the general state of management consulting) is that the cracks are beginning to show in these big firms that used to have a "nobody got fired for hiring EY" reputation.
• andrewmutz 4y ago
  Does outsourcing major strategic initiatives even work? Seems like the definition of the sort of things you shouldn't outsource
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • benatkin 4y ago
    I think the answer is "it depends".
  • 23B1 4y ago
    Well for my clients they're often up against maxed-out resources or employees who are just mired in their day-to-day and need a sort of entrepreneur-in-residence. For me, I'm given one or several major strategic initiatives and then my job is to build a 'demonstrator' that hits all of those without needing to fully build them out. My client (typically an executive) can then take the presentation to his or her leadership team or board to unlock the funding required to stand up the 'execution' phase of that initiative internally through hiring. So I guess you could say I build MVPs or proofs-of-concept that, if they work and are desirable to the company, get spun out into new lines of business.
    • californical 4y ago
      This sounds like amazing work, the best part of software engineering is coming up with a prototype and experimenting. Most of my personal projects are basically “I wonder if X is easy or hard, and if I can make it work” Do you stick to a particular business domain? Eg finance, transportation, e-commerce? I’d think it would help you to build MVPs if you stayed in a specific domain, but it could be fun to move around a bit too :) Also: how do you find clients? I feel like again this would come from having connections in a specific business domain? It feels like it should be hard to sell yourself as the “prototype person”, but how do you convince someone to let you prototype for them for a while?
      • 23B1 4y ago
• Jolter 4y ago
  Interesting, but how does your experience relate to the linked story? Is EY somehow related to Accenture? Are Accenture also doing auditing?
  • 23B1 4y ago
    They're both global professional advisories with a ton of similar services and competing for similar clients. They ought to be thought of as basically body shops for management consulting.
  • hestefisk 4y ago
    Accenture was spun out of Andersen Consulting after the Enron saga. Andersen had both a consulting business and an audit arm - they were one of the “big five” audit firms before the collapse of Enron. Today, Accenture only do consulting; they do zero auditing. EY are not related to Accenture or Andersen. EY is an audit firm (one of the “big four”) with a massive consulting arm. Unlike Accenture which is a global firm, EY operates more like a local franchise. They do this to minimise risk of contagion from a bad apple like in Germany to other audit businesses in different countries. As such, EY is far from a global firm, but more like a collection of separate audit and consulting firms in different countries who all have a license to use the EY brand. This is an important difference.
    • cgeier 4y ago
      before the Enron scandal
• ethbr0 4y ago
  On the consulting side of the audit firms that you're talking about, I think people misunderstand why companies hire big consultancies. It is not for performance. It's for minimizing risk. And not "risk that the project will fail to hit its schedule." Rather "risk that the company is unable to deliver the thing we're asking for at all." When I've seen big consultancies fail, it almost always goes like this: (1) big idea sold with A-team, (2) contract won and lowest-cost B-team substituted in, (3) B-team screws up execution, and customer usually figures out on or right before target delivery date, (4) if smart, customer tears consultancy a new asshole, from people with VP et al. titles, (5) if interested in further business then consultancy profusely apologies and puts an A-team back on the project, (6) A-team delivers, albeit after schedule. The difference between ey et al. vs smaller shops is (4). Smaller shops don't have extra senior bodies laying around to retask. So a more accurate description of a VP hiring ey is probably "I know they're going to screw it up, but I know if I bitch enough they'll eventually get it done right."
  • 23B1 4y ago
    Nailed it. My only beef is that when you’re going line-by-line on the deliverables, arguing over the “definition of done” that you’re actually crushing whatever good will and budget remains for the innovation a company actually needs. And when I say innovation I don’t mean gravity boots, I just mean a progressive use of robust tech, easily understood processes, and a general aversion to complexity - so you don’t have to do it all over again in five years. OTOH executive retention is tanking, so maybe it’s fine you one-and-done it, and move on to your next job before the truth is out - YOLO! (Barf).
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > arguing over the “definition of done” This brings back my PTSD. "I have never seen so many fine men wasted so badly"
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      I've always thought that if it gets to the point where a consultant and company are arguing over line items and it didn't go so badly as to preclude future work, then just meet in the middle, call it a poorly run project, and try and do better next time. There's no good outcome from a knock-down, drag-out fight for either party when it goes that badly. And yeah... I've observed my fair share of "So, we all agree we're going to call this a success? Great!" + director / VP takes a new job before it explodes.
• jojobas 4y ago
  Big 4 is a multiway confidence trick at this point, scamming employees, clients and governments all at once.
• tranchms 4y ago
  It’s true. I work as a Client Partner for a $1B+ consulting firm that comes in and cleans up after these situations. We bring in seasoned, experienced consultants with the functional knowledge that these big consulting firms don’t have. And even though our consultants are more costly on a per head basis, we’re more cost effective overall, because we do more with less. I always admired the big consulting firms until I realized how consistently they fail to deliver. It’s hard for the clients to fix it because they genuinely think they are getting the best. It’s sad and laughable. Eventually they figure it out. Usually when a firm like us comes in and exposes the dysfunction by getting a few consultants in there that know what they are doing and running things like it should. And it generally comes down to a lack of leadership— by both the client and the big consulting firm. They point the finger at each other. But also it’s just a lack of experience by those running/implementing the program. Staffed by consultants who read all the books and go to the trainings and classes but have never been in industry and been in the clients shoes.
  • Eisenstein 4y ago
    I'm a bit confused because this isn't my industry. What exactly are these consultants doing? What are they supposed to 'deliver'?
    • 23B1 4y ago
      Well lets say you're a guy who runs the 10-year-old analytics platform for your company; your team's job is to deliver a bunch of charts and data to the executive team on the performance of the company on a weekly basis. That's not an easy job, because you've got a shitton of unstructured data, new data sources coming online all the time, and a patchwork of analysis tools. This work would be a hell of a lot easier and more accurate and maybe even cheaper in the long run if you had an analytics layer that was more modern - but you don't have time to make the case to the CIO, because you're too busy just running the reports and doing the job that you're paid to do. However, maybe a guy like me is having a convo with his client the CIO and she says "Y'know, Eisenstein thinks we need a new analytics plat, but he's busy on five other projects – can I pay you $5k to take a look at it and make me some recommendations?" So I can sit with you, get your hot take, maybe bring in one of my guys who is shit-hot on dozens of analytics platforms, show you and your boss the trade-offs, costs, etc. If I'm lucky maybe you'll even hire one of my guys for a couple of months to install it and train you and your team up on it. Way cheaper than interviewing and trying to do an apples-to-apples comparison between a dozen different analytics companies who're all gonna lie to your face about how their product is the best, probably politically better that you don't miss a full quarter of you doing your job, and your boss also gets to look good when I ship a sexy deck that shows how we're going to integrate all her peers' pet systems and provide much more timely, accurate, and readable results. (I made this all up out of whole cloth, but the bottom line is sometimes incentives are aligned as such that a middle man can help you get there faster, cheaper, and better than DIY. On the other hand, consultants can also make things WAY worse as this thread illustrates)
• jasmer 4y ago
  It's a form of corruption. In China, they take 10% of the top, in Africa the money dissapears, in the West, consultants take 80% and it's all legal.
  • 23B1 4y ago
    I've never heard of a U.S. based consultancy taking 80%. In my experience we'd be happy with an 18-20% margin, but more often it was half that.
    • jasmer 4y ago
      I'm saying they are 5x more expensive than they need to be. So most of the money that goes to the agencies is de facto corruption, even if it goes to the workers who are working, but ouputting not much.
      • 23B1 4y ago
        Where did you get that 5x number? The rate cards we use are tied to market rates. Consulting (and services businesses in general) aren't super-profitable. I think probably you're just pulling numbers out of thin air. Now if you think that the value of consultants is overrated, I tend to agree with you in some - but not all - cases. As an example, it makes little sense to hire FTEs for a short term project that has to happen on a discrete timeline.
        • jasmer 4y ago
          Healthcare.gov (Obamacare) was a $1B, and it didn't work. Some Google Engineers came in to save it. In Canada, the 'Gun Registry' cost $700M and it could be literally an access database not even mySQL. Literally probably could fit in Excel. The governments custom payroll is going to cost another $1B and it still does not work, they are looking for alternatives. It's fraud. The bill $1B for a piece of shit that a handfull of decent Engineers could have built for 10% the cost. It's blind leading the blind leading the blind who don't care. Everyone's repuation is a stake so they will lie lie lie. Bureaucrats believe the smooth sales pitch and have no clue what a good project should look like. We need much better standards for IT projects because this is going to kill us.