I remember going to total quality managment class at my old company. We had an exercise where a bunch of us were blind folded and held hands and had to form a square. This was supposed to tell us about working as a team. We sort of screwed around until I got tired of this told people what to do. Actually I think it taught us something about teams just not what the leaders intended.
We also had to write mission statements.
I’ll second that Amen to CKDextHavn.
Like every profession, there are skilled people, and not-so-skilled people. Perhaps some of the gripes here result from bad experiences with bad consultants. In general, a good consultant knows a particular process well and thereby helps a client get through that process efficiently. The client thereby saves money by not having to figure it out from scratch. Or, for a client who knows the process already, that client will save time by having the consultant do the work & handle a lot of the associated day-to-day stuff…thereby allowing the client to focus on the management side of things (kind of like a contractor).
Please don’t confuse consultants with motivational speakers.
Anyway…
you mean consultants are “value-added”? 
I didn’t mean to imply that all consultants are scoundrels or without any merit. My company did need help changing, and the first few consultants we hired really did help us change the way we did business, which was truly neccesary. The thing that got me was the near infinite number of follow-ups, telling us the same thing in a slightly different way, and trying to pass it off as something new. The people who didn’t get the message from the first few consultants aren’t going to pick it up at all. They are mostly gone now, or are at least keeping quiet.
The problem was with the people hiring the consultants, assuming that if one consultant can improve things by 10%, then two means 21%, three means 33.1%, etc. You have to listen to what they are saying, and not the jargon. Same message, different jargon means no significant change, so no improvement. After the first one, you are just paying for jargon.