Usually it’s not the consultants, but the clients who drive these outcomes. I think like OP consultants would happily deliver answers, explore unknowns, create tools, and lay business roadmaps. There must have been something attractive about BCG work besides the name and the pay - that ideal, working on diverse projects and affecting change and improvement isn’t impossible. But as was said, you’re usually hired to give a predetermined answer rather than actually solve a problem.
Sounds kind of like the person who goes to a therapist because their spouse told them "you need therapy..." Don't expect anything meaningful to come out of the exercise.
The problem is that when you interview for BCG evrything is about how you can solve problems. I understand the frustration when you are young and idealist and discover that was a lie for 50% of your projects.
That's actually a separate area of practice: "Human Capital Consulting". In addition to laying off people, they also do systems integration for stuff like payroll.
I wrote a post many years ago on when not to hire a consultant and when to based on my two years at BCG. https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/146227/When-not-to-h.... I think this is a bit more balanced than OP's post though he's a far better writer than me :-)
Well, first of all let's just make clear that it's not like BCG was paying him $16k hush money because his story is amazing.
They pay everyone a $16k bonus on the way out for signing that thing, whether people who have a gripe or others who have only good things to say. It doesn't somehow give him credibility.
Aside from that, there are people who go into consulting and gain a lot of skills, and others who do the least work possible and leave. Some who find great fulfillment in the right corners of the work, some who find it totally dispiriting.
This is just one person's experience, not a salacious tell-all about the "dark underbelly of an industry that no one wants to talk about".
Assuming you're not being facetious... Business modelling, market research, actual understanding of how businesses operate (hint: it's not code), distilling large quantities of information into useful insights, communicating effectively with professionals, presenting to executive stakeholders, entry-level industry knowledge in a variety of industries, collaborating with people from different backgrounds & in widely different roles, (occasionally) finding potential solutions to business problems (again, code rarely solves much), selling ideas to stakeholders, being likable enough that people want to work with you.
Of course, but that's only the deployment process for the deliverable. An art on itself but the value is on the problem solving.
What I admire from the McK/BCG/BAIN etc. cadre is their confidence on being able to solve any problem you can throw at them. Of course this does not always work, but the attitude is a mixture between hard-work, power, arrogance and being extremely smart people.
The fresh out of undergrad associate probably isn’t going to fix your company, but the partner who has done 15 years of consulting and probably some leadership stints at clients will probably have something worthwhile hearing.
Consultants aren’t superheros. But if you’re looking for some smart people to grind on some question you have you they typically deliver what you want. Sometimes they crash and burn (had that happen with McK once).
Plus the consultants working with clients have support from:
* The partners overseeing the client relationships, who have each worked with hundreds of clients, been involved with a thousand projects personally, and know something of 10x more. At that stage in their career, a huge amount of strategy consulting becomes instinctive pattern recognition.
* The firm's global knowledgebase, practice areas, research support teams, etc. These hugely accelerate your knowledge of an industry so you can productively and usefully engage with experienced managers at the client right from day 1.
I was a BCG consultant for a few years. Every 3 months, I'd be thrown into a totally new industry: forestry and paper making, clothing supply chains, retail banking sales incentive structures, car tyre manufacturing cost reduction, airline route pricing, production planning for brick manufacturing, ERP systems for electrical contracting wholesaling. Those were my first two years as a junior consultant.
On the day the project kicked off internally, of course I knew nothing. But a couple of days later, I knew how each industry worked, understood the competitive positions of the client and their main competitors, had some good hypotheses on the client's specific challenges, knew the terminology, and was fully equipped to start asking relevant questions.
I never pretended to know stuff that I didn't. Being humble, open, inquisitive, sensitive to others' perspective, and focused on the outcome gets you a long way.
Exactly! My feelings is that they pride not on knowing things, but on knowing _how_ to know things.
I had an ex-Mck associate partner as a boss and turns out he's a great guy (though his brain seems to be overclocked and that made it extremely difficult to work with).
I’ve gotten really tired of this trope on HN because it’s basically willfully ignorant. It is exactly equivalent to saying “why do software developers get paid so much when all they do is write some code?” Code is the output, but there’s a hell of a lot that goes into deciding what code gets written, what framework it’s in, how it’s integrated with other code, that it’s bug free, etc. Consulting outputs are often the same - you see only the end product and ignore everything else that goes with it.
Framed another way - The HN crowd loves to shit on PowerPoint slides right up until they need to make a pitch deck that doesn’t suck.
All that said, after many years of working with consultants from every major firm, I’ve definitely got mixed feelings about the actual value generated by a lot of engagements.
These are important though. They are perhaps the single most visible piece of work that is used to make a decision on something.
I understand the temptation to poke fun at this, but think of it from a startup POV. They do pitch decks as well, and they are making up numbers there too.
If "making Powerpoint slides" is shorthand for being able to put organized thoughts and decision-worthy information condensed on a single page that an executive can rely on and understand a complicated issue, then let me make Powerpoint slides for the rest of time.
If it means churning out low value status updates then no thanks.
Just like how "coding" can be creating a work of art and delivering something amazing, or mindlessly burning down Jira tickets that you get shoveled on your plate.
The McK engagement manager who is a veteran and knows their job (and your job as CEO/CFO/VP) charges $10k per day, because they are basically an experienced executive for hire -- while the McK associate fresh from business school gets leased out for $1k per day. The latter are the equivalent of a smart but inexperienced freelance developer (who don't cost much less) -- though with the resources of McK corporate behind them, and the willingess to work 14 hours a day.
This guy knows. Unlike in other high paying professions, from day 1 in consulting you're dealing with C-level people. You learn how they think, how they talk, how they make decisions.
Learning to consistently convince people in power is a pretty nice skill to have IMO.
I think we're good at it if you believe from posts here at HN all we do is providing useless PPTs, and still growing double digits % each year while charging $2M for a 12w project.
I think one of the most notable things is learning how to talk and to think in clear (and effective) ways, even if unfortunately sometimes it's employed in a way that comes off as low in content or expertise.
It's about understanding how to organize thoughts and present a point in a way that an executive would want to make a decision on a topic. (When it goes the way it should.)
After a stint in consulting, you sometimes have meetings with people you work with up and down the chain in a company, and you wonder, "my god, how do you get through every day with the disorganized jumble of random thoughts you're spewing in this meeting?"
At its best, it teaches you how to find and organize evidence to make a point, convince people of something, and get things done.
At worst, well... those skills can be employed by people robotically going to create meaningless (or harmful) advice that a company already knows, for lots of $$$ wasted. Like so much else, it is often a reflection of the capability and state of the person paying for the work. You get someone who's under lots of deadline pressures, dug themselves into a bad budget hole, doesn't know what good work looks like, and you're gonna get a shitty consulting output that makes the headlines (or makes people remember) that consultants can produce lots of BS.
This is actually a great point. You’ll encounter company that ask “Why are my sales falling?” when you ask what they’ve looked at so far it’s often a handful of stab-in-the-dark strategies with no coordination or logic to the approach.
Even just helping a company come up with a rationale plan to identify key issues and succinctly communicate that to leadership is a huge benefit.
> Aside from that, there are people who go into consulting and gain a lot of skills
If what the author claims is true and consulting is basically making up numbers to fit some conclusion and general fluff work, I'm not sure that's a valuable skill to pick up. Sure, you could pick up networking and ...?
There's all types of consulting at all levels. I worked for years at a small IT consulting company owned by my brother where we worked to fill the gap of companies that couldn't afford to hire more than a single "IT guy" (or anyone at all) to supplement their needs. We had plenty of good relationships with IT people at companies we worked with. We did everything from AD admin to a few Linux servers to full HA deployments and custom internal webapp development.
It all depends on what you're offering and what the customer needs. We wanted long term contracts, so it was always in our best interest to provide a good solution. If companies outgrew us and wanted to insource IT, we would document and hand over what we managed, because to do otherwise not only would be a dick move, but it would kill our reputation.
I imagine it's much different for a big name firm that never gets called out on doing a shit job because that would cast decision making of the executives that called upon them I to question.
You're talking about IT consulting, while parent is talking about strategy/management consulting. Very different types with very different outcomes altogether.
I think they were conflated farther up thread, not initially by me.
>>> Aside from that, there are people who go into consulting and gain a lot of skills, and others who do the least work possible and leave. Some who find great fulfillment in the right corners of the work, some who find it totally dispiriting.
So I don't think it's entirely obvious which type of consulting was being discussed at the point I replied. Even so, I'm not sure the type matter as much as might be thought, I'm positive there are management consultants that bring useful knowledge and real benefits to the table. I think the incentive alignments make that harder, because of some of the same reasons I noted previously, but I don't think the type of consulting really matters, other than one type or the other being more common at different levels.
Non-disclosure is on the way in. Non-disparagement is on the way out. Feel free to skip signing things on your way out, especially if it's involuntary.
On getting fired... It's usually an unplanned meeting shortly after you get in, possibly with HR present. Take a deep breath, and realize the decision has been made, and no amount of explanations, excuses, circumstances, or bargaining will change it. Keep your mouth shut. Don't bother asking them why; they won't say, and then you'll start guessing. There's nothing you can say that will help you. Don't sign anything; say you'll take home whatever documents they give you to review. Don't help them pick up your work where you left off--you don't work there, they made it clear they have no interest in you working there. Take all your personal belongings, return theirs. If they let you send a farewell email, send something generic (or not at all). As always HR is not your friend.
In short, keep every interaction as curt as respectfully possible. It minimizes professional impact, and if something leads you to legal action, it puts you in the best position for it.
This, make sure you take the time to review what's in the agreement. I've been in this situation very recently and got an agreement on the spot that looked good and was tempted to sign right away, partly due to all the emotions that were there for me, it is an emotional event. But I took it home and allowed time for my rationale brain to think it through and realised I wasn't getting some things I was entitled to, due to an admin error (I genuinely believe it was a plain error).
So take it home let the emotions fade and think it through.
> Don't sign anything; say you'll take home whatever documents they give you to review
And get an employment lawyer to review the documents. This happened to me a few years ago and had it not been for the lawyer spotting a mistake I'd have missed out on thousands of pounds in my payoff. It was well worth the 60 minutes of their time.
> Non-disclosure is on the way in. Non-disparagement is on the way out.
Depends. 80% sure the last place I worked at had Non-Disparagement on hire. They were not primarily an IT company, and their primary pool of new recruits for their core business was adults fresh out of college. I don't think it's entirely coincidental that there was a -lot- of scary language in the agreements/handbook that seemed geared towards making sure people were afraid to talk about the problems the organization had.
> As always HR is not your friend.
My last day on that job, I had to do an exit interview. During said interview, the HR employee asked how I was doing that day, my answer was, "Considering this is the first time you folks are pulling me into a room since I got here, not bad!"
> 80% sure the last place I worked at had Non-Disparagement on hire.
You can always red-line the contract. Still, if I saw that, I'd be pretty worried. It's saying you can't even review them on Glassdoor, and I'd wonder what they're hiding.
In 25 years I've never seen this happen, so I suspect this at least depends greatly on location. I also would never sign anything on the way out unless it was very unambiguously to my advantage, and taking on legal risk for a measly $16k would absolutely not be it.
Nondisclosure is usually signed before hiring (often even before interview).
IME while most companies have disgruntled employees most don't pay you to sign a non disparagement on the way out and the ones that do typically do have something to hide.
I don’t think the point of the article to imply the entire consulting industry is like this. I would imagine there are markets for both consultants to actually advise and consultants to provide support for already made decisions. I think it would be just as naive to believe all consultants are scams as it would be to say all consultants are impartial professionals.
Its a very common thing in US companies and the big 4 in the UK even for normal non redundancy leavers - does seem odd almost like the Company is admitting guilt.
In a redundancy case I might say well then provide me will all the paperwork you have on file I will get my lawyer fried to check this over or we can sign the compromise agreement now for lets say 4 months salary.
And also the comment right about the "unnerving culture" is a bit of a red flag.
Not sure about the UK, but in the US consulting has a lifecycle. Very few hires stick it out for more than a few years. But that’s a feature not a bug. It’s not unusual for the Big 3 to help find you a job at a client. And why not? Now they have a lead for new work at the client. And the anti-disparagement makes sure when you’re talking to coworkers at your new job you talk about how great your time was and pass any interested candidates back to your old firm as new hires. Again, now the consulting firm has another contact at the client to help drum up business.
I did consulting (management consulting, not software) after a PhD and I would have written something similar after a few months. And there is a lot of truth to it. But if you stick with it, you realize what a bubble you were living in in academia and how varied (and tough) the real world is. It's not for everyone (and honestly I wasn't very good at it) but it's an experience that can really help you grow if you're open to it.
I would say it makes you have to prove yourself to new people every project, which is scary but let's you feel the full weight of what you are doing and not just coast on past achievements.
And as a technical person, you learn how technical skill and rigor is looked upon and weighted by the people that are paying. Like the author says, it's often an afterthought, but its valuable to learn this first hand.
My wife has managed labs for various universities. All I know and understand - obviously peripherally from meeting various peoples - is that I will never do a PhD, never get into Academia and I would advise almost anyone else the same.
Which is a real shame, because I love the romantic concept of science and advancing knowledge for the world!
But todays academic systems seems borderline pathologically damaging to the humans involved.
I would love to have a chat with your regarding your experience and ask you some question about the learning curve. My contact details are in my profile.
Seems to me the $16k was BCG concerned because this person was a vulnerable demographic and they didn't want to be sued, not being spoken poorly of. I've never heard of something like that either way.
I'm a data scientist consultant (not at BCG), and while some things may be true, there's also the flip side, where some junior analyst with a fancy degree thinks they're the bees knees when in fact they don't know anything at all.
"I'm not good at excel" is kind of a red flag for a variety of other incompetencies. This article features multiple instances of him saying he wasn't as competent as he was marketed but also more competent than others on the team. I would guess the other side of the story was very different. Name dropping MIT a dozen times is a similar red flag.
People are down voting you but I had the same take in regards to the red flags. In particular -- > "him saying he wasn't as competent as he was marketed but also more competent than others on the team"
A conditional severance package is pretty standard stuff in a contract for white collar employees. I work at a startup, and if I'm terminated involuntarily, my company will pay me a few months' salary. But if I violate the non-disparagement or non-compete clauses I signed, I have to pay back the severance.
I also think the MIT references are reasonable because the article was published in the MIT student newspaper.
Besides that, I agree that the story by itself isn't really enough to draw any conclusions against MBB. The author comes across as unjustifiably entitled.
I wouldn't generalize this outside of the consulting world. But many junior consultants who say they aren't good at excel just haven't done any sort of quantitative analysis and they wouldn't know where to start.
Yup. This reads a bit like new grad in over their head.
“I was the most senior consultant on the case proposal”. Unless this guy was selling the work to the customer (normally what partners do), no he wasn’t the most senior. He was the new consultant in the back doing the grunt work.
And the “sit back and shut up” is actually good advice for someone who has never done consulting before. The client knows you’re a 20-something junior. They aren’t hiring you, they are hiring your partner who has 10+ years of experience.
Some friends of mine have worked at BCG and similar companies, with very similar opinions of the work. What surprises me is how these consulting firms keep having an image among college seniors that they are a desirable job.
The image building is actually very easy. College kids know very little about the real world, having not lived or worked in it yet. They're insanely impressionable.
All kids know is what people tell them. So McKinsey, BCG, etc. plaster their name all over ivy league campuses and sponsor events telling kids how prestigious and sexy and exclusive their work is. And the kids believe them!
Then the kids get there, and realize the job is basically spending 80 hr weeks to create badly designed powerpoint decks filled with bullshit charts and sell them to know-nothing careerists at dying legacy companies and governments.
The ones who don't become consultants themselves, go on to become future clients. Marketing to college kids is extremely undervalued IMO. Professional services firms have used that marketing playbook for hundreds of years. All the big law firms do it too.
Before the internet killed traditional advertising, Ad Agencies used to do it too and were the "it" career for many decades.
What alternatives to college seniors have? There are not many lucrative jobs available right out of the gate, and most schools do not have Goldman or Google coming to campus to recruit.
BCG. Accenture. Deloitte. KPMG. E&Y. CapGemini. I could go on. They all sell the same crap and produce the same sh*t and somehow they keep their huge clients who overpay for low quality work. What a racket.
For the money, please identify an alternative that will accept the same contract terms, and can demonstrate the ability to compete at scale. Sometimes people need generic work done, not brilliant code written in a vacuum.
Why does scale matter? For every BCG, there are a number of capable boutique firms in each market, many that specialize in specific disciplines. The “big box” approach seems lazy.
because each subcontractor needs to be managed. They need individual priorities, contracts, and performance expectations set. The sheer complexity in subbing 100M of work to 50 competitors can require so much staffing in contract management that it would create more chaos and spending than it was worth for the change in capability. Scale matters because it simplifies management.
Source: my employer (not me) specializes in advising on the contracting for outsourced services.
"It was clear that the client was going to go forward with their decision regardless of how I acted. How could I be responsible for a foregone conclusion? And if I had no power to change things, then why shouldn’t I take the course of action that lets me keep my job?"
So following the philosophy that person say to follow. Letting a company waste 1 billion means that this money has the opportunity to go to a place where it can do more good?
I've been an independent consultant for two decades and take a lot of pride in my work. My clients constantly express delight with the results I deliver.
I recognize why people would want to coast along in an environment like the author described while collecting their free money, but I don't understand how they can manage to go on like that for months or years, without meaning or job satisfaction. It sickens me. And its the kind of bloat that gives consulting a dire name.
This kind of fluff job isn't great if it's your whole life; but it's perfect as a backdrop to a passion/hobby. Perfect day-job for, say, a novelist, or musician, or other type of person who's trying to "make it" in a way that first requires years of no-return investment.
You might say that such a job is soul-killing — but that's still better than a job that leaves you without the time or energy required to pursue the passion you want to dedicate your life toward. Many people using a job as a clerk, barista, admin assistant, etc. as a backstop to this sort of pursuit, would kill to trade that day-job in for this one.
Entry-level management consulting is infamous for long hours and insane travel (pre-COVID, anyway). You're not going to have the time or energy for passion projects when you're spending every waking hour banging out PowerPoints and waiting for your connecting flight at O'Hare.
Three friends of mine are management consultant senior partners/associate partners at McKinsey. They echo the same - you're not going to be having the time or energy for passion projects or even family.
I attended a workshop at the local McKinsey office in college as part of some minority recruitment push they were doing. The recent hires were very up front that most of the work is just looking up the "best practices" for the industry and situation in their internal wiki and presenting it nicely. I quickly realized it was not the career for me.
The communication workshop on the other hand was pretty useful, wish I had saved my notes. For better or worse the way they're trained to communicate is laser focused on how execs like to be spoken to, seemed like a useful skill to have.
I don't think you are relating to these consultants.
They are smart, ambitious, and care about perception. From experience, the lot of them truly enjoyed the work. It seemed like paradise for the analytical mind, the networkers, the career-driven, the optic-obsessed.
Consultancy is the realm of the ambitious number cruncher seeking recognition.
Its not the realm of the artisan, or the practical problem solver.
I am looking into boutique consulting these days, and would love to hear a bit about your experiences, service focus, and impact on private life. Would you be up for chat?
If this doesn’t summarize a large swath of big 4 consulting I don’t know what does. I can echo a very similar experience in this area. I have done consulting in a small corner of the energy industry for about 10 years now. I have always worked on the technical/development/customization side of the equation. I joined a consulting company that promised local(non travel) management consulting. They wanted to break into my field so they hired me and a few others to start a practice. I quickly realized that most of the the management consultants were hucksters and relied on networking and nepotism to stay busy. I often heard “back when I was at Deloitte/PwC/EY/KPMG…” the work consisted of building a ton of process model documents and PowerPoint presentations. If there was any real work that needed to be done it was shipped to India. The manager on site was often looking for any slight variation in requirements so they could claim a variance and extend the work order and create a change order. The senior consultants were often 1-2 years out of college and had training in running meetings and using consulting words to keep the business off guard. I spent a year there and decided I wanted to go independent. That was 7 years ago. Best move I ever made.
BCG/McK/Bain are not Big4 consulting. It's not all roses, but I'd argue that they operate pretty differently - the fact they charge 2x-3x more should tell you something.
We don't deal so much with process mapping PPTs (still a lot of PPTs though).
Except for PPT "beautification", we don't ship work to India. In the few occasions we end up outsourcing something, those are usually well paid experts, mostly local.
We're generally take scope changes well, assuming it's something reasonable. There's a tacit understanding that the client don't know all requirements beforehand. Understanding the actual problem is usually part of the work. So we build a level of trust that allow us to discuss scope trade-offs if/when needed.
Fresh grads are paired with Ivy league MBA consultants, at least a 100% manager ~5+ experience, and an experienced partners. Clients can check out ppl CVs but now they just go to LinkedIn.
To;dr we don't cheap out on anything since we have 3x or more the budget
I'm curious — are there management consultancies out there with standards about what sort of projects they'll take? A consultancy that just outright rejects vague RFPs?
I would expect such a place would make for a much more satisfying, less soul-draining work environment.
There are a huge number of more focused + results-oriented boutique consultancies out there. I run a very small and technically-focused automation consulting firm, and have a number of colleagues at firms in the 30-150 person range that do some pretty interesting work.
While some of the hand-wavy and "if the client wants it who are we to question it" stuff happens in all forms of consulting, it does exist on a spectrum. In some firms that comprises the majority of the work, in others its a small part of a larger and more targeted engagement.
I'm not too proficient on LinkedIn's search capabilities, but I imagine that if you were able to do a wildcard "* partners" search for companies in your area, you'll probably find a handful of boutiques to learn more about.
> My moral system is organized around a utilitarian principle of greatest good for the greatest number — that which adds value cannot be wrong. It did not bother me therefore when I was handed consulting reports that had been stolen from our competitors.
> What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work
Good sentence.
But anyway, consulting is a sham business. Anyone can tell you that.
The problem is sometimes you need a third party to tell you what to do. I'm often reminded about how McKinsey told UBS in the early 2000s that they were missing the boat on mortgage backed securities. They went all in and were one of the banks that lost the most in the GFC. Of course McKinsey walked away with millions for their brilliant insights.
To my mind consultants have carved out a niche whereby through experience, research, and by the virtue of having already visited everybody's offices, they can tell you what the "best practices" are in your industry. Sometimes this plain means what everyone else is doing, hence the UBS Mortgage Backed Security advice.
I just went through this with some super green Ivy school minted Deloitte hires that clearly were making things up as they went as someone in our industry can tell BS when they see it.
So why didn’t your company fire those unexperienced expensive consultants and hire good ones?
Consulting deals are sold on the golf course, noone at that level cares what actually happens as long as the slides produced justify what they wanted to do anyway. Individual consultants just go through the motions to make it look semi-plausible.
This exactly, we had no say in the matter just that consultants were coming in and we had to help them get up to speed with our tech stack and get out of our way.
Kind of. There are conflict rules so consultants don't share specifics about clients. We tend to share general trends and stick to long term relations. I've seen situations where the partner has been consulting for a client for longer than most CxOs tenure.
It's still less of an issue of a competitor poaching your key people. And by not hiring consultants, you do risk getting behind on a lot of practices.
UBS was missing the boat on the world's most profitable and popular financial instruments. The bank wanted to know what its competitors were doing better than it did, why it's stock price was lagging, and why it was losing business. McKinsey told them exactly what the problem was. It isn't up to McK to manage the bank's risk, nor to call UBS back 5 years later and say it might be time to quit with the MBS.
Makes you think of index funds / ETFs. For most small investors following what everyone is doing is the correct advice.
It might be similar for most businesses - you will never become a superstar, but you will likely be somewhere close to matching your competition in outcomes.
I’m a consultant and love my work. I’m convinced I bring value to my clients most of the time.
In Data Management consulting, it’s an in-and-out process where you come in, model the processes in place, compare with the standards, adapt it to the business, and propose improvements. You
You provide additional value also by not being on payroll: who wants to internalize a temporary function? In France you can’t fire an employee that easily. I don’t work in Strategy consulting or in one of the big firms, my daily rate is around 1000€ before taxes, and my clients call me back for more of my time.
It really depends what you do as a consultant. Are you just a glorified temp worker? Are you here with a clear mission? Are you a general advisor who brings experience or knowledge?
Like any job, there are shitty companies and people, but most aren’t.
I haven't personally heard of that job title before. How technical would you say you are? Do you advise on or design technological solutions as well, or is it about org charts, BPMN, etc?
The correct answer to the "find me a rock," problem is, "rock is ready to go, legal is still papering it but here's an email we can use as a letter of intent, so either way, they owe us a rock."
194 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] thread"Why aren't you doing anything about X?"
"What do you mean I'm not doing anything; I've dropped several grand on therapy to deal with X!"
It might sound like a cliche, but treating the clients money as if it was your own, is one of the rules i tried to follow when I was a consultant.
They pay everyone a $16k bonus on the way out for signing that thing, whether people who have a gripe or others who have only good things to say. It doesn't somehow give him credibility.
Aside from that, there are people who go into consulting and gain a lot of skills, and others who do the least work possible and leave. Some who find great fulfillment in the right corners of the work, some who find it totally dispiriting.
This is just one person's experience, not a salacious tell-all about the "dark underbelly of an industry that no one wants to talk about".
What I admire from the McK/BCG/BAIN etc. cadre is their confidence on being able to solve any problem you can throw at them. Of course this does not always work, but the attitude is a mixture between hard-work, power, arrogance and being extremely smart people.
Consultants aren’t superheros. But if you’re looking for some smart people to grind on some question you have you they typically deliver what you want. Sometimes they crash and burn (had that happen with McK once).
* The partners overseeing the client relationships, who have each worked with hundreds of clients, been involved with a thousand projects personally, and know something of 10x more. At that stage in their career, a huge amount of strategy consulting becomes instinctive pattern recognition.
* The firm's global knowledgebase, practice areas, research support teams, etc. These hugely accelerate your knowledge of an industry so you can productively and usefully engage with experienced managers at the client right from day 1.
I was a BCG consultant for a few years. Every 3 months, I'd be thrown into a totally new industry: forestry and paper making, clothing supply chains, retail banking sales incentive structures, car tyre manufacturing cost reduction, airline route pricing, production planning for brick manufacturing, ERP systems for electrical contracting wholesaling. Those were my first two years as a junior consultant.
On the day the project kicked off internally, of course I knew nothing. But a couple of days later, I knew how each industry worked, understood the competitive positions of the client and their main competitors, had some good hypotheses on the client's specific challenges, knew the terminology, and was fully equipped to start asking relevant questions.
I never pretended to know stuff that I didn't. Being humble, open, inquisitive, sensitive to others' perspective, and focused on the outcome gets you a long way.
"I never pretended to know stuff that I didn't."
Exactly! My feelings is that they pride not on knowing things, but on knowing _how_ to know things.
I had an ex-Mck associate partner as a boss and turns out he's a great guy (though his brain seems to be overclocked and that made it extremely difficult to work with).
Framed another way - The HN crowd loves to shit on PowerPoint slides right up until they need to make a pitch deck that doesn’t suck.
All that said, after many years of working with consultants from every major firm, I’ve definitely got mixed feelings about the actual value generated by a lot of engagements.
I understand the temptation to poke fun at this, but think of it from a startup POV. They do pitch decks as well, and they are making up numbers there too.
If it means churning out low value status updates then no thanks.
Just like how "coding" can be creating a work of art and delivering something amazing, or mindlessly burning down Jira tickets that you get shoveled on your plate.
The McK engagement manager who is a veteran and knows their job (and your job as CEO/CFO/VP) charges $10k per day, because they are basically an experienced executive for hire -- while the McK associate fresh from business school gets leased out for $1k per day. The latter are the equivalent of a smart but inexperienced freelance developer (who don't cost much less) -- though with the resources of McK corporate behind them, and the willingess to work 14 hours a day.
Learning to consistently convince people in power is a pretty nice skill to have IMO.
I think we're good at it if you believe from posts here at HN all we do is providing useless PPTs, and still growing double digits % each year while charging $2M for a 12w project.
It's about understanding how to organize thoughts and present a point in a way that an executive would want to make a decision on a topic. (When it goes the way it should.)
After a stint in consulting, you sometimes have meetings with people you work with up and down the chain in a company, and you wonder, "my god, how do you get through every day with the disorganized jumble of random thoughts you're spewing in this meeting?"
At its best, it teaches you how to find and organize evidence to make a point, convince people of something, and get things done.
At worst, well... those skills can be employed by people robotically going to create meaningless (or harmful) advice that a company already knows, for lots of $$$ wasted. Like so much else, it is often a reflection of the capability and state of the person paying for the work. You get someone who's under lots of deadline pressures, dug themselves into a bad budget hole, doesn't know what good work looks like, and you're gonna get a shitty consulting output that makes the headlines (or makes people remember) that consultants can produce lots of BS.
have you been working in a management/strategy consultancy? If yes, would you be up for a chat / email exchange?
My contact details are in my profile.
Cheers!
Even just helping a company come up with a rationale plan to identify key issues and succinctly communicate that to leadership is a huge benefit.
If what the author claims is true and consulting is basically making up numbers to fit some conclusion and general fluff work, I'm not sure that's a valuable skill to pick up. Sure, you could pick up networking and ...?
It all depends on what you're offering and what the customer needs. We wanted long term contracts, so it was always in our best interest to provide a good solution. If companies outgrew us and wanted to insource IT, we would document and hand over what we managed, because to do otherwise not only would be a dick move, but it would kill our reputation.
I imagine it's much different for a big name firm that never gets called out on doing a shit job because that would cast decision making of the executives that called upon them I to question.
>>> Aside from that, there are people who go into consulting and gain a lot of skills, and others who do the least work possible and leave. Some who find great fulfillment in the right corners of the work, some who find it totally dispiriting.
So I don't think it's entirely obvious which type of consulting was being discussed at the point I replied. Even so, I'm not sure the type matter as much as might be thought, I'm positive there are management consultants that bring useful knowledge and real benefits to the table. I think the incentive alignments make that harder, because of some of the same reasons I noted previously, but I don't think the type of consulting really matters, other than one type or the other being more common at different levels.
> They're not paying him hush money because he has a great story.
> They simply pay everyone hush money as a matter of course.
It's really funny when they aren't giving you any severance and they expect you to sign that stuff tho :3
to clarify: you generally aren't getting severance without signing something that loosely says you wont badmouth them.
On getting fired... It's usually an unplanned meeting shortly after you get in, possibly with HR present. Take a deep breath, and realize the decision has been made, and no amount of explanations, excuses, circumstances, or bargaining will change it. Keep your mouth shut. Don't bother asking them why; they won't say, and then you'll start guessing. There's nothing you can say that will help you. Don't sign anything; say you'll take home whatever documents they give you to review. Don't help them pick up your work where you left off--you don't work there, they made it clear they have no interest in you working there. Take all your personal belongings, return theirs. If they let you send a farewell email, send something generic (or not at all). As always HR is not your friend.
In short, keep every interaction as curt as respectfully possible. It minimizes professional impact, and if something leads you to legal action, it puts you in the best position for it.
So take it home let the emotions fade and think it through.
And get an employment lawyer to review the documents. This happened to me a few years ago and had it not been for the lawyer spotting a mistake I'd have missed out on thousands of pounds in my payoff. It was well worth the 60 minutes of their time.
Depends. 80% sure the last place I worked at had Non-Disparagement on hire. They were not primarily an IT company, and their primary pool of new recruits for their core business was adults fresh out of college. I don't think it's entirely coincidental that there was a -lot- of scary language in the agreements/handbook that seemed geared towards making sure people were afraid to talk about the problems the organization had.
> As always HR is not your friend.
My last day on that job, I had to do an exit interview. During said interview, the HR employee asked how I was doing that day, my answer was, "Considering this is the first time you folks are pulling me into a room since I got here, not bad!"
You can always red-line the contract. Still, if I saw that, I'd be pretty worried. It's saying you can't even review them on Glassdoor, and I'd wonder what they're hiding.
IME while most companies have disgruntled employees most don't pay you to sign a non disparagement on the way out and the ones that do typically do have something to hide.
YMMV
In a redundancy case I might say well then provide me will all the paperwork you have on file I will get my lawyer fried to check this over or we can sign the compromise agreement now for lets say 4 months salary.
And also the comment right about the "unnerving culture" is a bit of a red flag.
Laughs in investor-captured surplus value.
I would say it makes you have to prove yourself to new people every project, which is scary but let's you feel the full weight of what you are doing and not just coast on past achievements.
And as a technical person, you learn how technical skill and rigor is looked upon and weighted by the people that are paying. Like the author says, it's often an afterthought, but its valuable to learn this first hand.
Which is a real shame, because I love the romantic concept of science and advancing knowledge for the world!
But todays academic systems seems borderline pathologically damaging to the humans involved.
I would love to have a chat with your regarding your experience and ask you some question about the learning curve. My contact details are in my profile.
Cheers,
I'm a data scientist consultant (not at BCG), and while some things may be true, there's also the flip side, where some junior analyst with a fancy degree thinks they're the bees knees when in fact they don't know anything at all.
"I'm not good at excel" is kind of a red flag for a variety of other incompetencies. This article features multiple instances of him saying he wasn't as competent as he was marketed but also more competent than others on the team. I would guess the other side of the story was very different. Name dropping MIT a dozen times is a similar red flag.
I also think the MIT references are reasonable because the article was published in the MIT student newspaper.
Besides that, I agree that the story by itself isn't really enough to draw any conclusions against MBB. The author comes across as unjustifiably entitled.
I'd wonder how much that influenced his opinion retroactively haha.
Could you please explain why you think that way?
It’s like saying “I’m good at computer keyboards”.
Claiming you're not good at excel is a red flag since it's a fundamental tool for the profession.
I had to ask my coworker for help putting together a simple before/after bar chart for its perf gains in excel.
He couldn't believe it.
“I was the most senior consultant on the case proposal”. Unless this guy was selling the work to the customer (normally what partners do), no he wasn’t the most senior. He was the new consultant in the back doing the grunt work.
And the “sit back and shut up” is actually good advice for someone who has never done consulting before. The client knows you’re a 20-something junior. They aren’t hiring you, they are hiring your partner who has 10+ years of experience.
All kids know is what people tell them. So McKinsey, BCG, etc. plaster their name all over ivy league campuses and sponsor events telling kids how prestigious and sexy and exclusive their work is. And the kids believe them!
Then the kids get there, and realize the job is basically spending 80 hr weeks to create badly designed powerpoint decks filled with bullshit charts and sell them to know-nothing careerists at dying legacy companies and governments.
The ones who don't become consultants themselves, go on to become future clients. Marketing to college kids is extremely undervalued IMO. Professional services firms have used that marketing playbook for hundreds of years. All the big law firms do it too.
Before the internet killed traditional advertising, Ad Agencies used to do it too and were the "it" career for many decades.
Source: my employer (not me) specializes in advising on the contracting for outsourced services.
Ah, the beans and noses of consulting... https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-nos...
I've been an independent consultant for two decades and take a lot of pride in my work. My clients constantly express delight with the results I deliver.
I recognize why people would want to coast along in an environment like the author described while collecting their free money, but I don't understand how they can manage to go on like that for months or years, without meaning or job satisfaction. It sickens me. And its the kind of bloat that gives consulting a dire name.
You might say that such a job is soul-killing — but that's still better than a job that leaves you without the time or energy required to pursue the passion you want to dedicate your life toward. Many people using a job as a clerk, barista, admin assistant, etc. as a backstop to this sort of pursuit, would kill to trade that day-job in for this one.
The communication workshop on the other hand was pretty useful, wish I had saved my notes. For better or worse the way they're trained to communicate is laser focused on how execs like to be spoken to, seemed like a useful skill to have.
They are smart, ambitious, and care about perception. From experience, the lot of them truly enjoyed the work. It seemed like paradise for the analytical mind, the networkers, the career-driven, the optic-obsessed.
Consultancy is the realm of the ambitious number cruncher seeking recognition.
Its not the realm of the artisan, or the practical problem solver.
I am looking into boutique consulting these days, and would love to hear a bit about your experiences, service focus, and impact on private life. Would you be up for chat?
My contact details are in my profile.
Cheers,
Piotr
I wish those gentlemen in question had contact details in their profile.
Except for PPT "beautification", we don't ship work to India. In the few occasions we end up outsourcing something, those are usually well paid experts, mostly local.
We're generally take scope changes well, assuming it's something reasonable. There's a tacit understanding that the client don't know all requirements beforehand. Understanding the actual problem is usually part of the work. So we build a level of trust that allow us to discuss scope trade-offs if/when needed.
Fresh grads are paired with Ivy league MBA consultants, at least a 100% manager ~5+ experience, and an experienced partners. Clients can check out ppl CVs but now they just go to LinkedIn.
To;dr we don't cheap out on anything since we have 3x or more the budget
I would expect such a place would make for a much more satisfying, less soul-draining work environment.
While some of the hand-wavy and "if the client wants it who are we to question it" stuff happens in all forms of consulting, it does exist on a spectrum. In some firms that comprises the majority of the work, in others its a small part of a larger and more targeted engagement.
I'm not too proficient on LinkedIn's search capabilities, but I imagine that if you were able to do a wildcard "* partners" search for companies in your area, you'll probably find a handful of boutiques to learn more about.
that's where I stopped reading
Here are the other three stories in the series:
https://thetech.com/2010/04/02/dubai-v130-n16
https://thetech.com/2010/04/06/dubai-v130-n17
https://thetech.com/2010/04/13/dubai-v130-n19
Good sentence.
But anyway, consulting is a sham business. Anyone can tell you that.
The problem is sometimes you need a third party to tell you what to do. I'm often reminded about how McKinsey told UBS in the early 2000s that they were missing the boat on mortgage backed securities. They went all in and were one of the banks that lost the most in the GFC. Of course McKinsey walked away with millions for their brilliant insights.
To my mind consultants have carved out a niche whereby through experience, research, and by the virtue of having already visited everybody's offices, they can tell you what the "best practices" are in your industry. Sometimes this plain means what everyone else is doing, hence the UBS Mortgage Backed Security advice.
Undeserved respect for brands is where the problem is, in my opinion.
Consulting deals are sold on the golf course, noone at that level cares what actually happens as long as the slides produced justify what they wanted to do anyway. Individual consultants just go through the motions to make it look semi-plausible.
It's still less of an issue of a competitor poaching your key people. And by not hiring consultants, you do risk getting behind on a lot of practices.
It might be similar for most businesses - you will never become a superstar, but you will likely be somewhere close to matching your competition in outcomes.
I’m a consultant and love my work. I’m convinced I bring value to my clients most of the time.
In Data Management consulting, it’s an in-and-out process where you come in, model the processes in place, compare with the standards, adapt it to the business, and propose improvements. You
You provide additional value also by not being on payroll: who wants to internalize a temporary function? In France you can’t fire an employee that easily. I don’t work in Strategy consulting or in one of the big firms, my daily rate is around 1000€ before taxes, and my clients call me back for more of my time.
It really depends what you do as a consultant. Are you just a glorified temp worker? Are you here with a clear mission? Are you a general advisor who brings experience or knowledge?
Like any job, there are shitty companies and people, but most aren’t.
There's the nutshell