Maybe finally business “leaders” are realizing how completely worthless these companies are? Business consulting is literally a bunch of Ivy League grads making PowerPoints and calling that a deliverable.
Before joining a corporation I really thought that this is an exaggeration by people who are unsatisfied by their own fate at the companies to which the consultants come. I was shocked by how true this statement is. A lot of PowerPoint slides and very little value in them.
I previously worked for a large management consulting firm, but in one of their newly acquired tech/implementation teams.
There are quite literally analysts and sr analysts on every project whose entire job is just creating and editing powerpoints, sending them to their partner managing the case, getting feedback and repeat. Nothing else, just powerpoints. They may sit in on some meetings themselves but don't really offer much in the way of actual expertise in any meaningful way. Many of these people have literally never worked in the sector/field they are supposed to be consulting/advising on
They all have due dates basically every night for a new powerpoint presentation and that is literally the only deliverable for many of the people on a given case (client project).
While I was paid a lot for the job, often multiples of the developers working for any given client and it was hyper stressful, there's probably not a single project I can think of where the client wouldn't have been better off just doing things themselves and hiring full-time positions or even contractors who aren't one of these giant complex expensive firms.
Now that isn't to say there aren't a handful of very valuable/knowledgable people staffed to a project, but I'd wager on the average project only like 10-20% of people have anything of actual value to offer.
Yup. I've gone in as a workflow software / network company to clean up after some of these top consultants' "recommendations" (i.e., make and/or replace their systems so they'd actually work as advertised).
With what I've seen, these "consultants" are the most vulnerable segment to LLMs, especially LLMs tuned to the corporation's information store. Which means that the consultant's largest clients will disappear first.
Of course the consultants will try to sell "we will help you implement these LLMs for your business".
That is best case scenario. In a company I worked in, they managed to create reorganization ... without actually talking to anyone who would know what people and departments do.
The two most capable managers looked at new organization they were supposed lead and left. So it was headless for next two months. Remaining people inckuding manageme t spent a lot of time doing nothing for months complaining in the kitchen. We all got used to low productivity as normal. Then I left, not sure what happened after.
There was some LinkedIn profile highlighted recently around this, some guy working at one of these consulting companies highlighted his roles (in ascending order but I'll list them the other way) as....
* Making beautiful looking powerpoint slides really quickly.
* Telling other people to make beautiful looking powerpoint slides really quickly.
* Convincing the client that beautiful looking powerpoint slides quickly answered their problem.
You are missing the entire point of bringing in a consultant: plausable deniability and double dipping. For one, if you come up with some idea and it goes south, guess who gets the blame. If you, on the other hand, come up with the idea to bring in McKinsey, and listen to what they have to say, and that idea goes south, you get a pat on the back for bringing in a great consultancy into the mix, and if things went wrong its not even McKinsey's fault but dubious things like "market conditions" or whatever they cite. The things they often recommend to you are sometimes bordering on corporate espionage made legal by proxy, taking what worked with another competing client in your field and applying that formula to your own work. Then of course these consultancies are for profit companies, creating another investment angle for anything that you do for shareholders that are invested in both your company and the consultancy.
They are never going away. It doesn't even matter what they put in those slides and they won't be going away.
Ehhh a little hard to say because pandemic killed office culture for me but I’m gonna guess negligible. I thought it was a weak article personally.
The previous ones were much, much more substantial. Mostly on a liberal leaning east coast folks don’t want the firm to be doing conservative or foreign authoritarian work basis.
Edit: authoritarian lite, let’s say. E.g. no Russia fwiw
I was refering to the book before I realized it was also a serie of articles.
There were a few stories about the involvment of the company in tobacco, the opioid crisis, and some geopolitical stories that made it quite a bit more than just something about a liberal POV.
That’s fine but the impactful stuff was just a rehash of stuff that people had already dealt with a year or two prior. So no, it wasn’t very impactful from my perspective.
Shrug. People hype that up to be a “shadowy evil org” but it’s really just because you want absolute firewalls to avoid problems when solving both sides of a vendor and customer and competitor
I think working on some big tech thing where you’re actively constructing a product with huge negative ramifications is way more evil than working in a big decentralized org where some people far removed from you do something you think is evil tbh.
But I don’t care. I’m just commenting out of mild interest. It’s not exactly a big cost to comment.
I've heard from someone on your side they are hiring as they always do to give a show of strength, but a lot of the new hires aren't being assigned much work or are given pretty far out start dates. I get the sense that there are a lot of silos though and people only really know what is going on that they can directly see.
Part of the value is that your competitor is also using McKinsey. So when Ford brings them in and they want to know what is cutting edge, they can spy on GM and Toyota using the consultancy, with a little fig leaf being "this is what we see the industry doing" instead of "this is what Toyota is literally doing." Corporate espionage by proxy.
Corporate espionage implies theft of secrets. McKinsey isn’t handing out secrets. They’re handing out largely public info that’s a pain to compile for high level strategic stuff.
There’s literal benchmarks and industry reports that are more like products. There’s also just chatting with well connected people who know an industry. But most of the time it’s a junior hire using Google to fill out the basic rundown of what peers are doing on a problem.
even simply expanding consultants' liability is bound to help them: they have more capital and more lawyers to fight, while any small shop would be destroyed by the first liability-related lawsuit
The way I interpret GP is not that they want more crimes to be committed, but rather that McKinsey people are already committing plenty of crimes, but only one of them went to prison so far.
Well I don't know about your business in McKinsey, but just in case you don't know about your company's criminal record (bad if you do, bad if you don't), you could a quick review of the "Controversies" section for McKinsey in Wikipedia, including colaboration with authoritarian regimes, corruption in south Africa, arms business with Russia, jail consulting...
When was the last opioids crisis settlement, a month and a half ago? How much is it already? Almost a billion dollars.
The argument is that there are plenty of unprosecuted crimes already, obviously.
I understand why you might disagree with that, and I understand why your reading comprehension might work better when not discussing your employer, but I have to say, you're really not helping your firm's reputation here.
That’s not really the argument though. Because the person in question was prosecuted for something unrelated. It’s just a blanket request for people who work there to go to jail.
It also (probably unintentionally) calls out entry level workers specifically.
