5 ms·

Consultants very, very rarely bring any genuine novel insight. In my experience, their prime contribution is simultaneously their most cynical and most useful:

by jl6 3y ago

Consultants very, very rarely bring any genuine novel insight. In my experience, their prime contribution is simultaneously their most cynical and most useful: they navigate sclerotic bureaucracies, locate the people who know the answer, and then present the answer to decision-makers in a way that cuts through organizational politics and saves executive face. Small orgs don’t need consultants. Not because they can’t afford them, but because small orgs don’t have the dysfunctional communication patterns of large orgs, which is the prime driver of demand for consultants. The client already has the answer within their possession. The client should already be able to surface that answer and execute on it. But they just can’t. They are institutionally incapable of finding the already-existing answer within themselves. The old adage says the consultant will borrow your watch to tell you the time. This quip masks the fact that clients don’t know how the big hand relates to the little hand, or where their watch is located.

whimsicalism 3y ago
Strongest defense of consulting I've read
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  The cynical take is consultants are there to embed themselves in an organization so deeply that they ensure that more of their consultants are hired in the future.
nness 3y ago
Very spot on — consultants are able to navigate the bureaucratic structure within an organisation to deliver work that the orgnaisation cannot navigate itself. I've worked a decade in technology consulting. 10 years ago the client had no idea what they needed — apps, e-commerce, digital self-service were all new concepts. Now, organisations are already equipped with smart people who know the answer — but sometimes you just need to catalyse change when you can't do yourself. The existence of consultancies, or agencies in the creative/marketing side for that matter, isn't a failure of an organisation — not always at least. Sometimes its simply becasue the organisation has created a structure which works very well in one set of circumstances and very poorly in others. (There is a reason why big tech, for all its expertise, has a roster of outside ad agencies who do development and deployments of their non-core services ... it's just faster to have agencies do web dev than setting up internal teams. You get a few agency devs set up on google3, and you've got yourself a billable pipeline...)
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
After being on the inside and outside. Can confirm. For decades on the inside I was pissed that we paid consultants since we already knew what to do. Now being a consultant. I see this is true. The main thing we bring is just aggregation and bodies. (and someone to blame). But hate being apart of it. Really the customers should staff up some and do their own internal consulting. Large corporations should just die, they are not efficient, not innovative, they are just a large pooling of capital that takes on its own life and feeds on humans. The entire system is MOLOCH.
- smokefoot 3y ago
  Some truth to this (minus the ritual child sacrifice). However it’s hard to do complex ambitious things like manufacturing semiconductors or designing consumer laptops in a small company. Big problems demand a big organization and increasingly they’re what drives our economy. The lived experience inside big companies is bad and getting worse. Consultants are a symptom of this, but I think the root cause is an insatiable demand for earnings growth and productivity which is basically a force of nature at this point. The alternative is deindustrialization or some rethinking of the social contract.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Yep. I have no argument for heavy industry. Things like semiconductors do take a lot of capital, and a large organization. I'd be curious to find out how much Intel or TSMC use consultants. The old school Intel was run by engineers, I would bet they did not use consultants as much as modern Intel. The problem seems to be how much technical knowledge is kept in-house, thus not needing consultants. Versus Companies that have outsourced their technical knowledge and now can't survive without consultants.
mousetree 3y ago
As a former McKinsey consultant this is very true. Most of the time the work was just cutting through the bureaucracy, interviewing people, getting all the data, synthesising it and present it back. To be fair though, once in a while there were some cases where a client genuinely did not have the required expertise in house or needed a solution quicker than their in-house teams could deliver.
manmal 3y ago
I agree with most of your points, and would like to point out that the “client” is not a single person or organism, but just a lot of people. Just as the internet already contains all the answers in it, you might need a search engine (or LLM) to find them. Crawling the web or the org is grunt work that you might have no time for.
RC_ITR 3y ago
I also think any “Mechanical Turk but we need over-achieving Ivy League educated 25 year olds to actually do it” tasks are also very well served by consultants. Conducting surveys, combing through massive data, etc.
quickthrower2 3y ago
I think there can be times were a consultant is useful to a small org. For example when using or investigating a technology they have no experience in yet it might be faster to get a consultant to help. Or trying to get compliance with some regulation or standard.
hammock 3y ago
> their prime contribution is simultaneously their most cynical and most useful: they navigate sclerotic bureaucracies, locate the people who know the answer, and then present the answer to decision-makers in a way that cuts through organizational politics and saves executive face. Is this not a description of a successful middle manager inside the org as well?
- primax 3y ago
  The middle manager has the opposite set of incentives. They want to solidify and grow their position inside the company, which often isn't in line with what is the best outcome for the company. This is the principal agent problem and is the root cause of this issue.
Anticlockwise 3y ago
This is true of the big name consultants where they're just sending new Ivy grads into the org. Small consultancy shops can be really useful to smaller orgs when: 1. The consultants are ex or current operators who actually know something 2. Those smaller orgs can't afford that level of talent full time.
divbzero 3y ago
> They are institutionally incapable of finding the already-existing answer within themselves. Or sometimes, as OP mentions, they have the answer already but need consultants for political cover to implement the solution.
setr 3y ago
Only had to do it a few times, but exactly my experience. The main one was spending ~3 months and speaking to ~40 people in order to write 2 rest APIs in about 300 python LoC. It was a minor integration between 4 different services owned by different groups, with no one knowing anything about any system/functionality outside a very small slice of the domain they controlled. At best they could point me to another person to ask, with every question taking a minimum of three levels of indirection to resolve. They were fully aware of the situation too; utterly shocked we managed to close it out in those 3 months. They had more than enough software developers and knowledge to do it themselves — my only value add was piercing the veil, navigating through all their compartmentalized knowledge to get a straight answer

by jl6 3y ago

whimsicalism 3y ago

Strongest defense of consulting I've read

quickthrower2 3y ago
The cynical take is consultants are there to embed themselves in an organization so deeply that they ensure that more of their consultants are hired in the future.

nness 3y ago

Very spot on — consultants are able to navigate the bureaucratic structure within an organisation to deliver work that the orgnaisation cannot navigate itself. I've worked a decade in technology consulting. 10 years ago the client had no idea what they needed — apps, e-commerce, digital self-service were all new concepts. Now, organisations are already equipped with smart people who know the answer — but sometimes you just need to catalyse change when you can't do yourself. The existence of consultancies, or agencies in the creative/marketing side for that matter, isn't a failure of an organisation — not always at least. Sometimes its simply becasue the organisation has created a structure which works very well in one set of circumstances and very poorly in others. (There is a reason why big tech, for all its expertise, has a roster of outside ad agencies who do development and deployments of their non-core services ... it's just faster to have agencies do web dev than setting up internal teams. You get a few agency devs set up on google3, and you've got yourself a billable pipeline...)

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

After being on the inside and outside. Can confirm. For decades on the inside I was pissed that we paid consultants since we already knew what to do. Now being a consultant. I see this is true. The main thing we bring is just aggregation and bodies. (and someone to blame). But hate being apart of it. Really the customers should staff up some and do their own internal consulting. Large corporations should just die, they are not efficient, not innovative, they are just a large pooling of capital that takes on its own life and feeds on humans. The entire system is MOLOCH.

smokefoot 3y ago
Some truth to this (minus the ritual child sacrifice). However it’s hard to do complex ambitious things like manufacturing semiconductors or designing consumer laptops in a small company. Big problems demand a big organization and increasingly they’re what drives our economy. The lived experience inside big companies is bad and getting worse. Consultants are a symptom of this, but I think the root cause is an insatiable demand for earnings growth and productivity which is basically a force of nature at this point. The alternative is deindustrialization or some rethinking of the social contract.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Yep. I have no argument for heavy industry. Things like semiconductors do take a lot of capital, and a large organization. I'd be curious to find out how much Intel or TSMC use consultants. The old school Intel was run by engineers, I would bet they did not use consultants as much as modern Intel. The problem seems to be how much technical knowledge is kept in-house, thus not needing consultants. Versus Companies that have outsourced their technical knowledge and now can't survive without consultants.

mousetree 3y ago

As a former McKinsey consultant this is very true. Most of the time the work was just cutting through the bureaucracy, interviewing people, getting all the data, synthesising it and present it back. To be fair though, once in a while there were some cases where a client genuinely did not have the required expertise in house or needed a solution quicker than their in-house teams could deliver.

manmal 3y ago

I agree with most of your points, and would like to point out that the “client” is not a single person or organism, but just a lot of people. Just as the internet already contains all the answers in it, you might need a search engine (or LLM) to find them. Crawling the web or the org is grunt work that you might have no time for.

RC_ITR 3y ago

I also think any “Mechanical Turk but we need over-achieving Ivy League educated 25 year olds to actually do it” tasks are also very well served by consultants. Conducting surveys, combing through massive data, etc.

quickthrower2 3y ago

I think there can be times were a consultant is useful to a small org. For example when using or investigating a technology they have no experience in yet it might be faster to get a consultant to help. Or trying to get compliance with some regulation or standard.

hammock 3y ago

> their prime contribution is simultaneously their most cynical and most useful: they navigate sclerotic bureaucracies, locate the people who know the answer, and then present the answer to decision-makers in a way that cuts through organizational politics and saves executive face. Is this not a description of a successful middle manager inside the org as well?

primax 3y ago
The middle manager has the opposite set of incentives. They want to solidify and grow their position inside the company, which often isn't in line with what is the best outcome for the company. This is the principal agent problem and is the root cause of this issue.

Anticlockwise 3y ago

This is true of the big name consultants where they're just sending new Ivy grads into the org. Small consultancy shops can be really useful to smaller orgs when: 1. The consultants are ex or current operators who actually know something 2. Those smaller orgs can't afford that level of talent full time.

divbzero 3y ago

> They are institutionally incapable of finding the already-existing answer within themselves. Or sometimes, as OP mentions, they have the answer already but need consultants for political cover to implement the solution.

setr 3y ago

Only had to do it a few times, but exactly my experience. The main one was spending ~3 months and speaking to ~40 people in order to write 2 rest APIs in about 300 python LoC. It was a minor integration between 4 different services owned by different groups, with no one knowing anything about any system/functionality outside a very small slice of the domain they controlled. At best they could point me to another person to ask, with every question taking a minimum of three levels of indirection to resolve. They were fully aware of the situation too; utterly shocked we managed to close it out in those 3 months. They had more than enough software developers and knowledge to do it themselves — my only value add was piercing the veil, navigating through all their compartmentalized knowledge to get a straight answer