Management consulting digression and discussion from the What were you thinking thread

In My Humble Opinion
1

You may have no idea who I am but I have been a big fan of your posts for twenty something years mainly because we are so different. We both got engineering degrees and you are just a few years younger than I am. I was a hippie deadhead in college and you were one of those frat boys that I had nothing but contempt for but I hung out with a few of them. The engineering program where I went to school were mostly insufferable geeks so the social people (Greeks system, hippies, athletes) studied together. We had very different goals. The Greeks generally went into sales or marketing or defense work because it was the most lucrative. The rest of us just wanted a reasonable job and to enjoy life. Obviously I am painting with a giant brush here.

My entire career was volume manufacturing of high tech electronic components or machines that did the manufacturing with a brief stint in construction engineering. Many times over the years you scoffed at me for my choices and implied that I was being an idiot (never in a disrespectful way…seriously). I retired at 56 and mostly enjoyed the hell out of what I did and always felt fulfilled that I spent the day helping in a very small way to create things that hundreds of millions of people used.

I always took a VERY dim view of management consultants. Once or twice a year upper management would bring in some group of highly paid assholes and I’d have to go to classes for a week and spend a bunch of unpaid over time catching up on my real job. It wasn’t like they were telling us things that were incorrect. It’s just that they were NEVER implemented because fighting fires was more important day to day and it would all be forgotten until the next year. A couple of times you have said things like, “I just finished a job with a client and gave them a bunch of advice and I don’t give a shit if they took it or not” and I was like “yep. been there on the other side.” They didn’t give a shit. No value add.

Outside of those consulting firms there is certainly no shortage of waste and politics but at the end of the day you at least are being useful. We celebrate our successes together. I really do like you, bro, and hope you can find happiness at home and career but things are different outside of that consulting company bubble.

Damn…that ended up being an unfocused ramble. Hope it makes sense.

7

Uh…Not really. Are you trying to say you like and respect me in spite of having joined an organization in college that has provided a network of lifelong friends and choosing a lucrative career helping large corporations effect change so they can run better while throwing it in my face that you no longer have to work anymore? :smiley:

Yes, I actually do remember you. I hope I don’t come across as “scoffing”. I mean unless an idea is like really ill-conceived.

8

When did I say “respect”? :slight_smile:

I made lifelong friendships in college too I just don’t have a ring to prove it. I worked at the campus radio station. I worked for six different places in my 30 year engineering career. In all but one of them a connection got me that first interview. Five of them were in the first fifteen years so I get what it’s like to be run through the mill.

9

I got my first actuarial job, and the one i just accepted an offer for, from personal connections. I got all the others via paid recruiters. (Paid by the hiring company, not me.) Hmm, i guess there was one job where a personal connection threw the recruiter my way.

But i made lifelong friends in college, too. They just work in different fields from mine.

I, too, have a pretty jaded view of management consultants. At their best, they give management ammunition to make the changes everyone knew had to be made. Often, they suggest changes that are legal but basically make the world a worse place. Like, my SIL at McKinsey specialized in retail banking for a while, and she went from bank to bank and urged them to increase all the fees that people don’t look at when they pick an account. So tons of people got hit with nutty fees for bouncing checks, or whatever. It was bad enough that there was a wave of regulation about 5 years later reining some of that in.

I felt like my employers (property casually insurance companies, mostly) made the world a slightly better place. In good years we got bonuses, and in bad years we helped our customers rebuild their lives after wild fires and crazy storms. Yeah, i know everyone hates insurance companies, but i believe they make the world a better place, and I was happy to be a cog in the machine to keep the machine running. (Happy enough that I’m planning to return to that world after retiring, although this time on the regulatory side.)

I was always a little jealous of cabinet makers, and people with similar jobs who could immediately see the benefit they provided. My tile guys liked what they did in my bathroom enough that they asked to take photos. (The tile guys my contractor used when i remodeled were really stellar.) And being a retail clerk is a sucky job in lots of ways, but i used to volunteer at a food booth every year, and i loved handing people the food they wanted and knowing i was meeting their needs and giving them a little sliver of joy. My job wasn’t that obviously useful. But at least i always felt like i was making the world a little better. I think that’s important for job satisfaction.

10

We’ve had a few consultants at my nonprofit and I can’t say any of them has changed anything in any way. We’re still dealing with the same problems we’ve always dealt with, in some cases now it’s more intractable than ever. I think there are some specific use cases - such as a grants consultant (who will write your grant for you), or someone focused on a very narrow issue, like developing a strategic plan. But I think the best case scenario is if you already know the problem and want to know how to fix it.

11

That was what was so great about manufacturing. We made new widgets every single day that got shipped out of the door and people used them. A product would go from scribbles on a piece of paper to millions of them being made.

12

That’s why I love my job. I directly help people all day long. There is no better feeling than knowing that you personally and immediately helped improve somebody’s day. You solve puzzles, get thanked for it, feel validation, and then on top of it all get paid to do it.

13

I do consultancy work (not my bread and butter, tbf), am damned good at it, and my clients are better off for it.

14

Yes, you are. I am very impressed.

15

Well, I don’t know that I want to be the advocate on behalf of all things fraternity or management consulting (not surprisingly, a large intersecting portion of the Venn diagram), but…

My college sort of felt like a combination of Hogwarts, a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and Animal House. Freshman year, everyone more or less got tossed into a “sorting hat” and picked one of the 28 houses to join. Geeks joined a geek house. Stoner hippies joined a stoner hippy house. Rich kids joined the house where everyone wore sideburns like Luke Perry in 902010 and did cocaine all day. Athletes joined whatever house their particular sport predominantly joined (Wrestling, Football 1, Football 2, Lacrosse/Soccer, Ice Hockey, etc.). A lot of guys who didn’t join a house freshman year often joined one sophomore or junior year because they just happened to become friends with a lot of guys in that house. I joined because I became friends with a couple of guys from my ice hockey team who were part of restoring one of the fraternities that got kicked off and I liked the guys. We were one of the houses that were sort of a mixed group.

Also joining a fraternity doesn’t preclude you from joining other school activities such as sports teams, campus radio, religious or ethnic affiliated groups and so on. We had all those dudes in my house. In fact one of the things I liked about my fraternity was that it actually exposed me to a wider group of students.

Are fraternities the be-all end-all of college life? No. But it was a big part of my college, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do, so why the fuck not? Also, this was 30 years ago before college kids spent all their time taking Adderall so they could study all night to compete for jobs at Google.

Consulting firms like Accenture, Mckinsey, Deloitte, Capgemini and a thousand others employ over 5 million people globally. Corporations and other large institutions are rife with politics, waste, corruption, inefficiency, and all other forms of bullshit. Maybe you had a negative experience with some consultants who didn’t know what they were doing. Or maybe their client didn’t feel like spending money on implementing their suggestions. Maybe your particular job is so inconsequential to your company’s business the consultant didn’t feel it was important to spend any more time on you because they can see the process end to end while you just see this management you create each month that no one reads. Most of the time the company has some project that it’s own people either don’t know how to do or are too busy with their BAU work. I don’t know. I didn’t invent Corporate America and all its faults. I’m just trying to earn a living like anyone else.

Saying management consultants make the world a worse place is like saying lawyers do. Sure everyone thinks lawyers are overpaid deceitful arrogant jerks (and a lot of them are). That is until they need their advice on a legal matter. Why wouldn’t there be a whole profession of people who educate themselves on the complexities of running a business and communicating complex concepts to a broad audience of stakeholders?

16

I never said that being in a frat precluded you from other organizations although I don’t recall any fratboys at the radio station when I was there. Obviously most of those dudes could do other things. There weren’t any frat/sorority people amongst the Deadhead crowd either but as the Dead got very trendy later, no doubt they tagged along. Those same dudes that mocked us. (To be fair the mockery went both ways). They must fucking love John Mayer. Anyway, there was plenty to do that didn’t involve Greek life. I was never bored without going to keggers or whatever.

I just now remembered my one Greek experience which is probably not very representative. UC San Diego was fairly new in the early 80s and didn’t have much of a Greek presence but they were trying to take hold. I think there were only four frats. (Fear not, by the time I had finished grad school they had completely metastasized). A friend of a good friend went to San Diego State and was in a frat and they wanted to meet him to talk about colonizing (their word) at UC. My friend pleaded with me to join in the meeting. So this “old” dude showed up (in his 30s) who must have been their advisor or something with a very cute college aged lady (“little sister”) who completely ignored us. He was telling us all of the benefits of frat life which didn’t appeal to me but one of them, which totally turned me off, was that they kept a file system of past tests and homeworks of classes. We politely listened and he went on his way. Before the next quarter started we got letters welcoming us as charter members and a bill for the first quarter’s dues.

OK, now that was out of line. I was a Sr Manufacturing Engineer and Project Manager. I was in the Manufacturing Department, you know the people who make stuff and generate all of the revenue. I developed assembly processes, wrote the manufacturing documentation and trained the techs, monitored all of the test data, sent out regular data reports to all of the senior staff which they certainly read. Our area was the hub that interfaced with Sales, Quality, R&D and the end customers. Every person in the complex who was a Director, VP or C-level knew me by name. When I said that I found a problem and I was going to make a presentation, all of senior management would show up.

I didn’t say management consultants make the world a worse place. I said that in my experience that they were overpaid and no value add. I don’t care if it’s because they are full of shit or because management didn’t implement their genius ideas. It was a giant waste of time and I never saw any of them twice for them to even find out if their shit worked or why it didn’t work. As someone said up thread, this excludes the narrowly focused ones like the ones who recommended equipment to us, installed it and showed us how to use it. This is someone there to fix a specific and well defined problem and they are experts on that thing. Not this amorphous what do we need to do to be more efficient?

17

I think that was directed at me. But it completely misses the point. We never had consultants make specific recommendations about my job because it was obvious what my job did and why, and that wasn’t the point of the consultation. But we did have consultants recommend corporate changes that affected everyone.

We used to joke that being physically attractive and young must be job requirements. The consultants were smart enough, didn’t really understand the business, and usually made somewhat superficial recommendations that everyone knew had to be done. As i mentioned, my employer usually hired them to

It was mostly watching my SIL that made me realize they often do much worse, and actively make the world a little less nice to live in.

18

I felt that spark as well. In my working lifetime, there were five-year cycles. A bunch of obnoxious (and they were always obnoxious) consultants would come in and say we were doing everything wrong, and we need to do it all differently. Giant upheaval. Maybe some layoffs and/or reassignments. Then, five years later a different group of obnoxious consultants come in and tell us what those other guys told us was completely wrong. You need to do things their way. Rinse and repeat.

I never saw much improvement in performance or efficiency or much of anything.

19

Well sometimes they would recommend layoffs or making benefits worse to save money during a bad labor market so they people still employed there would be unlikely to leave. It wasn’t wrong per se but yeah.

Yep.

We lack focus. We need to take the big division and make it into five smaller divisions so that we can have each group specialize on their small area.

We are duplicating effort. We need to make one big division to take advantage of economy of scale.

20

You know, this would probably be a discussion that those who loathe the pit would also benefit from. :wink:

21

I was speaking in generalities, not about your job in particular.

Mckinsey is actually known for a number of high profile clients and recommendations that actively made the world worse.

A firm I worked for about 15 years ago had a group that was sort of a combination of a PR firm and lobbying agency. I never worked with them directly but we did have a sort of meet and great where they went over what their practice did. In practice what they did was a lot the film Promised Land where they send in people to influence elections and apply political pressure to politicians. Most of the ones I met seemed like jerks.

Most of my work is actually pretty mundane. A lot of project management/PMO or business analyst work. Creating process flows, gap analysis, go to market strategies. Sometimes it ends up being a lot of high level recommendations that the client never actually wants to spend money on implementing.

In fact now that I think about it, more often than not it was the clients that didn’t want to spend the money having us implement solutions. It’s like going to a doctor, paying for the initial cancer diagnosis, thinking you can just figure out how to treat cancer on your own, then getting mad at the doctor because you died.

22

It’s hard to argue because so many frat guys are, in fact, douchebags. It’s a system that basically creates a sense of entitlement and elitism by its very nature.

The “files” system was pretty common in fraternities. It’s more of a study aid that is more or less obsolete since Google was invented, let alone AI. My fraternity was a “recolonizing” chapter so we had our fair share of older dudes from “National” coming by from time to time to make sure we were following protocol and whatnot.

23

Streaking during hours of darkness only? I think you all know what I’m referring to…

24

I’ve spent the past decade or so at two different companies who were undergoing “Transformation” (and yes, McKinsey was involved and that only means layoffs and new #hastagsTransform corporate speak bullshit).

Nothing. Actually. Changed.

The men in suits 4x removed from the actual work shuffled around the table to different responsibilities but never did the headcount increase where needed, or the budget increase, or new technology to alleviate roadblocks come online or, literally, any tangible improvement whatsoever. I’m sure McKinsey made bank, though. Fuck ‘em.

25

:slightly_smiling_face:
Only in America.

So the 5-million people are somehow immune to the politics, waste, corruption, inefficiency and other forms of bullshit.

That’s my innate distrust of anything big. Big government, big business, big labor, big military, you name it. In my experience they got big at something (or else’s) expense like it’s some sort of zero-sum game.