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1) Your ideas are bad. 2) Spreadsheets exist. 3) No-one cares about your marketing copy. 4) No-one finds your c-suite babble inspirational. This is almost p
by highwaylights 3y ago
1) Your ideas are bad.
2) Spreadsheets exist.
3) No-one cares about your marketing copy.
4) No-one finds your c-suite babble inspirational.
This is almost perfect input to an LLM exactly because of how low value it is in the first place.
- djtango 3y agoHa it's fun to dunk on management consultants but I think the magic is they are like pop music producers. Somehow they're able to make the C suite hoover up LLM shovelware the same way top producers can take super obvious music and sell I V vi IV but when we try the same chords it's uninspired and no one wants to listen to it
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoOr, you have a break out hit like the Spice Girls. If it was so bad, then why do people listen? There is still a market. Does the market suck? Full of idiots? Your argument ends up being that successful things are bad, because humans are just idiots and thus if something is successful it is because it is just liked by idiots. As much as I might agree generally, it doesn't get you far.
- fragmede 3y agoBack then, payola meant that people listened whatever the labels wanted to make popular. it's very much an intentional, manufacturered factory.
- warkdarrior 3y agoHoney, everything is an "intentional, manufactured factory". Or do you just wake up every morning and say to yourself "let me type some random code and see what kind of software comes out"??
- norir 3y ago> Your argument ends up being that successful things are bad, because humans are just idiots and thus if something is successful it is because it is just liked by idiots. I mean I'm not sure that this is that far from the truth in some domains, though it depends on how you define idiocy. There is, for example, a market for demolition derbies. Of course all of us are idiots in some ways so we should be careful about whom we disparage.
- pydry 3y agoThe magic is in: A) Forming cross company cliques (a lot of C suite is ex consultant and they scratch each others' backs). B) ego stroking and typical sales ("this executive is a visionary who must be furnished with top quality steak and strippers") C) Letting you know on the sly what their other customers are doing that seems to be working. D) Providing industrial grade ass cover for decisions that the C suite want to make but are afraid to make by themselves (like layoffs).
- jamiegreen 3y agoDon’t underestimate the ass covering. I recon 60% of management consulting work is just to ass cover for a director with no conviction
- pydry 3y agoYeah, I think that's the majority of the grunt work done by junior consultants. I don't doubt that if the high level decision agreed upon is "more layoffs because AI" and they were asked for a 60 page report to justify it that ChatGPT would help inordinately in fleshing it out with something that sounds fairly plausible.
- ghaff 3y agoThere's a lot of boilerplate that actually takes quite a while to write from scratch. If the people involved have a pretty good idea in their heads of what fundamentals are fairly sensible and which are probably sort of irrelevant or even wrong, something like ChatGPT is actually pretty good at churning out at least a decent pre-draft that can save quite a bit of time. I've used it a fair bit for introductory background that I can certainly clean up faster than I could put together from scratch.
- corysama 3y agoThe more expensive the cover the better. “I paid a world-class consulting consultant company top dollar to vet this idea and they produced ton of documents about how great it was. And, yet it failed. But, I’m not at fault here. What more would you have had me do?” There was an article on HN years ago about top grade from Harvard-like schools being sucked into consulting companies and discovering their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear.
- mlinhares 3y agoIt’s insane that people think producing pop music is easy. Competing on the pop music market is a cutthroat business with a lot of competition and the good ones get their price back in gold. When Scorpions wanted to be resurrected they hired Desmond Child to produce them and he absolutely crushed. These people are very good at what they do and there are very few of them.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoIt’s also insane people think running a large business is easy, or that management consultants aren’t worth what they’re paid.
- jack_riminton 3y agoWorth here is the key word. I did an MBA which was specifically designed to get people into consulting, we did many consulting projects for real multinantionals and the key lesson was: "What does the hidden client want?" i.e. someone has been tasked with getting some consultants to come up with a suggestion, the key question however is what does THEIR boss want to hear. If you can work that out and give it to them then you've earned your 'worth'
- ghaff 3y agoWell, there's also the case where some internal engineering and product management think they have the right answer. But it may be a literally bet the company sort of thing. (Especially outside the software realm where once the bus has left the station it's not turning around.) Now I know there are people here whose reaction is that executive management should just shut up and listen to what the worker bees say. But it actually doesn't seem unreasonable to me (and I've been on the product management end of things in a case like this) to have some outside perspective from some people who are mostly pretty smart to nod their heads and say this seems sensible. As a bonus they create big spreadsheets that make the business planning types happy and keep them out from underfoot.
- hcks 3y ago
- im3w1l 3y agoSounds like you are tunnel visioning in your analysis of the music? There are so many more things to it than the chord progression. On the songwriting side, there's the lyrics which have both a phonetic and a semantic component. There's also the fact that many people will mishear the lyrics and their evaluation of them will be based on the mishearing. There's the melody. Does it work together with the chords to highlight the key parts of the lyrics? Then there's the performance where there are a million ways to stand out or flop. Loudness, timbre, timing and even detuning can all be used for expression.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoAre you trying to tell me that "starbucks lovers" was intentional?
- johndhi 3y agoOften the benefit of management consultants is they help the company feel better about firing or laying off people. Actually a robot would be perfect at that. No one likes doing layoffs but chat gpt won't mind