[HN Gopher] A retiring consultant's advice on consultants
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A retiring consultant's advice on consultants
Author : samizdis
Score : 132 points
Date : 2023-08-21 09:40 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| hammock wrote:
| https://archive.is/Slqwj
| some_furry wrote:
| Thank you and everyone else that shares a convenient paywall-
| busting archive link on HN front page stories. It always makes
| me smile to see them.
| hammock wrote:
| We used to have them built into the context bar for every
| submission - it said "web." But the mod removed them because
| people asked for it (for some reason?)
| TrackerFF wrote:
| We worked with a McKinsey consultant not too long ago, seemed
| like a nice fella.
|
| Didn't say much, mostly showed up and took notes during meetings
| (typical vague "digital transformation" project from the
| executives).
|
| Probably cost a fortune, despite being the youngest in the room.
| peteradio wrote:
| If you found out who is father was and where he was from I'm
| sure it'd make perfect sense.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah this is pretty spot on. I didn't work for one of the big
| consultancies, but it was pretty much the same playbook in the
| three different places I worked. As one of the underlings, I
| always tried to do good work for clients, but in the end I don't
| think it was usually worth it for them to pay us as much as they
| did. It's a weird world, where the value you provide is one of
| the following:
|
| 1. Using up someone's budget, because they don't get to keep it
| and want to look like they're doing something with it.
|
| 2. Doing a bunch of pretend work so you can come to the
| conclusion the VP wanted in the first place.
|
| 3. Being sent in to die on a doomed project, so you can take the
| blame for it.
|
| Eventually, you look back at your career and notice nothing
| you've ever worked on made a difference to anybody. The paycheck
| is nice, but there are other places to get one just like it.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| > 2. Doing a bunch of pretend work so you can come to the
| conclusion the VP wanted in the first place.
|
| I was once a contractor at a company that had been acquired
| twice. The Finance lead all off a sudden had a big team of
| people, and he lacked the imagination to use them effectively.
| His team were a waste of space. His solution was to hire a
| consultancy to 'benchmark' the size of the Finance team. Guess
| what they found...all of the acquired people had to go!
|
| I felt he lacked the backbone to just make a decision himself.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Seems like definitely a CYA move. Some things seem
| intuitively 'right' but following that intuition isn't always
| necessarily the best move. But right or wrong, many folks
| want a CYA card, and hiring external consulting group is
| usually it.
| vsareto wrote:
| >Eventually, you look back at your career and notice nothing
| you've ever worked on made a difference to anybody. The
| paycheck is nice, but there are other places to get one just
| like it.
|
| Can't tell you how much motivation was lost after seeing my
| billed rate to a client vs. what the consultancy was paying me.
| They should bill higher than what they pay me for sure, but 6
| times my rate? I was only doing the bare minimum after seeing
| that.
| jtriangle wrote:
| >I don't think it was usually worth it for them to pay us as
| much as they did.
|
| Do understand that, most businesses have zero way to actually
| hire competent employees outside of their areas of expertise.
| So if a bread factory wants a CRM spun up to manage their sales
| and orders, they don't know where to start in terms of finding
| that sort of talent, and a consultant is a far, far safer
| option for realizing their goals. The realization of a goal
| holds nontrivial value, which is what a consulting firm is
| billing them for.
|
| Could they do it cheaper? Yes, absolutely, but, they'd also
| need to get lucky, and, understandably, luck isn't really
| something most successful businesses are willing to leverage.
| pc86 wrote:
| It's amazing how much money there is to be made in simply using
| up someone's budget in a way that's "good enough" so they can
| keep that money next year.
| mberning wrote:
| Using consultants as a potential fall guy for some big and risky
| initiative is extremely common in my experience.
| pbj1968 wrote:
| Every consulting experience ever:
|
| They all work at "top" firms and have "elite" educations. All of
| them. Seeing it in this thread.
|
| After we sign the contract, "the problem is far, far greater than
| we were led to believe, and the solution is more consulting."
|
| The HR solution is always the opposite of what we're doing. Title
| drift? Reduce titles! College grads have same titles as seasoned
| veterans? More titles!
|
| The operational solution is always the same bundle of crap they
| sell to everyone else, but they'll tell you it's custom. Good
| luck getting any fixes in a reasonable time frame or expense.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Strongest defense of consulting I've read
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| 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.
| nness wrote:
| 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...)
| Anticlockwise wrote:
| 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.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| divbzero wrote:
| > _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.
| mousetree wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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.
| manmal wrote:
| 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.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I am a software "consultant". In reality, I just end up an FTE on
| a project for 2-4 years. Definitely self-complimenting, but
| that's what happens if you actually do your job until the company
| grows enough to finally replace your team with 10 teams.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| The same holds for marketing and advertising, which makes sense
| if you consider an agency to be a consultancy.
|
| The pattern I've seen repeated everywhere: A genuinely
| knowledgeable expert sells their expertise via online content,
| books, and seminars. This attracts the clients. The expert will
| attend a few key client meetings. But then, unbeknownst to the
| client, they disappear and leave the work to juniors.
|
| This is so ubiquitous that, earlier this year, I decided to
| change my career aspirations. I'd long wanted to be an agency
| leader, but the pattern above was repeated at every successful
| agency I came across, and it's not something I can stomach any
| longer.
|
| So, I decided to put myself out there as the expert. I write a
| newsletter. I published a book. I'm pursuing speaking
| engagements. Just like the other consultants do.
|
| However, I don't pass my clients onto anyone else. They're hiring
| me. They were sold on my expertise, so my expertise is what
| they're going to get.
|
| When a project grows too big for one person to handle, or when
| there are aspects of the work that don't justify my high hourly
| rate, I transparently inform my clients of my intention of
| bringing on freelancers for those aspects. It's all done out in
| the open.
|
| And while I do charge a markup on the work my subcontractors do
| on my behalf, it works out to far less than my hourly rate, and
| my clients are fully aware of the markup being charged and what
| value I'm providing in return (i.e.: supervision).
|
| All of which is to say: I think consultants can provide
| incredible value. (I know, I know... a consultant who believes on
| consulting. Shocking!) But you do have to be careful, and oddly
| enough, the bigger and more reputable the consulting firm, the
| less I would trust them. The business rewards bad players.
| moonchrome wrote:
| You're still overseeing other subcontractors. My next step is
| likely in a similar direction but I want to start out with a
| couple of former colleagues in more of a partnership role.
|
| IMO being responsible for other people is tiring and
| unrewarding, I just want a structure to tackle interesting
| projects without a middleman.
| ghaff wrote:
| You run into scalability limits pretty quickly. Unless you
| are truly the world expert on weird ball bearing failures or
| whatever. Or can genuinely speak or do consulting days that
| clients will line up to pay you $20K+ per day to do. (And
| even that isn't all that much absent a pretty full dance
| card. Just how the math works.)
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| > IMO being responsible for other people is tiring and
| unrewarding, I just want a structure to tackle interesting
| projects without a middleman.
|
| You're not wrong, but that's also only a problem to you, not
| the client. So it's not an ethics question, but a matter of
| what you enjoy doing. All the power to you if you sort that
| out.
|
| If I put myself in the shoes of my clients: They want their
| problems to be solved in a cost-effective way. They don't
| mind paying a premium for genuine expertise, because they see
| the value. But they WOULD have a problem paying that premium
| if it turned out that I was quietly passing on the work to
| people without the same expertise.
|
| Most projects don't need expertise for every aspect, or can't
| justify the budget needed for true expertise at each level.
|
| For example, let's say you're building a website. There are
| several functions involved in that:
|
| - Planning
|
| - Information Architecture
|
| - Copywriting
|
| - Design
|
| - Front-End Development
|
| - Back-End Development
|
| - Infrastructure
|
| If your client is a major corporation, there's an argument to
| be made for expertise at every one of those levels. So they
| pay for that expertise. But what's galling is how rarely they
| actually receive that expertise, because even though they get
| face time with the experts, the work is being done by
| juniors, often without the client's awareness.
|
| If your client is a small company, the problem isn't with
| getting the expertise they paid for, but with only paying for
| the expertise they actually need.
|
| The advice I give to my clients is to focus on the planning
| and copywriting, because those, in my opinion and experience,
| are what make the biggest impact on whether or not your
| website will be an effective sales tool for your company.
| Invest there first, and if you need to hire juniors for the
| rest, hire juniors for the rest. Or hire me and I'll hire the
| juniors so you don't need to worry about it.
|
| What agencies and consulting firms do, however, is charge
| expertise-level rates for every aspect of the project, even
| though 80% of it is being done by junior-level people. This,
| to me, is dishonest, and is what I'm trying to avoid as a
| consultant.
| ulu21 wrote:
| I worked at an MBB for a few years. With CS background, mostly on
| digitalization topics.
|
| Never before did I spend so much energy into truly trying to
| solve the problems our clients had. More than once, our
| recommendation was to go along with an idea that was already
| present within their organisation (presented sharply and as
| factual as possible).
|
| But it also happened that we recommended going a completely
| different way to whatever their CEO, the VPs, middle managers or
| employees wanted, because we discovered they were so entrenched
| in their way of thinking. I am grateful to have had the privilege
| to do this work.
| hdicke wrote:
| [flagged]
| literalnorth wrote:
| Small consultants, like me, are a world apart from what is
| otherwise an accurate depiction of big consulting. My firm and
| many of my friendly competitors, work on specific questions or
| projects - do it cheaply, quickly and within scope.
|
| Sometimes you need the resources size brings to the project, but
| absent mergers, migrations and enterprise software launches -
| small consulting is probably the better choice.
|
| Also, the same can be said of big law and big accounting - albeit
| on the legal side senior partners often bring more value.
| extr wrote:
| Small consultants can be worth their weight in gold, it's
| unfortunate the stereotypical experience with big firms colors
| the perception of the entire engagement model. Particularly for
| niches where you have no experience or existing best practices.
| Simply having someone in the room who has seen a half dozen
| solutions to XYZ and knows the common pitfalls is worth the
| cost, let alone the actual labor/execution.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I'm a partner in one of these firms, clients know they can
| hire a small team of us and turn us loose (literally their
| secret weapon). We will gather requirements, apply our domain
| knowledge to refine processes, and build a complete product
| before the business can even work out the high level
| agreements. If this is even possible with a body shop, it is
| not, then you need to tell them every single thing that needs
| considered and implemented. We just run with it and get it
| done. Our rate is too low...about 20-30% higher than the
| "body shops."
| gustavus wrote:
| So after years of being an engineer there is a part of me that is
| entranced by the idea of being a quick talking, sharp suited
| business consultant. Anyone whose been one of those "management
| consultants" have any advice for moving from tech to get picked
| up by one of the big firms?
|
| EDIT: As for the why, I've been working as an engineer at large
| organizations so long I figure it might be nice to be on the
| other side of the consulting table and be considered an "expert"
| instead of the obnoxious "human resource" constantly whining
| about obnoxious reality. It get's tiring, and it seems nice to be
| one of the slick suited bad guys.
| debacle wrote:
| It is only glamorous to other people. There is an enormity to
| being the Jon Hamm that takes a toll. You are playing an
| archetype in a three act play.
|
| Being picked up by a big firm is easy, they are always hiring.
| Once you're in, you can pivot into the sales process,
| especially if you can hunt your own kills.
| bequanna wrote:
| Find someone in your network who already works there and get
| them to refer you for an open position.
| crazygringo wrote:
| From what I know, they mostly hire people at select elite
| campuses who are graduating from either their bachelor's, MBA,
| or PhD program. They hold recruiting events and you show up.
|
| I believe it's quite difficult to get in any other way, but I'd
| be curious if anyone knows people who were working at another
| job and simply applied and got interviewed and a job.
| tootie wrote:
| This is Big 4 consulting at it's finest. I saw Accenture and
| McKinsey fleece a lot of big companies and government agencies
| with these tactics. Some were downright underhanded and
| deceitful.
|
| There is also a world of actual expert consulting. I worked in
| this space for a long time and while we definitely sniffed for
| opportunities to increase our scope we mostly did it by building
| reputation and delivering exceptional work. It's really, really
| hard to tell the difference from a pitch though.
| spicebox wrote:
| Neither Accenture nor McKinsey are Big 4. The Big 4 are PwC,
| EY, KPMG, and Deloitte. Despite what the name suggests they
| aren't actually the top consulting firms (the name comes mostly
| from their accounting work.The three consulting firms, at least
| in terms of cost/prestige, are McKinsey, BCG, and Bain (MBB for
| short).
| darig wrote:
| [dead]
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| I am sure the authors contribution will be missed. ;)
|
| 1. Consultants form long-term support relationships out of
| necessity, as training existing staff without them leaving for
| higher paying positions is sometimes impossible. There is a wide
| set of circumstances that make this true.
|
| 2. Savvy people that "middleman" their services have already
| failed their integrity check. You can be sure a "Turtles All The
| Way Down" project plan will lead to cascade failure, or be resold
| into a dozen other firms within a year.
|
| 3. Risking any project above 12% of annual revenue means your
| company will likely be driven into the ground eventually (applies
| to both ends of the deal). Most probably still think that a
| company with a $7.4B market cap won't still try to short you the
| last installment after deployment... lol... most corporations put
| professional bandits to shame. IP theft, piracy, and blackmail...
| you may find international business is not for fools and or
| idealists.
|
| 4. posting 87.4% LLM machine learning garbage articles will
| potentially earn you a plagiarism copyright strike or worse
|
| "Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the
| circus has left town." (George Carlin)
| spicebox wrote:
| As someone with firsthand experience at a "top" consulting firm
| this article is pretty accurate, albeit with a definite negative
| slant. A couple parts that really ring true for me are:
|
| > The work will mostly be done by clever but pimply
| 20-somethings, armed with two-by-two matrix frameworks ... What
| they lack in wisdom will be made up for in long hours.
|
| The structure of consulting firms is that a partner (who does
| actually have a lot of experience with the industry) will "sell"
| the work to the client and oversee the team that actually does
| the work. Partners will sell multiple cases at a time and most of
| time is spent doing sales so most of the work is done by the
| consulting team with some guidance from the partner. The
| consulting team will be comprised of a couple of consultants 1-3
| years out of undergrad and couple of consultants 1-3 years out of
| their MBA and a manager who has maybe 5 years of consulting
| experience. Usually none of them will have any specific domain
| knowledge.
|
| > Question everything
|
| Since most of the work is done by (nearly) fresh grads they won't
| have a lot of specific industry experience. At the same time it's
| hard to find information on the obscure topics they're
| researching so the actual information they find will be iffy.
| Sometimes it will even be made up (they'll tell the client it's
| based on "industry experience" or something but it was probably
| invented by 23 year old in excel). Regardless the information
| will be presented to the client as rock solid and scientific
| (with maybe a little disclaimer at the bottom)
|
| In short: The people you're talking to aren't the people who are
| doing the actual work, The people who are doing the work have no
| industry experience And the numbers they're basing their analysis
| on are probably whatever they found on google.
|
| I know this comment sounds really critical but I do think there
| is some value in consultants and they are really good at
| structuring out a problem but the analysis they do is probably
| 75% accurate at best
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I've seen this as well. And while not defending such practices,
| how much experience do the consultant worker-bees need when
| much of what they gather come from the staff of the hiring
| company?
|
| That is, these consulting firms get called in more because
| office politics and organization dysfunction is high, too high.
| The fees aren't so much for expertise per se, but a stupidity
| tax on the hiring company that lacks the leadership and
| management to get out of its own way.
|
| Put another way, these consulting firms don't hire themselves.
| The fact that they do get so much work is more of a reflection
| of how weak and rudderless some Big Incs actually are, than the
| strengh of the snake oil sells.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Mostly this. Whenever you hear someone say "I've been telling
| them to do X for years", you have to keep in mind that the
| value of the consultant is not to come up with the idea to do
| X, but to tell them to listen to you.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| It is satire, not actually written by a consultant. This is the
| humor page at the end of the economist. But the fact that it is
| accurate actually does make it funny, if a bit trite.
| spicebox wrote:
| Like most good satire it's based on reality
| [deleted]
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > This is the humor page at the end of the economist.
|
| Isn't this just a Bartleby article? Their column on
| management
| conductr wrote:
| In my experience, this is all disclosed
| (partner/manager/associate). Pretty much any proposal I've seen
| from the top firms includes a cost estimate built by using
| hours x rate for each respective job title and often further
| broken down by stage of the project. Time and material bids are
| most common so you should be asking for this up-front, I
| actually view it as a bit of a red flag if they don't
| voluntarily disclose/bid it this way (eg. if I'm paying for
| time, I need to know how much time is being planned for and by
| which rate level).
| squirrel6 wrote:
| In reality, we would usually take the value-based fee (how
| much we think it's worth) and then allocate it down to scope
| bullets, which are also usually very vague.
| smokefoot wrote:
| The more expensive the services, the less likely you are to
| get a bid in this format.
| squirrel6 wrote:
| This is very true. The more ambitious the scope is, the
| more difficult it is to provide a bid in that format. Also,
| expensive engagements are priced on perceived value anyway.
| conductr wrote:
| Very true. I regularly get it on $500k-$2m projects, that's
| probably considered small. Of course it's caveated to hell
| with talk of "projection", "risk", etc. But that's part of
| my job is asking questions so I can anticipate whether they
| can execute on this or if it's perhaps some ambitious low
| bidding techniques.
|
| FWIW, I also don't work in tech.
| Finance/accounting/management consultants are my world. I
| could definitely see how software/tech is more ambiguous by
| it's very nature.
| jeron wrote:
| >In short: The people you're talking to aren't the people who
| are doing the actual work, The people who are doing the work
| have no industry experience And the numbers they're basing
| their analysis on are probably whatever they found on google.
|
| this has always been the most mindboggling thing about
| consultants. I have a few friends working as consultants and
| occasionally when they discuss cases, I always think to myself,
| "who on earth are you to advise them about so-and-so management
| when you literally just graduated college a year or two ago?"
| spicebox wrote:
| In defense of consulting the "sales pitch" on consulting is
| that the people on top, the partners and managers, have the
| industry experience to guide the more junior employees who
| don't have experience but have good analytical skills. How
| true that is is up to interpretation but that's the steel man
| version
| simmonmt wrote:
| The value is that (ideally) they've asked around and figured
| out how half a dozen peer firms do what you're struggling
| with. So while they may not have solved your management
| problem personally, they can give you an idea of what's
| worked for your peers without all the icky industrial
| espionage and antitrust violations you'd need to find it out
| yourself.
| spicebox wrote:
| It's not espionage, it's an expert network!
| neilv wrote:
| I had a similar reaction, the first time I heard a graduating
| CS undergrad say that they were going into management
| consulting: "But you don't know anything yet..."
|
| But I guess it's not that different from the new grads who
| are instantly called Software Engineers.
|
| Some percentage will rise to quality work, through
| mentoring&training, effort, and experience... and quickly
| earn the title.
|
| And some percentage will go through the motions... and still
| get paid lots of money.
| ghaff wrote:
| The one time I dealt with KcKinsey, the partner was pretty
| sharp, one of the associates was as well, and the other, well,
| more arrogant than justified.
|
| Overall, in retrospect, the experience was... not terrible.
|
| We answered a lot of questions, did a lot of education. They
| produced a bunch of spreadsheets that kept the business
| planning people occupied (a good thing). And they basically
| validated to the senior management that the product managers
| and related advising on strategy were on the right track.
| Expensive, yeah. But it's not always the worst thing to get an
| external sanity check.
| classichasclass wrote:
| We had a McKinsey consultant team at a large governmental
| agency I was contracted to as an SME. Scope creep was a daily
| threat with them; they were always trying to get into another
| subline in the business and set up a new basecamp there as
| work faded elsewhere. The worker bees were earnest but had
| little or no domain-specific experience, and worked off
| obviously pre-fabricated steps that were carefully calibrated
| to emit "just enough" progress -- but not too quickly. I
| remember advising higher-ups we needed to get off that train,
| but the problem was the agency was far too shorthanded and
| relied on them for even basic operational tasks instead of
| higher-level conceptual ones, thus making them essential, and
| their management almost certainly knew it. I moved onto
| another opportunity and I have no doubt they're still there
| in some capacity.
| frognumber wrote:
| I would recommend a good psychic for this -- someone skilled
| at cold reading. You will receive even better validation and
| a similarly reliable "external sanity check."
|
| If I were in Europe, I'd leave it at that. For the Americans,
| it's important to dot the i's and cross the t's, so: An art
| of the industry is telling people what they want to hear.
| That gets you hired again. Consultants are no good as an
| external sanity check.
|
| They are great for taking the blame for decisions you had
| planned on making.
| ghaff wrote:
| Internal people with their own biases and investments are
| always right. Of course.
| squirrel6 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience. Agree with this last
| paragraph 100% -- I would also highlight that part of the
| value consultants provide is in helping senior management cut
| through politics to actually solve problems and encourage
| cross-functional cooperation.
| canvascritic wrote:
| 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
| archo wrote:
| https://archive.is/Slqwj
| [deleted]
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