Or, since Betteridge's Law, like Moore's and Poe's, is a physical constant of the universe, it could implode in on itself and create a supermassive black hole.
“Decision support” and “strategic (blank)” are how this is often messaged
In a regulated space, I have found we usually bring them in initially just to find out how our competition is dealing with a new requirement. We may not even engage longer with them on the bigger project. This is actually useful because they have insights to so many companies.
Higher ups are responsible for the company. You can blame consultants all you want but the board is still going to want heads to roll if you're underperforming.
The plausible deniability does not have to be just from shareholders. It can also be from the courts, or even other employees in the company. Also, the plausible deniability is for the person in the company doing the head rolling, so that they do not get caught up in it. Of course, some things can get so big that board members and CEO can get caught up in it, but not always.
In a broader economic context, they take profitable but unpredictable companies and make them boring. Google is the more recent example. Apple (pre-return of Job) is another. Here's a good article: https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/apple-googlemckinsey-how-a...
I know Accenture does more harm than good. If a company brings in any of these types of “consultants” it means they are on a race to the bottom and this is their last attempt at turning things around. And at that stage the environment tends to be toxic.
I will tell you, having been approached by Accenture a number of times that the rates they offer their consultants are far below what a decent consultant expects to get paid. You get what you pay for. You're mileage may vary.
The opposite. Also I actually went to a job interview at Accenture once, their pay rates for IT people are terrible. Why anyone competent would work there I have no idea.
I was briefly employed by Accenture after an acquisition.
It was exactly the corporate hellscape you'd expect, and at the end of the day you can't escape that. But a lot of the day to day experience depended on what team you were on. If you had good leads on your team, you could be protected from a lot of bullshit and focus on getting work done.
The only "good" projects I'm aware of were projects that the acquired company had sold before the acquisition.
For lower level employees (especially offshore), the corporate bullshit is impossible to escape, but depending on where you fall on the ladder, there are some good opportunities for advancement. If you're a ladder climber, you can make a lot of money in a Managing Director position or above.
I didn't enjoy my time with them and would never work with them again, but I guess my point is that it's possible to have good experiences working there. Maybe this post will make it just a little bit less baffling that some folks choose to work there.
> I didn't enjoy my time with them and would never work with them again, but I guess my point is that it's possible to have good experiences working there
This sounds like an abusive relationship "yeah they're great if x, y, z, w, q happen and you stay 'on the good side'"
Meh, I think that comparison is hyperbolic. Annoying corporate bullshit (which Accenture undeniably has loads of) isn't the same thing as abuse.
I'm certainly not defending the company. I was arguably on the good side and still would never want to work with them again. But for the average American employee at least it's "just" a somewhat shitty corporate gig. Some of the practices around offshore might well be called "abusive", I wouldn't know as I had virtually no interaction with that side of things.
I worked in government where Accenture where brought in for projects. A lot of high level meetings and presentations, then sub-junior level devs. At the end there was a lot of legal wrangling over "we delivered what you asked for", while the customer got very little of what they wanted.
No, but let’s not overestimate what the rest of us are doing. I studied engineering at a prestigious school, I don’t think any of my jobs was particularly useful and this applies to most people I’ve met in my professional life. Something’s severely broken but I can’t really point to what it is.
I've been thinking about this lately, and to put it bluntly, my conclusion is with the "sound money" people, that monetary intervention at the whims of bureaucrats has progressively poisoned the economy as the information system it is. Basically all irrationality observed both at the macro and micro level (down to individual insanity) is due to something being wrong with how money is made and allocated. This creates irrational behavior at top level, and that trickles down from there.
Low interest rates disincentivize saving and incentivize reckless speculation. In a world where savings accounts yield 0.25% and bonds yield negative, even ordinary people are forced to consider investments like crypto, SPACs, and high growth tech stocks just to maintain their wealth. Monetary policy has made us all into gamblers.
But isn't keeping your money providing information to the economy? And conversely, forcing it to be spent as investment generating malinvestment, investment in frivolous activity? I'm just thinking out loud...
Savings don't cause inflation at all. Imagine adding $100K to every one's bank account in the US, and make sure that these accounts are frozen for 30 years; this doesn't increase aggregate demand at all.
I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with our monetary policy that leads to wild speculation, but isn't "just to maintain their wealth" overstating it? I guess it remains to be seen what happens from here, but ignoring this year the S&P has been a good solution to maintaining wealth, has it not?
Yes, anyone can easily track inflation by buying and holding a cheap broad market index fund like VOO or VTI. In fact, it has never been easier for people to ensure they keep up with inflation. As you get close to retirement, you can transition to cheap bond index funds like VCSH.
There are even cheap target date funds where all you need to know is what year you want to retire.
The people who feel the need to gamble on the things listed below are those who are not earning enough, not saving enough, or want to gamble:
> even ordinary people are forced to consider investments like crypto, SPACs, and high growth tech stocks just to maintain their wealth. Monetary policy has made us all into gamblers.
I guess, I just have this sense that things could've been much better if we intervened less, and that's in general. I think bias for action does harm in many instances.
Yeah and at least in tech you get to play with: technology.
So it’s fun, but I have this constant feeling that I could actually create value and also earn more.
All the paths seem to be closed though whenever I dig a bit deeper. I was optimistic with decentralization for a while because that would let you operate outside of established firms that all seem to have the issues a sibling poster describes [1], unfortunately it didn’t take off for many notable non-financial use-cases.
I too am in that stage of life. Why, even the other day I wondered "Do those 'bypass all authorization" buttons on the ICBM launch console (@ our hole in North Dakota) actually work?"
To my surprise they do! Fortunately the "Shutdown engines" button also works! But it got me out of my funk.
Well, got to do some cleaning: seems Minuteman-III silo vibrations cause bowel evacuations in most people.
Incomplete List of useful jobs that get pay a fraction of my yearly salary but yet provide actual value to society : teacher, nurses, day-care worker, trash collector.
I think what is severely broken is how we compensate different jobs. Something as meaningless as wrapping crypto in a extra layer of code should not be 5 teachers salaries.
I’m self-taught but I feel the same way after a decade of working for various startups. What’s disheartening is that all the code I wrote over the years is likely no longer running or cordoned off in some “legacy” codebase, slated for eventual removal. All those agonizing decisions that I had to make over performance, code style, and library choices were ultimately for nothing (other than a paycheck). I suppose many professional jobs are like this though.
We're all "shoveling coal" and "put on our pants one leg at a time."
Pedigree gets noticed as a social and business scarcity signal, and ease of opportunities and expectations ensue. "It must be good if it says 'Mercedes'!" (just don't check the used car ratings for that model not built in Germany)
What I noticed was pedigree dulling or "overload" amongst high performance individuals from relative overachievement backgrounds like EE/CS and MD IITians + Ivies. At that point, they're "Mike", "Bob", "Venkatash" and the titles and diplomas are hiding in the corner somewhere. The ideas and work were central over an antithesis like: "How can you help my personal-professional brand get another book deal, startup funding round, and TED talk?". One time, a new software development manager came in and drove 5 developers into resigning by trying to micromanage and impose ", Ph.D." authority (a type who belongs MENSA and brags about it) on them. Sigh
The smartest successful people I've known are/were decent people. The latter might have something to do with it. I've seen enough gloriously cocksure, arrogant individuals set themselves up for hubris like Theranos.
We were making a fairly big bet on a new product line so the CEO brought in McKinsey. The consultants were a bit of a mixed bag. The partner and one of the associates were sharp. The other associate less so. They basically just confirmed that what we were planning made sense. But that was useful in and of itself. And they provided our business planning people with complicated spreadsheets that kept them out of otherwise getting in the way. (Only somewhat /s.)
There are some specific cases where consultancies can be very useful. If you'e going through pretty much any on-time transition where you don't have internal expertise, bringing in outside expertise can be worthwhile. Things like opening an offshore office for the first time, buying another company and doing a merger, turning around a failing department or division. Clearly defined time bounded activities that require specific skills you don't have.
Too often though companies use consultants to manage core activities of the company. If it's a core activity, and you can't do it yourself, what are you even doing in business?
Consultants bread and butter are long standing regulations. Healthcare, banking, environmental and probably some others I am less familiar with. You find yourself on the other side of a government regulator action and what do you do? Stumble your way though it for the first time while redirecting business critical assets to an unfamiliar one time project or hire a group of people who have been standing on the other side of these regulators twice a year for the last 20 years?
Absolutely agreed! I think where so many of us have seen this go awry is when companies think IT isn't a core activity.
And I also see companies consistently screw up defining their deliverables and by not building in a draft review process (early enough for feedback to be actioned on).
If you have nebulous deliverables and a single project end date... of course consultancies are going to throw together what they think the minimal acceptable product is, at the last minute. We don't build software that way anymore, and for good reason.
> If it's a core activity, and you can't do it yourself, what are you even doing in business?
The most value I’ve ever seen was at a large, well-known organization where the 24 year-olds in $2k suits met with the actual staff and gave the C-level an honest report about all of the problems which had been getting buried for years by the mid-level management.
That worked but so many things are just broken for that to be useful. Nobody wanted to deal with that, so unsurprisingly a lot of people left after a year or two.
As a subcontractor which was embedded into a BCG team in Virginia on a procurement overhaul project I have had nothing but a positive experience with that crew.
They provided an actual real useful very detailed plan on how to reach the desired end state after spending weeks pitching their plan to the client. Maybe it's just the two partners I work with. Nothing shady or unethical happened. The client screwed themselves up so badly there is so much room for big money proposals to fix things the client already did to themselves.
The leadership goes out of their way to stop both real and perceived corruption. e.g., no gifts or expensed dinners for clients. My team only needs reputation to get more work. And they are good at getting themselves out there and putting out good work. Just my observation.
I was disappointed by this article, expected better. Although it acknowledges wrongdoing, it does little to explain why it happens as often as it does.
Not really, because even if it were that simple (get some people from "over there" and bring them "here" so things are now "better"), it's not in their best interest.
Just like with politics, it's not about doing something, it's about making sure with the next round of "who do we pick", you're the one that gets chosen.
They’re change agents in organisations that find themselves unable to change. Are they effective?…often not, but juicing meaningful decision making is the underlying spirit of deploying them.
McKinsey and other consultants are the modern equivalent of counselors to medieval kings.
A strong, competent king would still have counselors - but he'd make sure they were competent, loyal, and deriving only modest and honest profits from the arrangement.
A less-strong but passably competent king would often need more & better-paid counselors - if only to provide coverage and a chorus of arguments, when he needed to do things that weren't so popular or familiar.
A weak or incompetent king often fell victim to Evil Counselors - who more-or-less ended up ruling the kingdom, for their own enjoyment and profit.
Back in medieval times - when insulting the king could literally get your head chopped off - it was quite reasonable to blame "evil counselors" whenever the kingdom wasn't doing so well.
But now? Why the h*ell can't people see and say the obvious, when craptastic managers, bureaucrats, and politicians need to be dethroned & defenestrated?
It’s like saying the emperor is not wearing any clothes. Everyone can see it and thinks it’s crazy, but all emperors (and emperor hopefulls) wear no clothes, so they’re disinclined to make an issue of it.
No. There is a very wide range of competence & honesty in managers, bureaucrats, and politicians. And you'll accomplish d*mn little if you replace or remove the consultants who gather around the crappy ones.
I always thought the point of consultants was to manage internal politics by giving management cover to do things that everyone knows needs to be done but nobody wants to do
1. Experts in their field often reach a point in their career where they've run into enough road blocks and solved enough major problems in their field that they can see some benefit in helping others avoid/solve said problems on fast track. [This is where I'm at]
2. Companies often have need for on-tap expertise to solve problems on fast track without being required to commit for the long haul.
And here is the intersection of consulting. I've solved about a million problems at this point in my career. Many of them solved the hard way - the way I'd like you not to have to solve them. I've spotted patterns that allow you to predict what kind of behaviours and working processes will cause what kinds of problems and I've formed patterns and processes that allow clients to sidestep issues before they become issues.
Wouldn't it be useful to benefit from that?
Many major consultancies, sadly, hire a ton of people that haven't put in the time and built the skills to be as effective as you may like - which is reflected by the fact that every time I've been approached by Accenture they've offered rates that only a junior or intermediate level consultant would go for.
This explains why a lot of customers part ways with consultancies with a bad taste in their mouth. This isn't the grade of "expertise" you expect when you hire a consultancy. You expect senior or principal level resources for the rates you pay - people who have done the time, solved the problems and come armed with the solutions; not juniors and intermediates who may be great bums in seats, but not what you hire big expensive consultancies to provide.
I've also been on a team with a technical consultant. Finding someone with that specific expertise and fitting into the environment would have been really difficult and probably more expensive, also considering the risk of a bad hire.
There are managers who refuse to listen to their own people. This is where MBB consultants come in: talk to everyone, listen, and deliver fancy brochure-level template presentations with data and input from their own employees. It's the same or variations of recommendations that are listened-to because they cost more.
Also, an ignorant of the politics and business generalist business expert can more easily notice if there is anything amiss by entering as a novice with fewer vested interests.
84 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread* Mediocracy: The Politics of the Extreme Centre
* The Managerial Revolution
In a regulated space, I have found we usually bring them in initially just to find out how our competition is dealing with a new requirement. We may not even engage longer with them on the bigger project. This is actually useful because they have insights to so many companies.
Higher ups are responsible for the company. You can blame consultants all you want but the board is still going to want heads to roll if you're underperforming.
McKinsey and Purdue worked together on opioids. Both were sued and both had to pay for their strategy which resulted in addiction and death.
> Of course, some things can get so big that board members and CEO can get caught up in it, but not always.
... asking for a friend.
It was exactly the corporate hellscape you'd expect, and at the end of the day you can't escape that. But a lot of the day to day experience depended on what team you were on. If you had good leads on your team, you could be protected from a lot of bullshit and focus on getting work done.
The only "good" projects I'm aware of were projects that the acquired company had sold before the acquisition.
For lower level employees (especially offshore), the corporate bullshit is impossible to escape, but depending on where you fall on the ladder, there are some good opportunities for advancement. If you're a ladder climber, you can make a lot of money in a Managing Director position or above.
I didn't enjoy my time with them and would never work with them again, but I guess my point is that it's possible to have good experiences working there. Maybe this post will make it just a little bit less baffling that some folks choose to work there.
This sounds like an abusive relationship "yeah they're great if x, y, z, w, q happen and you stay 'on the good side'"
I'm certainly not defending the company. I was arguably on the good side and still would never want to work with them again. But for the average American employee at least it's "just" a somewhat shitty corporate gig. Some of the practices around offshore might well be called "abusive", I wouldn't know as I had virtually no interaction with that side of things.
The closest I’ve seen are fresh college grads getting a year or two of experience before moving on.
I was working for them and worked for companies that hired them.
You should spend your money on wealth, or give it to someone who will.
If you save your money and don't spend it, that creates inflation because it isn't stimulating production of wealth.
A substantial net worth is known as wealthy. Net worth is defined as the current value of one's assets less liabilities.
Having a billion dollars in one's bank account and zero liabilities is wealthy, unless you are defining wealthy some other way.
Are you talking about wealth as a a nation, as opposed to individual wealth?
Please explain.
There are even cheap target date funds where all you need to know is what year you want to retire.
The people who feel the need to gamble on the things listed below are those who are not earning enough, not saving enough, or want to gamble:
> even ordinary people are forced to consider investments like crypto, SPACs, and high growth tech stocks just to maintain their wealth. Monetary policy has made us all into gamblers.
Unfortunately, terrible for the long term.
So it’s fun, but I have this constant feeling that I could actually create value and also earn more.
All the paths seem to be closed though whenever I dig a bit deeper. I was optimistic with decentralization for a while because that would let you operate outside of established firms that all seem to have the issues a sibling poster describes [1], unfortunately it didn’t take off for many notable non-financial use-cases.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33214646
Edit: added link
Right, without this fact, the tech landscape would look like a lot different.
To my surprise they do! Fortunately the "Shutdown engines" button also works! But it got me out of my funk.
Well, got to do some cleaning: seems Minuteman-III silo vibrations cause bowel evacuations in most people.
Incomplete List of useful jobs that get pay a fraction of my yearly salary but yet provide actual value to society : teacher, nurses, day-care worker, trash collector.
I think what is severely broken is how we compensate different jobs. Something as meaningless as wrapping crypto in a extra layer of code should not be 5 teachers salaries.
Pedigree gets noticed as a social and business scarcity signal, and ease of opportunities and expectations ensue. "It must be good if it says 'Mercedes'!" (just don't check the used car ratings for that model not built in Germany)
What I noticed was pedigree dulling or "overload" amongst high performance individuals from relative overachievement backgrounds like EE/CS and MD IITians + Ivies. At that point, they're "Mike", "Bob", "Venkatash" and the titles and diplomas are hiding in the corner somewhere. The ideas and work were central over an antithesis like: "How can you help my personal-professional brand get another book deal, startup funding round, and TED talk?". One time, a new software development manager came in and drove 5 developers into resigning by trying to micromanage and impose ", Ph.D." authority (a type who belongs MENSA and brags about it) on them. Sigh
The smartest successful people I've known are/were decent people. The latter might have something to do with it. I've seen enough gloriously cocksure, arrogant individuals set themselves up for hubris like Theranos.
Long answer: no, not really.
We were making a fairly big bet on a new product line so the CEO brought in McKinsey. The consultants were a bit of a mixed bag. The partner and one of the associates were sharp. The other associate less so. They basically just confirmed that what we were planning made sense. But that was useful in and of itself. And they provided our business planning people with complicated spreadsheets that kept them out of otherwise getting in the way. (Only somewhat /s.)
Too often though companies use consultants to manage core activities of the company. If it's a core activity, and you can't do it yourself, what are you even doing in business?
And I also see companies consistently screw up defining their deliverables and by not building in a draft review process (early enough for feedback to be actioned on).
If you have nebulous deliverables and a single project end date... of course consultancies are going to throw together what they think the minimal acceptable product is, at the last minute. We don't build software that way anymore, and for good reason.
The most value I’ve ever seen was at a large, well-known organization where the 24 year-olds in $2k suits met with the actual staff and gave the C-level an honest report about all of the problems which had been getting buried for years by the mid-level management.
That worked but so many things are just broken for that to be useful. Nobody wanted to deal with that, so unsurprisingly a lot of people left after a year or two.
They provided an actual real useful very detailed plan on how to reach the desired end state after spending weeks pitching their plan to the client. Maybe it's just the two partners I work with. Nothing shady or unethical happened. The client screwed themselves up so badly there is so much room for big money proposals to fix things the client already did to themselves.
The leadership goes out of their way to stop both real and perceived corruption. e.g., no gifts or expensed dinners for clients. My team only needs reputation to get more work. And they are good at getting themselves out there and putting out good work. Just my observation.
Just like with politics, it's not about doing something, it's about making sure with the next round of "who do we pick", you're the one that gets chosen.
A strong, competent king would still have counselors - but he'd make sure they were competent, loyal, and deriving only modest and honest profits from the arrangement.
A less-strong but passably competent king would often need more & better-paid counselors - if only to provide coverage and a chorus of arguments, when he needed to do things that weren't so popular or familiar.
A weak or incompetent king often fell victim to Evil Counselors - who more-or-less ended up ruling the kingdom, for their own enjoyment and profit.
Back in medieval times - when insulting the king could literally get your head chopped off - it was quite reasonable to blame "evil counselors" whenever the kingdom wasn't doing so well.
But now? Why the h*ell can't people see and say the obvious, when craptastic managers, bureaucrats, and politicians need to be dethroned & defenestrated?
If you see them show up at your company, run. It will be hell.
My mother, a nurse for 40 years, knows first hand what a bunch of consultants know about patient care
1. Experts in their field often reach a point in their career where they've run into enough road blocks and solved enough major problems in their field that they can see some benefit in helping others avoid/solve said problems on fast track. [This is where I'm at]
2. Companies often have need for on-tap expertise to solve problems on fast track without being required to commit for the long haul.
And here is the intersection of consulting. I've solved about a million problems at this point in my career. Many of them solved the hard way - the way I'd like you not to have to solve them. I've spotted patterns that allow you to predict what kind of behaviours and working processes will cause what kinds of problems and I've formed patterns and processes that allow clients to sidestep issues before they become issues.
Wouldn't it be useful to benefit from that?
Many major consultancies, sadly, hire a ton of people that haven't put in the time and built the skills to be as effective as you may like - which is reflected by the fact that every time I've been approached by Accenture they've offered rates that only a junior or intermediate level consultant would go for.
This explains why a lot of customers part ways with consultancies with a bad taste in their mouth. This isn't the grade of "expertise" you expect when you hire a consultancy. You expect senior or principal level resources for the rates you pay - people who have done the time, solved the problems and come armed with the solutions; not juniors and intermediates who may be great bums in seats, but not what you hire big expensive consultancies to provide.
McKinsey sure and certainly do something useful for it's shareholders, for the rest of the world.............
There are managers who refuse to listen to their own people. This is where MBB consultants come in: talk to everyone, listen, and deliver fancy brochure-level template presentations with data and input from their own employees. It's the same or variations of recommendations that are listened-to because they cost more.
Also, an ignorant of the politics and business generalist business expert can more easily notice if there is anything amiss by entering as a novice with fewer vested interests.