Having been in the trenches of various startups and bigcorps, and having interfaced with multiple consultants along the way over the decades, there's an insidio

Having been in the trenches of various startups and bigcorps, and having interfaced with multiple consultants along the way over the decades, there's an insidious pattern I've observed, especially over the last 10 years. Consultants, no matter how polished their decks or refined their methodologies, often seem to be selling a form of abstracted advice. They've taken a page out of the growth hacker / patrick mckenzie playbook, but without the authenticity nor the qualifications to back up their advice: commoditizing broad-strokes strategies and repackaging them for a premium. And there's the glaring detachment from day-to-day operations. Consultants offer overarching guidance while skipping the nuance There's also this consistent overemphasis on bigcorp-style "best practices" checklists. In the world of startups, where innovation and disruption are celebrated, these canned best practices can be the antithesis of genuine growth. As someone smarter than me once said, startups flourish not by following the well-trodden path, but by blazing their own. Perhaps most frustrating about consultants is the temporal nature of their involvement. The transient "parachute in, advice, parachute out" / garbage in - garbage out strategy leaves startups grappling with the real-world implementation of sometimes nebulous strategies, and many organizations in utter shambles if allowed to run amoc To be clear, i'm not branding all consultants under this shadow, and this might be a bit harsh after some recent negative experiences. There are some genuinely talented individuals doing consulting work and some who genuinely add value. But the increasing commoditization of startup advice and the corporatization of the field, where every consultant seems to have a canned playbook, does make one wonder: at what point does advice become noise? Also, for those who've found genuine value in consultants or who haven't noticed these trends I described, would love to hear your counterpoints. Maybe I am just stuck on the dark side of the moon