I normally try not to just rant via negative anecdotes, but on this topic, it is difficult not to.
I've repeatedly seen the pain of people who do well in consultancies but then go off and get leadership roles at a single company. As a general rule, they are horrible leaders. They'll talk well, make up pretty reports, build elegant org structures that also make up pretty reports, give awesome names to processes that sound like they'd make a real difference... they look and sound like great execs. But they never quite grasp what needs to happen to actually make the business work. So those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us.
Part of it is that they never learned what truly mattered. They have experience swooping in, fixing one pain point, and leaving. They never have to live with the long-term consequences of their decisions. So they never learned what to look for and what to seek or avoid. They never learned depth. They learned how to make a project look shiny for 6-18 months. How it impacted business in 5-7 years wasn't "in scope".
Obviously, this is all generalizations. I'm sure there are exceptional people who came from that environment. But that is exactly what they are - the exceptions to the rule.
I feel like there's pool of hucksters who work connections well, swoop in to management to fix big entrenched problems, and spend
* 6 months "learning about what's there" - and often hiring a bunch of their old buddies in to good-paying roles at their new company
* 6-12 months making seemingly big changes that amount to nothing (and they hit their cliff!)
* 6 or so months skating by until they find their next gig or get canned with a nice severance package
My last place had a guy screw up so horribly he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff. All while the rest of us kept things going and tried to make sense of the incomprehensible ramblings of the "team" he'd hired in to manage us.
Incidentally, I discovered that at least one of them had had great success wooing managers he met on https://www.platohq.com/, which seems to be a pay-to-play way to get past HR and interview gates. I should give it a try.
> My last place had a guy screw up so horribly he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff.
almost certainly a 12 mo. contract of some sorts, or else some sort of termination cause. maybe an "on retainer" fee.
point is, high level executives are in the same bell-curve as all other professions, and it's mostly a cartel.
Sounds about right. I know someone who's company hired VP that was ex-McKinsey, and then they hired a bunch of ex-McKinsey staff.
* offshore more dev internally
* about 12 months in, lots of things breaking, so move from offshore to outsource
* they try to have offshore hand off to outsource, offshore just stop working/caring
* with everything in the dump, they move to a different org or leave the company
It was worse than if they were just consultants, as now the people left to clean up the mess still cross paths with those that caused the problem.
I'm a former tech consultant who manages/ed lots of people since then. A few thoughts:
1) When I was a consultant and had to manage my own staff, they tend to come from a similar background, are extremely motivated, and a strong desire to do succeed. And if the staff doesn't do good, there's 10 more where that came from. That's a relatively easy situation to manage in; but it doesn't make you good at managing all the complexities that come from managing different levels, different backgrounds, and different levels of motivation. So I got a lot better at managing once I had to do it in a non consulting basis.
2) While a lot of consultants are good at making a project look shiny for 6-18 mos while not dealing with depth; there are a lot of organizations and staff that stare at their own navel for five years and tell me that they're doing depth; and never get anything over the finish line. Which is also not great. So there is some balance there and more organizations than not get stuck in the mud.
3) I've had some run ins with strategy consultants who come up with bonkers solutions to very difficult problems. And then hand it over to me to implement. And I go WTF - there are these 10 major problems with this approach. The strategy consultant tells me those are my problem. So I do the implementation and solve the 10 problems I saw and make it work. While I grouch about the strategy consultant... she had the fortitude to recommend the thing that got the client to the finish line... that I would never have the courage to recommend. That is great in a one off engagement, but probably pretty rough to work for.
This all reads vaguely like justification people often use for one off anecdotes trying to support a whole system. Obviously sometimes things work out, otherwise the system would completely collapse, it's just a matter of ratio and amount of grifters in the field making our (the "average" HN high level coder) lives miserable through sheer incompetence
I started my career in advisory consulting for a Big 4 firm, which should support the premise of the article - a lot of times you have kids fresh out of college telling you what to do. While I quickly left for a smaller consulting shop that helped grow my technical skills more, I eventually moved out of consulting altogether for the reason you outlined in your comment.
I got really good at working on the current engagement at hand, but I never got to stick around and see the impact - for better or for worse. I was missing that critical feedback loop that would help tell me if I needed to course correct what I was doing or how I was doing it. It's also really easy to get super deep into one type of engagement which can severely limit your career mobility if that skillset goes out of style or if companies around you don't have a need for it.
Switched to an engineering role after that and it's been much more constructive to my overall career.
I agree mostly with your comment and I've seen all of that too. The one thing I'd say though re
> those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us
There is something to be said for that - maybe it's not globally optimal but having people under you scrambling to make things work often ends up leading to better outcomes than some other styles of leadrship. It doesn't feel good to be the one working there, but it gets better results than a person who comes and tries to tell people what to do and they all just ignore him. I've seen that too (and been that person). There is some kind of aloofness that servers leaders well but enda up coming across as not doing anything and making everyone else scramble.
You make a good point. It can be generalized to say that a prescribed strategy will be successful proportional to how much of the overall org (internal, partners, etc) is invested in it. If the consultant is a one-man shop throwing out proclamations he will get very little traction. If he is a 10 man team digging into the actual systems he will get more. If he is a 100 man managed services embed he will get the most
This is really good, and matches up with my primary complaint from the execs I've seen hired out of consulting. They tend to be short timers. They often present wildly optimistic 3-5 year growth plans to the board knowing full well they won't be there in 3-5 years. The board almost never ties their compensation to these plans in any way, so the real thing they spend their time doing is hitting whatever short term metric their compensation is tied to, and these metrics are almost never well aligned with the long term interests of the company. I've been in a company that spent years digging out of the mess one of these guys left behind.
> They learned how to make a project look shiny for 6-18 months
This is the root cause of so many problems, execs, politicians and even employees now that personal branding has taken over for everyone have no interest in building things that last past their mandate. We are drowning in shiny novelty and yet organisations and infrastructure are crumbling.
This seems an apt description of management consulting trying to find its future.
It used to look at the trends of the past 5-10 years, and extrapolate or forward, especially mbas. That hasn’t exactly worked out so well the last 20y due to tech driven change outpacing most everything else.
The saying the tech is the easy part of the equation compared to people seems to put the management consulting lens at the top of the pyramid in some cases.
Sometimes it’s not negative and just the truth of many intelligent lived experiences. If business consulting can be subjective sometimes the response to it might have to be as well to resonate.
If it makes you feel better about your negative anecdotes I've had the same general experience. I've seen a lot of Business School -> Consulting -> Executive track guys come through various companies in my career and they've without exception been disasters.
There are a couple of general patterns I've seen with them. One is that they tend to be short timers. They are going to put together a 3 to 5 year growth plan with the full knowledge that they won't be here in 3 to 5 years. I've worked on more than a few of these were we present several different models with varying assumptions to a new exec and they then take those models and change them to use incredibly unrealistic assumptions to drive growth numbers that have no basis in reality or any chance of being achieved. This might be fine if the board then tied their options or bonuses to the model, but often they get tied to EBITDA or some similar metric instead.
The problem with using EBITDA is that there are a few ways to grow EBITDA. One, and the one you're going for with these big growth models, is top line revenue growth. The other is by cutting costs. Often cutting costs is much easier. Especially if you're only concerned with short term EBITDA growth, but it can also mean sacrificing long term growth. But these guys don't really care because they won't be there long term.
The company I’m working for now relies heavily on consulting and it’s awful. Almost complete lack of documentation for critical infrastructure. Minor decisions made that come with major costs like using EFS instead of EBS which skyrockets costs. When there is documentation for something, it’s so useless yet in-depth, like the manager needed to check off a “documentation” bullet point but didn’t read a single line of it.
Working here has given me so much experience on how to manage a project long-term that I probably could’ve never learned anywhere else lmao.
Oh god, I’ve also had to work with some of the worst consultants I’ve ever seen. It’s the first time in my entire career that I’ve ever been tempted to flame someone at work. Watching someone flop around like a fish out of water while trying to do some of the most basic shit is beyond maddening. The nerve of some of these people to try and correct me, too.
On the other side of this, as a dev, I find not having to live with the long term consequences of tech/product/process decisions a breath of fresh air. No longer need to obsess over every future “what if”…
Selfish? Maybe. But it reduces the cognitive load of an already mentally draining job and makes me happier on the job.
Given how short employees tend to stay at companies, long term impact seems to be a founder only concern.
As an employee, I simply don’t give a damn if I create 10 liabilities in 5 years as I won’t be there in 5 years. Creating $10 of future costs for $1 in profit is a great deal for me.
I want a quick buck, my bonus, and to move on to the next thing.
Yeah, but this will bite you as well when other people do it and you have to fix it. Or I guess you’ll always go look for low hanging fruit and run away from any responsibility/accountability forever. But even that bites back at some point or another when you run out of luck
There are many reasons to leave a company. Tech companies are frequently fundamentally unstable operations. In my opinion experience employee churn is more a matter of the environment than the individual and their plans.
I dont think many employee's have this mindset. This mindset would contribute to the issue and would be one that I would have not considered...so I thank you for your transparency.
I have worked with consultants from BCG, McKinsey and Bain, sometimes while at the same company. On balance they’re charming, intelligent people. In a magical world where I was a COO,CFO I would bar employing them immediately.
In a typical F500 setting strategy consultants aren’t on-hand to make anything better or improve anything meaningfully - in general consultants are on hand to validate a C or C-1’s personal belief and drive its execution. Why?
First, this is what keeps these companies around. You don’t keep a client by telling them they’re wrong or ignorant. Two, buying the big three name is essentially idea laundering. “It’s not a land grab, Bain said said we had to do it.” “McKinsey told us we had to hollow out that one plant town to survive!” They’re also an emotional refuge and a great backchannel. The BCG principal talks to the CEO weekly, you might not, good to be on their good side.
Look, I’m sure in certain niche, high-skill consultants (industrial process engineering?) are valuable. By random dart method they’ve probably driven a fair amount of value, but on average you should never let them in the door.
In certain niche areas "consulting" is just another way of saying "I've gone freelance". Management consulting (aka the people that will say "I'm a consultant!") is a different set of tires and almost always used for 'idea laundering' and plausible deniability as you said. A lot of them are fresh grads from renowned universities, "skilled" in powerpoint, and that's about it. The big firms hire them in droves to give their advice the appearance of "intellectual superiority". It's a well known source of jokes amongst management consultants.
>First, this is what keeps these companies around. You don’t keep a client by telling them they’re wrong or ignorant. Two, buying the big three name is essentially idea laundering
I completely agree with you, but if everyone knows this, then why does this ploy work?
Because long term strategic decisions require taking risks, and that means potentially missing out bonuses if it fails, and possibly getting fired.
Bringing in consultants essentially gives you the ability to say "we vetted it, and it sounds like a low-risk approach". This means you can sell it to the board, to other exec's, sell it to the rank and file, etc. And if it fails, you can blame it on KPMG or Bain or whoever. "Bain said it was cool" is a perfectly valid excuse.
Spending $300k to CYA and protect your $600k bonus is a terrible choice for the company but a fantastically rational choice for an individual executive.
I suspect because many executives want it to work. A benefit of arriving at very senior leadership is reduced personal risk for high-consequence failure. Consultants are part of that upside.
One can even avoid unpleasant disagreements with peers simply by hiring an equivalently prestigious firm and positioning the consultants to fight it out.
I've worked in more niche consulting where we brought in specific expertise and occasionally we crossed paths with McKinsey. It's true that they're not dumb and they're not out and out frauds, but it's really hard to see what kind of value they are even trying to bring. One of the biggest projects I ever worked on, we came in at the tail end of McKinsey consultation to do implementation on their strategy. We just redid their whole strategy and reset the execution process they had set even though our remit was just implementation. They had written down all this smart sounding stuff, but it was unworkable and really not fit to purpose.
And on the biggest existential question on the viability of their entire venture, I think they completely whiffed. Likely just told them what they wanted to hear so the project would move forward. Last I read, it has been an absolutely enormous write down for a company previously known for being invincible.
One project I was involved with, the value of the consultants was helping the clients work through their own process, because the client didn't fully understand the process themselves.
Did the consultants know the process? No! But they managed to extract the information from multiple people, combine it into an actual working process and present it back to the people and us, so we could actually implement any of it.
From working with a bunch of ex management consultants, this is their special sauce. They’re often good at first principles thinking, learning a domain rapidly, and they don’t have any emotional connection to things in the business (people, processes, etc).
This is a pretty good combination that is actually hard for many people to do, especially when you’re in the business trying to keep the lights on.
Not all management consultants are good of course, there is an awful lot of bullshit, but I’d hire from the pool for full time employees focused on improving processes or solving hard business problems.
Another thing about consultants is if you call up in the middle of the night and need a team in Singapore the next day and stay for two weeks to work on a crisis they’ll do it. FTE’s will laugh or quit.
There are quite a lot of businesses that need to hire consultants to implement the opinions of what to do from their employees. Management to employee communication has broken down to such an extent that the only way to bridge that gap is consultancy. Working out what to do and how to make progress is something consultancy is genuinely good at. The annoying part which only drives a deeper wedge is managements response to this is to have the consultancy implement what they found which just ensures future engagement will be a nightmare.
There is also the opposite. Management often decides what they want first and looks for justifications after the fact, and since their own people who have to deal with the consequences of that decision will not support it, and the data doesn't support it, then they hire consultants until they get one who doesn't care about what's real and gives them the justification to support it.
That is when they roughly know what they want, if they don't they hire an innovation consultant and organise competitions and grands for companies and universities to come up with work.
From my experience that is very very common. Client's hardly ever understand their own processes, everyone knows their little slice of it and where to hand-off work but nobody groks the big picture.
I did an MBA at a school which was basically a conveyer belt to get people into consulting (I didn't, couldn't stand it and I went into PM and engineering). The main thing they teach you is to "identify the hidden customer" i.e. the person who hired you to do a project will have a boss they're trying to please, figure out what *they* want. If you create a proposal which pleases them, you've done well. Note that none of this has any relation to whether what you're proposing makes sense or is a good solution.
Maybe the best course of action is establish your terms on that basis -- "if you hire us for a particular project or problem, we will not exclude solutions/responses that highlight or challenge underlying systemic causes outside the scope of the engagement."
If not, then the advice you got could be summarized as "figure out what you're being paid to do and do it."
The risk with management consultants is that they tell management what they want to hear. This is great for customer satisfaction and repeat business. It's just that occasionally this causes real problems.
> The risk with management consultants is that they tell management what they want to hear.
This is a feature. You get outside expertise that recommends cost cutting and reducing staff. It’s not your fault though, the expensive consultants with the nice suits were the ones recommending it!
Having seen the hiring model of a lot of these companies, this shouldn't surprise anyone.
A lot of Big-4/management consultancy, revolves around hiring bright young people straight out of University and sending them into large companies with, at best, a canned methodology, and access to some more experienced people to ask questions of.
As someone who works at a big 4, you're quite right. They're huge employers of University graduates, however these graduates are usually supported by seniors, managers or partners. Each piece of work has a team around it.
Yes you might have junior staff coming in to ask questions, but there is always someone more senior briefing the junior and reviewing their work.
The growth that a graduate experiences in the first 2 years of their career is enormous.
It's also very important to distinguish between consulting and assurance services. Both within a big 4, offer very different services and offerings.
We’ve used McKinsey on a couple of projects. What you describe is exactly what we saw happen and the results were as expected from bright, motivated young workers being advised and led by more experienced senior staff: quite good.
The only “knock” I could see is the presentations could be a bit formulaic and slightly too polished, which is hardly damning.
"The only “knock” I could see is the presentations..."
The presentations? Is that all you got for it? Is that the only or the most important outcome? I would say that's nothing. It's the actual implementation that counts and is difficult. It's as if a consultant would present in a powerpoint how to implement a piece of software and then leave it up to you to implement it and you have to hit and solve all the road blocks along the way. And on top of it they come up with that presentation without even having implementing anything similar themselves.
I do consulting. I’m always confused when people state that hiring new grads from
top universities, having established frameworks, and having experienced people lead projects is a bad thing.
On a website that often complains about how difficult it is for graduates or juniors to get jobs in tech. Big 4 firms especially are well known for hiring people straight out of University.
Surprising to see how people react when a company does use lots of junior staff. The difference being is that these junior staff are client facing as opposed to being behind the scenes.
If the chargeout rates and quality of frameworks and level of oversight is right, then fine.
Unfortunately..... that's often (IME ofc) not the case. The financial model and incentives for these companies is to staff with as junior people as they can get away with.
I was tempted to feel bad for Hertz but then, on the flipside, what kind of deranged numbskull do you have to be to hire a bloody management consultancy[0] to build you a website and mobile app?
[0] Yes, yes, I know Accenture have developers and development teams, but look at their history with publicised software development projects: it's not exactly a road paved with glittering diamonds of crystallised glory. I'm not suggesting Accenture are irredeemably awful at everything they do but it's evidently the case that software development isn't really their oeuvre even though they do seem to do quite a lot of it.
Exactly. That's so many levels of poor reasoning that it's hard to feel bad for anyone, other than maybe the developers whose work never saw the light of day.
Plenty of people, including those with prestigious titles, who are detached from the reality of software development. In some cases they "hire some geeks" to solve a problem a big company already solved, and like in this case there are other times where they hire some big company with an official sounding name because, surely, they can get things done.
Honestly, it gives me hope that my job as a web developer won't be wiped out by AI too soon. There's enough foolish management types out there hiring the wrong humans to work on futile projects that I figure I have at least another 5 years before I have to resort to food delivery or basket weaving.
Scale. I know of large banks that use Accenture because they can spin up 10 scrum teams overnight when they can’t attract that much (and good) talent themselves. Hertz is a pretty big company with a big transnational footprint. It’s not a Wordpress web site. That said, 32M $ for nothing is still bad.
I'm going to take the other side here -- there are very legitimate cases where consultancies make a lot of sense: cases where you need to do something that requires expertise way out of your business domain.
Example 1: Pharma company wants to roll out SAP Payroll system
Example 2: Telco wants to roll out billing system
The problem with these situations is that:
- SAP experts rarely want to work at a Pharma company
- Billing system experts rarely want to work at a Telco
- The company should not hire -- and then after a year, fire -- workers after a specific job (e.g., SAP implementation) is done. Also, if the company is in the middle of nowhere, and the job is only for a year or two, why would anyone relocate there?
- You cant become an expert by being at one company and seeing it done (and fail) once. You become an expert by doing it at many places
- You cant hire a bunch of recent grads and do these projects, they require mentorship from people who have done these projects many times. The consultancies provide that.
> you need to do something that requires expertise
That's the way it should be - the problem is it's impossible to vet the consultancies that actually have that expertise against the consultancies that claim the experience and are good at using smoke and mirrors to trick somebody into thinking they have it.
Depends on the competency. I'd venture Accenture has done half of all SAP major implementations in the world. For popular software packages, there are typically project testimonials from dozens of other fortune 500 companies, and there is usually a "Gold-Partner" type guarantee from the software vendor themselves. When the consultancy messes up, they risk losing the Partner label or tier.
Obviously this works for popular packages with defined success criteria, but that is a lot of business for consultancies already, and i'd argue, a great reason to go with a consultancy.
Readit News
I've repeatedly seen the pain of people who do well in consultancies but then go off and get leadership roles at a single company. As a general rule, they are horrible leaders. They'll talk well, make up pretty reports, build elegant org structures that also make up pretty reports, give awesome names to processes that sound like they'd make a real difference... they look and sound like great execs. But they never quite grasp what needs to happen to actually make the business work. So those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us.
Part of it is that they never learned what truly mattered. They have experience swooping in, fixing one pain point, and leaving. They never have to live with the long-term consequences of their decisions. So they never learned what to look for and what to seek or avoid. They never learned depth. They learned how to make a project look shiny for 6-18 months. How it impacted business in 5-7 years wasn't "in scope".
Obviously, this is all generalizations. I'm sure there are exceptional people who came from that environment. But that is exactly what they are - the exceptions to the rule.
* 6 months "learning about what's there" - and often hiring a bunch of their old buddies in to good-paying roles at their new company * 6-12 months making seemingly big changes that amount to nothing (and they hit their cliff!) * 6 or so months skating by until they find their next gig or get canned with a nice severance package
My last place had a guy screw up so horribly he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff. All while the rest of us kept things going and tried to make sense of the incomprehensible ramblings of the "team" he'd hired in to manage us.
Incidentally, I discovered that at least one of them had had great success wooing managers he met on https://www.platohq.com/, which seems to be a pay-to-play way to get past HR and interview gates. I should give it a try.
almost certainly a 12 mo. contract of some sorts, or else some sort of termination cause. maybe an "on retainer" fee.
point is, high level executives are in the same bell-curve as all other professions, and it's mostly a cartel.
* offshore more dev internally * about 12 months in, lots of things breaking, so move from offshore to outsource * they try to have offshore hand off to outsource, offshore just stop working/caring * with everything in the dump, they move to a different org or leave the company
It was worse than if they were just consultants, as now the people left to clean up the mess still cross paths with those that caused the problem.
1) When I was a consultant and had to manage my own staff, they tend to come from a similar background, are extremely motivated, and a strong desire to do succeed. And if the staff doesn't do good, there's 10 more where that came from. That's a relatively easy situation to manage in; but it doesn't make you good at managing all the complexities that come from managing different levels, different backgrounds, and different levels of motivation. So I got a lot better at managing once I had to do it in a non consulting basis.
2) While a lot of consultants are good at making a project look shiny for 6-18 mos while not dealing with depth; there are a lot of organizations and staff that stare at their own navel for five years and tell me that they're doing depth; and never get anything over the finish line. Which is also not great. So there is some balance there and more organizations than not get stuck in the mud.
3) I've had some run ins with strategy consultants who come up with bonkers solutions to very difficult problems. And then hand it over to me to implement. And I go WTF - there are these 10 major problems with this approach. The strategy consultant tells me those are my problem. So I do the implementation and solve the 10 problems I saw and make it work. While I grouch about the strategy consultant... she had the fortitude to recommend the thing that got the client to the finish line... that I would never have the courage to recommend. That is great in a one off engagement, but probably pretty rough to work for.
I got really good at working on the current engagement at hand, but I never got to stick around and see the impact - for better or for worse. I was missing that critical feedback loop that would help tell me if I needed to course correct what I was doing or how I was doing it. It's also really easy to get super deep into one type of engagement which can severely limit your career mobility if that skillset goes out of style or if companies around you don't have a need for it.
Switched to an engineering role after that and it's been much more constructive to my overall career.
> those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us
There is something to be said for that - maybe it's not globally optimal but having people under you scrambling to make things work often ends up leading to better outcomes than some other styles of leadrship. It doesn't feel good to be the one working there, but it gets better results than a person who comes and tries to tell people what to do and they all just ignore him. I've seen that too (and been that person). There is some kind of aloofness that servers leaders well but enda up coming across as not doing anything and making everyone else scramble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4CNB80SRc
This is the root cause of so many problems, execs, politicians and even employees now that personal branding has taken over for everyone have no interest in building things that last past their mandate. We are drowning in shiny novelty and yet organisations and infrastructure are crumbling.
It used to look at the trends of the past 5-10 years, and extrapolate or forward, especially mbas. That hasn’t exactly worked out so well the last 20y due to tech driven change outpacing most everything else.
The saying the tech is the easy part of the equation compared to people seems to put the management consulting lens at the top of the pyramid in some cases.
Sometimes it’s not negative and just the truth of many intelligent lived experiences. If business consulting can be subjective sometimes the response to it might have to be as well to resonate.
There are a couple of general patterns I've seen with them. One is that they tend to be short timers. They are going to put together a 3 to 5 year growth plan with the full knowledge that they won't be here in 3 to 5 years. I've worked on more than a few of these were we present several different models with varying assumptions to a new exec and they then take those models and change them to use incredibly unrealistic assumptions to drive growth numbers that have no basis in reality or any chance of being achieved. This might be fine if the board then tied their options or bonuses to the model, but often they get tied to EBITDA or some similar metric instead.
The problem with using EBITDA is that there are a few ways to grow EBITDA. One, and the one you're going for with these big growth models, is top line revenue growth. The other is by cutting costs. Often cutting costs is much easier. Especially if you're only concerned with short term EBITDA growth, but it can also mean sacrificing long term growth. But these guys don't really care because they won't be there long term.
Working here has given me so much experience on how to manage a project long-term that I probably could’ve never learned anywhere else lmao.
Oh god, I’ve also had to work with some of the worst consultants I’ve ever seen. It’s the first time in my entire career that I’ve ever been tempted to flame someone at work. Watching someone flop around like a fish out of water while trying to do some of the most basic shit is beyond maddening. The nerve of some of these people to try and correct me, too.
Deep breath
Selfish? Maybe. But it reduces the cognitive load of an already mentally draining job and makes me happier on the job.
As an employee, I simply don’t give a damn if I create 10 liabilities in 5 years as I won’t be there in 5 years. Creating $10 of future costs for $1 in profit is a great deal for me.
I want a quick buck, my bonus, and to move on to the next thing.
Sucks to be the guy cooperating in this scenario, but it's the only way to start clawing things back from the brink.
Deleted Comment
https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI?t=15m20s
In a typical F500 setting strategy consultants aren’t on-hand to make anything better or improve anything meaningfully - in general consultants are on hand to validate a C or C-1’s personal belief and drive its execution. Why?
First, this is what keeps these companies around. You don’t keep a client by telling them they’re wrong or ignorant. Two, buying the big three name is essentially idea laundering. “It’s not a land grab, Bain said said we had to do it.” “McKinsey told us we had to hollow out that one plant town to survive!” They’re also an emotional refuge and a great backchannel. The BCG principal talks to the CEO weekly, you might not, good to be on their good side.
Look, I’m sure in certain niche, high-skill consultants (industrial process engineering?) are valuable. By random dart method they’ve probably driven a fair amount of value, but on average you should never let them in the door.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2022/11/25/french...
I completely agree with you, but if everyone knows this, then why does this ploy work?
Bringing in consultants essentially gives you the ability to say "we vetted it, and it sounds like a low-risk approach". This means you can sell it to the board, to other exec's, sell it to the rank and file, etc. And if it fails, you can blame it on KPMG or Bain or whoever. "Bain said it was cool" is a perfectly valid excuse.
Spending $300k to CYA and protect your $600k bonus is a terrible choice for the company but a fantastically rational choice for an individual executive.
One can even avoid unpleasant disagreements with peers simply by hiring an equivalently prestigious firm and positioning the consultants to fight it out.
And on the biggest existential question on the viability of their entire venture, I think they completely whiffed. Likely just told them what they wanted to hear so the project would move forward. Last I read, it has been an absolutely enormous write down for a company previously known for being invincible.
Did the consultants know the process? No! But they managed to extract the information from multiple people, combine it into an actual working process and present it back to the people and us, so we could actually implement any of it.
This is a pretty good combination that is actually hard for many people to do, especially when you’re in the business trying to keep the lights on.
Not all management consultants are good of course, there is an awful lot of bullshit, but I’d hire from the pool for full time employees focused on improving processes or solving hard business problems.
In most cases, at the outset they don’t have more knowledge than the client though.
Disclosure: I used to work at McKinsey
Its such a common theme in modern businesses.
If not, then the advice you got could be summarized as "figure out what you're being paid to do and do it."
McKinsey in particular have a lot of controversy. So much so that googling for "mckinsey controversy" to refresh my memory brought in several different scandals from the one I was thinking of. Here's them and the French state: https://www.philonomist.com/en/article/mckinsey-origins-scan... , which seems similar to what the OP article is talking about. Here's a more general summary: https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-many-times-mckinsey-ha...
The risk with management consultants is that they tell management what they want to hear. This is great for customer satisfaction and repeat business. It's just that occasionally this causes real problems.
This is a feature. You get outside expertise that recommends cost cutting and reducing staff. It’s not your fault though, the expensive consultants with the nice suits were the ones recommending it!
A lot of Big-4/management consultancy, revolves around hiring bright young people straight out of University and sending them into large companies with, at best, a canned methodology, and access to some more experienced people to ask questions of.
Yes you might have junior staff coming in to ask questions, but there is always someone more senior briefing the junior and reviewing their work.
The growth that a graduate experiences in the first 2 years of their career is enormous.
It's also very important to distinguish between consulting and assurance services. Both within a big 4, offer very different services and offerings.
The only “knock” I could see is the presentations could be a bit formulaic and slightly too polished, which is hardly damning.
The presentations? Is that all you got for it? Is that the only or the most important outcome? I would say that's nothing. It's the actual implementation that counts and is difficult. It's as if a consultant would present in a powerpoint how to implement a piece of software and then leave it up to you to implement it and you have to hit and solve all the road blocks along the way. And on top of it they come up with that presentation without even having implementing anything similar themselves.
I love hiring new grads.
Surprising to see how people react when a company does use lots of junior staff. The difference being is that these junior staff are client facing as opposed to being behind the scenes.
Unfortunately..... that's often (IME ofc) not the case. The financial model and incentives for these companies is to staff with as junior people as they can get away with.
https://thehustle.co/hertz-accenture-consulting-website-laws...
[0] Yes, yes, I know Accenture have developers and development teams, but look at their history with publicised software development projects: it's not exactly a road paved with glittering diamonds of crystallised glory. I'm not suggesting Accenture are irredeemably awful at everything they do but it's evidently the case that software development isn't really their oeuvre even though they do seem to do quite a lot of it.
Plenty of people, including those with prestigious titles, who are detached from the reality of software development. In some cases they "hire some geeks" to solve a problem a big company already solved, and like in this case there are other times where they hire some big company with an official sounding name because, surely, they can get things done.
Honestly, it gives me hope that my job as a web developer won't be wiped out by AI too soon. There's enough foolish management types out there hiring the wrong humans to work on futile projects that I figure I have at least another 5 years before I have to resort to food delivery or basket weaving.
Example 1: Pharma company wants to roll out SAP Payroll system
Example 2: Telco wants to roll out billing system
The problem with these situations is that:
- SAP experts rarely want to work at a Pharma company
- Billing system experts rarely want to work at a Telco
- The company should not hire -- and then after a year, fire -- workers after a specific job (e.g., SAP implementation) is done. Also, if the company is in the middle of nowhere, and the job is only for a year or two, why would anyone relocate there?
- You cant become an expert by being at one company and seeing it done (and fail) once. You become an expert by doing it at many places
- You cant hire a bunch of recent grads and do these projects, they require mentorship from people who have done these projects many times. The consultancies provide that.
That's the way it should be - the problem is it's impossible to vet the consultancies that actually have that expertise against the consultancies that claim the experience and are good at using smoke and mirrors to trick somebody into thinking they have it.
https://www.sap.com/partners/find.html
https://pf-prod-sapit-partner-prod.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand...
Obviously this works for popular packages with defined success criteria, but that is a lot of business for consultancies already, and i'd argue, a great reason to go with a consultancy.