Mmmm…no. I don’t think that’s the right conclusion to draw.
An industry as large and diverse as consulting is certainly subject to all that. I don’t think it would be able to sustain itsself as that large as an industry if that’s ALL it was. At some point you have to provide something of value otherwise people wouldn’t pay for it.
Yes, and corporations and large institutions are full of people who are aware of these things and know exactly where they can be found, but are ignored by the higher ups who only listen to outside consultants who actually aren’t aware of where these issues lie. At least the outside consultants can be blamed by the executive team when the board calls them out for doing the stupid shit the consultants asked them to do.
I’m fully on board with the idea of consultancy and have seen it done right many times. When I worked for Koch Industries (yeah, I know), they had a team of 30 or so software development consultants that would be farmed out as needed to the IT teams of individual departments when the department had projects that required more manpower than they had on staff. This worked extremely well, as the consultants might have varied jobs (like an external consultant), but they all fell within Koch Industries, so they didn’t have to learn the company’s principals around development each time they were needed. I’ve also seen it done extremely poorly, like when someone hires one of the big four. It always starts with a small team, whose job it seems is to drum up more business and bring in even more of their cohorts. Then, once millions of dollars has been spent listening to them and upgrading all of the hardware to support their idea of app servers with PCs as dumb terminals, they are nowhere to be found when a month later the company trashes it all because Word can’t keep up with one finger typists.
Management consultancy, on the other hand, is a huge fucking waste of time (and money!!!) in every instance I’ve come across it and that’s a lot. My question is always “Why the fuck are we paying the CEO 7 or 8 figures if he has to have some team of 28 year old MBAs tell him how to do his job? If you want to know what’s wrong with marketing, it’s Bob. Bob is an incompetent boob who understands that an SEM spend of 100 million is more likely to get him a CMO job at a bigger company than an SEM spend of 15 million. So Bob wasted $85 million dollars of the company’s money just to pad his fucking resume. Fire Bob and promote Mary and marketing will get back to rocking like they did under Bill whom you let go because you wanted to give his job to Bob.”
If that sounds like a real example, it’s because it is. That company is now bankrupt. Fuck Bob, fuck the CEO, and fuck the management consultants that ignored all of this in spite of being provided actual data to show the problem.
28 year old? On the last Bain engagement the person determining what was wrong with labor scheduling for a retailer with hundreds of stores and tens of thousands of employees was a 24 year old with a degree in Chemistry! But her degree was from Columbia, so it was all right.
Submitted for your approval (and with apologies to Rod Serling):
Pit threads are always pretty wide-ranging but I wonder if we might have more fun with a dedicated “I pit all management consulting” thread and get this one back to being about decent posters pulling mostly one-off stupid shit.
Would anyone object if a mod could perhaps find a good pruning point and help out?
I hate to say, but is that not management?
I’d be fine with that if someone wants to go ahead and start one. I don’t know that I want to be the representative speaking on behalf of the consulting industry, but I’d be happy to share my hatred of the profession.
Yes, but not external. 
Looks like #5787 is about where the management consulting digression began. So we’re now about 30 posts in. There are a couple posts among the first ~10 below that point that aren’t part of that digression, but most are.
I’ll report this and my earlier post and see if we get traction.
I agree with you and if someone wants to take the trouble to move the management consulting to a new thread, that would be great!
We’ve asked @Miller for permission to do so.
Most likely sometime later today one of will do so.
I think that was all the posts. First try I grabbed some extra.
Team, I engaged a group from McKinsey to offer suggestions as to whether this thread should remain in IMHO or moved to the Pit. I will circle around with their recommendations later.
I had the misfortune of once working for such a company (fortunately for only a few years) so I definitely believe you. I ran a small IT group in a very big company, and I took pride in producing good internal software products at low cost. This was partly due to efficient methodologies, and partly through the fact that roughly about half the group were unpaid interns, typically seniors from computer science programs.
The point is that in this organization, the culture was that your importance was measured by your budget, so managers made a point of spending as much as they could on large staffs and wasting as much as they could on useless consultants. I was not only unappreciated, I was actively disliked for making the culture look bad by showing how much more efficient things could be. The division VP used to refer to my little group as “the skunk works”, and she didn’t mean it kindly. Regardless of how good our products were, we were violating the cultural norms, dammit!
Several posters mentioned McKinsey. Some time ago, John Oliver did a story about them as the main investigative story on his show, and it was absolutely scathing. If you didn’t hate management consultants before, you will after seeing this:
Lol, i would have put it in the pit, and also, left out all the posts that just say, “please move this.” But @What_Exit moved faster than i did.
We had some Management Consulting teams that helped and others that didn’t.
But I can say having lived through 5 different Quality Programs, they were all an almost complete waste of time. To me those were scammers, a complete boondoggle, but weirdly the state had funds to help companies bring these scammers in. I’m guessing the “quality” industry had good lobbyist in New Jersey.
I might have left it in the Pit as well but only because I think there are some Pit like responses early on.
OK, please drop the digression from the digression. Digressions are 3 forums down to the left.
One thing that I saw was company management bringing in a consulting team and then later that manager getting hired by the consulting company or the consultants bringing in an interim CEO who becomes the real CEO who brings in his cronies and they do shit like make the benefits and the culture worse and then leave after a few years literally millions of dollars more wealthy. It’s the Old Boys/Girls network that all started with a bunch of twenty somethings who went to Wharton together (or were in the same frat at some point).
I get that they actually work for the Board and their job is to make things better for the shareholders but how the fuck do you live with yourself doing that shit over and over?
I have to run some errands. My personal real life anecdotes later.
The only management consultants I ran into were “change consultants” hired by our general manager to give us direction. All of us managers got some time off to go to boring meetings and some decent lunches. But the moment the change consultants put forward something the boss disagreed with they were out on their asses. Total waste of time and money.
My son-in-law was a management consultant in Europe. No experience with anything, and he knew it. He was happy to move to a real job. He did rack up lots of hotel points, though.