I’ve come across McKinsey and BCG a few times in my career. The author’s description is in line with what I observed on the other side of the table. Their teams really had no clue what they were doing, but it gave otherwise clueless executives cover to say “the experts recommend…” which somehow was to make bad ideas something others should get behind.
Armies of consultants would try to do “analysis” to justify their recommendations but the analysis was a total charade of numbers nobody checked and models full of inaccurate assumptions. It was a lot of complexity designed to make it look like someone knew what they were doing. Teams would send you crazy Excel templates at 5 PM, say this is needed by 7 please for the CEO, then they’d work through the night to prepare stacks of terrible PPT nonsense for a 9 AM meeting. In the end their recommendations nearly destroyed the company, which was a surprise to nobody that actually knew what was going on.
The experience taught me a lot about business and business leadership. Many times I’d ask myself “what would McKinsey or BCG do here?” Then I’d go do the exact opposite. That’s proven a good course of action at many critical junctures.
A big part of their purpose is to short circuit the bureaucracy within a company. Instead of filtering everything though the fiefdom owners, management has hired guns get shit done.
They hire smart, personable people who can run with whatever. If the numbers or analysis is bullshit, it’s because the org gave them that data.
That said, dealing with the BCGs and McKinseys of the world is a pain in the ass. Once you do it a few times, they are pretty easy to manipulate and manage up.
I think almost the opposite is going on often. What's often happening is you have 1 manager building his fiefdom, and other managers trying to build theirs and there's only so much money to go around and only so many directions a company can go. So manager 1 hires in BCG so that he can use BCG's reputation to get his pet project funded by the executive team. BCG doesn't cut through the bureacracy, it's a tool of the bureaucrat to beat the other bureaucrats- which is why the conclusions match what the manager wants, not what is best. It's about the bureacracy, not about getting anything particular done.
Don't buy this anectode. BCG is too expensive to be hired by managers to convince executives. There are cheaper ways to do that.
Most common scenario is that the executives want to prioritize between 100s of managers' pet-projects, then they hire us to swift through.
End result is that a company (correctly) focus on a few high impact projects and a bunch of middle managers get hurt because their pet project get underfunded.
Yeah I don't mean manager as in "has a team of 5 people" I mean someone responsible for big teams, I'm just using manager as the generic, it could be a "head of" or "General Manager" or "Director" etc. Looking at teams that are a 2%+ of the size of the company.
You can spend 3 years getting a bunch of disinterested people to agree or spend $3M and get it done. The ability to get the $3M is exec endorsement of the alpha bureaucrat.
Cisco is networking, and aws/azure are cloud services i don't think it's really the same as consulting.
The horror story of some consultancy is akin to going to a palm reader. Whereas the example you have is more like going to buy a family car and getting upsold to a Ferrari. There is nothing wrong with the Ferrari you just should have known you only needed the Mazda.
You still don't get what you wanted but one is selling you snake oil and the other is just good at sales.
Often these kinds of consultants get hired to provide justification to executives to do something they wanted help / grounds to do. So there's definitely some not-great incentives for the consultants to come to a certain conclusion...
Also, it is not unheard of (hah) for the consulting companies to overpromise the analysis and work that can be done, understaff it, and work on unrealistic deadlines where the consultants can only but cram the worst kind of "analysis" (as you put it) into the time allotted.
As I commented below also, if the person hiring the consultant doesn't know what he/she is doing or is under a lot of other constraints + pressure, and isn't a good judge of work, the conclusions that come out will likely be BS too.
By the way, I wouldn't hire any such consulting company to do work on something they haven't done 20 times before and with reasonable examples of concrete + credible conclusions. Consultants are not well known for groundbreaking innovation on a per-hour basis.
1. Indeed looking at the situation with fresh eyes. The people inside a business might not have the slack to rethink things, and are used to the way things are (German has a nice word there, "betriebsblind" = inured to the working methods of a company and therefore blind to their shortcomings).
2. Institutionalised industrial espionage, under the banner of "best practices".
3. Improving communication inside a company. Consultants can talk to people on the floor that know what they're doing (but are often ignored), and translate it and transmit it back to upper management levels. (Note that this is a best case scenario - there are consultants that take pride in interacting with the C-suite only.)
4. Professional scapegoat, to justify and sign off on whatever management actually wants to do ("We don't want to fire you, but the consultants said we have to, in order to save the company.")
I'd say some of these functions are actually benign, though some only to the executives that hire the consultants.
I think a big reason why BCG and McK and others are hired is so management can reduce responsibility by saying "but those experts recommended it". It's a charade, so much in business (and life?) is..
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".
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Former management consultant here (with one of the Big 3). It is true that some of this type of work (twisting analysis to fit conclusions) happens, but my experience has been the opposite, as in the medium-long term clients appreciate more the consultants that don't hide the truth, and in the end consulting partners want to keep long term relationships with the executives they work with. Consulting has offered me a lot. Money, but more importantly exciting projects that one usually doesn't work on at a relatively young age, the opportunity to learn how to structure communication effectively, how to manage stakeholders with opposing views (and how to become a bridge between them), how to break down a problem in pieces that are solvable with the experience and tools that you have. This in turn has accelerated my career (also outside of consulting). I also went back to consulting after working in industry.
Companies hire consultants for many reasons. In general they have the skills internally too, but unless they have overcapacity, their people have a day-job too and it is preferable to throw a group of smart and motivated mercenaries to solve a tough problem working full-time on it. Sometimes consultant are the only ones that are capable of liaising across functions and departments, without seeming skewed towards any particular one: as roles in industry tend to specialise ever more, this is becoming more and more important. And some problems (organization, process, etc) benefit a lot from an external view.
Sure, sometimes Mck, BCG, Bain (and many others) are used to provide validation for something that the CEO wants to do. But it happens a lot less often than people think.
This was my experience as well. In 2 years of consulting you might work on as many problems as 10 years in a corporate role. And the problems vary by functional area as well. The experience can be grueling, but very educational as well.
And consultants get hired for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes you’re just buying headcount for a special project, other time buying expertise in an area your company isn’t that strong in. And sometimes for an “independent voice”.
But the criticisms I read are kind of funny considering the clusterfucks some companies are. That was probably one of the more eye opening things. As an outsider who works with lots of clients the strengths and weakness of different organizations is really apparent.
I feel exactly the same and would wager that some of the ultra-negative comments here are either the result of extreme examples of bad work (every company will deliver bad work at times) or they have been personally affected by the consequences of hiring strategic consulting firms, so they are the enemy from this point forward.
I used to work for Big 3 as well, in technology consulting (way way way before switching to become an actual dev somewhere else), so our analyses were targeted more towards offering a client a perspective on his technological standing compared to the rest of the industry. It was at a time were _the majority_ of European companies exhibited extreme skepticism towards public cloud infrastructure, for example, and putting laws, economic numbers, competitors and all that into perspective for a client can certainly be very valuable to drive some change.
For Big 3 however, I had a feeling that consultancy offerings were always a way to get the foot in the door to win clients for the accounting teams - who were pretty toxic about being the only "real" Big 3 employees and everyone else is inferior.
I did a freelance project for their digital ventures unit at some point. Nice rates and it was a well run project that did not fail. It's not all bad with companies like this.
But there's a big "you get what you ask for" factor here and when the customers are gullible fools representing wealthy companies, you get obvious results and BCG is happy to take the cash. Often the whole point of involving BCG is internal posturing between executives that justify their position by starting expensive initiatives. Corporate politics is lucrative for consultants. The customer is in on it in that case. Often they are repeat customers as well.
What I liked in the project I did with them was just the amount of professionalism. The customer paid a lot, asked for sensible things, and they got good results. Did they pay a lot? Definitely. Would they have been able to DIY? Definitely not. So probably worth it for them.
One pattern I noticed was that engineering was something they used freelancers for routinely but anyone talking to the customer was an internal employee with a fancy job title. Basically if you are internal, they work you hard and people don't tend to stick around very long. The ones that do stick around get promoted and start earning big money. But you also get a lot of fairly junior talent with not a lot of experience but great education as well.
Freelancers got nice rates which the customer probably paid 2x or 3x for. So, money was no concern here for BCG. They focused on quality here. Nice project; would do it again.
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
"Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man."
Oh my the author has not lived. Under this definition, as an example, Sam Bankman-Fried has provided far more net benefit to his fellow man than Norman Borlaug. Clearly the author values billions of dollars over a billion lives. Which may be why he's in consulting in the first place.
they wanted a consulting report that parroted back their pre-determined conclusion
Precisely: Someone at a high level wants to do something, a major change or costly initiative. They have to justify it, so they hire a consultant to tell the company it's fine, it will work out, it's a great idea.
I have actually worked with a consultant that told the truth. It was even done nicely, polished and presented in a very palatable style. It was ignored. Also everything it predicted came to pass.
Yeah, BCG have a history of that with our Government here in Australia too, as well as all the other big consulting groups.
We had a Government body rolling out a National FTTH network (called the NBN), and the opposition party didn’t like it (they have strong links to the media industry, Mr. Murdoch in particular, who owned most of the cable TV infrastructure here). The experts all said their policy was a terrible idea - switching to upgrading the degrading copper phone lines and buying the under-maintained HFC assets and upgrading those where they existed. When that party won Government in 2013, they got BCG to write a report saying their policy was great and would save us $20 billion. Well, we’re now more than $20 billion over what FTTH was going to cost based on the actual rollout costs, and it’s regarded as a huge mess and a big waste of money.
More recently, the same party got BCG to write a report saying they should do what they’ve been wanting to do in selling off the profitable parcel delivery from our national post office. Problem is, that parcel service very effectively subsidises the delivery of essential services to regional communities through post offices, which will have to close or be massively Government subsidised if they sell it. The party in Government have a habit of these kind of privatisations of important services, where we always find in hindsight that we’ve sold it for far less than it’s worth, and it always just happens to be somebody politically connected to the party too...
Using consulting groups like BCG who write reports with exactly what the Government wants in them is basically used in some of these cases as part of a kind of corruption racket.
Now, I started a PhD (on a full time research position) and I feel the same. Probably I would have jumped ship last year if it wasn't for Covid (which made unemployment a pretty bad situation) but now I feel too invested and yet don't know what do too otherwise, i.e. work looks to me like the classic "find me a rock"-problem described there and I'm probably burned out a little.
My supervisor wants to do ML on materials science and since a lot of it has been said and done (and is horrid...), he wanted to add some secret buzzword sauce. Unfortunately he has no idea about ML and what he wants to achieve, he isn't even able to tell me a question I should answer plainly in text. It always goes back to 20min "talks", where he assures me of my good work and asks some questions, a clueless reviewer in peer review would come up (i.e. produce a graphic of X, where X is not relevant to the problem, but related and might be nice to check out, to be 110% sure...).
Disclaimer: if one needs a PhD-dropout physicist with a bit of python and .NET (and a solid understanding of Linux as run in HPC) and an idea about most of the other classic ecosystems, tell me! (no adtech, weapons or cars)
Would you be interested in working in quantitative finance in London? We're hiring (remotely for now, but you'd be expected to work in London probably later this year).
We have lots of PhDs (physics, maths, etc - not exclusively though, I only have a master's in maths) and aren't particularly looking for a finance background, so you're pretty much a classic interview candidate. (Finance knowledge or interest is obviously a plus.) Interviews would be on a combination of general maths, stats, finance, ML and programming - whatever subset you're strongest in.
To sell the role a bit - we work on algorithmic trading, but I probably can't say too much more than that. I'm really enjoying working here, the environment's a lot like hanging out at uni with my nerdy friends and the work is interesting and free of bullshit. Project turnaround time is quick.
Please let me know if you'd be interested in hearing more about this. You can reach me at my_email@wauchope.net, but instead of my_email it's dax.
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.
Most of the "consultants" I have seen (BCG, Mk) are not "consultants" in any way, solving problems the company has no answers to, but are plain body leasing. We need 500 people next Monday, who you gonna call? (at least for those situations where 50+ consultants are hired).
Real consultants help with something like M&A, or moving into a different business, a procedure the company has no expertise in or needs to have because it's one off.
Management consulting steel executives on the future of the steel market on the other hand, doesn't speak well for the steel executives.
And everyone who hires management consultants hopes to be let into secrets from their competitors, because everyone thinks the competitor (I've seen this as a startup "consultant") knows more about the market and the future than they do. Most often this is not the case.
What? You know a team of 5 from McK/BCG/Bain costs about $180K/w right? These 500 will run for ~$70M/month. Likely more, we never have 500 consultants available on a short notice.
Maybe you're confusing with staff augmentation, not consulting.
Thank you. I thought I take quite some money, but $900/h ($180.000/5days/5consultants/8hours ?) is really nice money. Especially if you think that probably many of the team are fresh from university with no experience (at least my friends at Berger/BCG/Bain worked there fresh from university) - selling people fresh from university for $900/h is quite a feat.
The most expensive I've worked with in the past was EUR 700/h for an M&A lawyer.
Large companies - like Deutsche Post - I've worked with take people from all the big consultancies at once, so I assume there are enough. Governmental departments in Germany spend around $600M a year paying external consultants, I wonder how many that are at peak time. Wikipedia says BCG has 21k employees, Mk 30k and Bain 12k, Spiegel says BCG Germany has 500 consultants.
"Maybe you're confusing with staff augmentation"
You might be right here too. Would fit in with my "most consultants from BCG/Mk are not consultants but body leasing, but call themselves consultants".
Those fresh grad are supported by managers and, partners with global and deep expertise, and a small army of back-office research staff.
We generally avoid "body leasing" kind of work, even when client is OK paying for that. Attracting talent is hard, and putting them in such projects is a sure way to lose people. And we generally avoid consultants on cases for more than 6mo, too short of a time for staff augmentation.
Despite BCG having 21k employees they're spread across 90 offices globally, and usually staffed. When we do get requests for large amount of people, it's a staffing nightmare.
Damn, should have taken that BCG director for digital something job when it was offered to me :-( - small army of back-office staff sounds refreshing after decades of startups and lean tech companies.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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?
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.
I don't understand how these thoughts:
"I wasn’t sure at the time, but having had enough free time of late to ponder such questions, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that having a father who can pay for a top-notch education outweighs the disadvantage of being raised by a hypocrite. Sticking with the job for the sake of a paycheck passes the children test."
. . . resonate with the final part of the opinion article:
"As hard as it was to decide whether or not to stay at my job, it was easy to pass up the hush money. Mistake or not, my future hypothetical children deserved to hear their father’s story, and $16,000 did not seem like a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. After rejecting the offer, I enjoyed a full night’s rest."
So doing the right thing when it only cost him $16,000 was okay, but it was not worth it if he had to sacrifice a top-notch education for potential future kids?
For a start, anyone with an ounce of common sense knows BCG aren't invoking the non-disparagement clause for telling his kids "yeah, management consulting is a big con and I never really knew what I was doing" or anything else even their actual clients have heard a million times before.
Maybe someone could put together a PowerPoint with the benefits of having an $16k extra in annual revenue and then he'd get it.
This is a pretty standard severance agreement. The company offers a cash bonus to make sure that the employee fired leaves amicably and will not cause any further issues down the line. That way everybody walks away with something to keep them reasonably happy. This sounds like roughly one to two months severance which is pretty standard (I've seen up to 6 months in the case of layoffs but firings tend to get less).
The story is trying to make a big deal out of something that really isn't.
I've had one in my career. I think it probably is standard among companies that try to maintain an image that is a little too divergent from the truth for comfort. BCG certainly fits this mold.
I've never been asked to sign one by an ordinary company whose presented public image was in line with reality.
Those companies probably still had disgruntled employees, they just didn't feel the need to clamp their jaws shut with money.
Mmmmm I guess this is standard but not a honourable discharge. It's not that uncommon to help the leaving employee find a good position in another company so that he/she can become a future customer, being part of the alumni network.
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 :-)
Big3 mgmt consultant here. Worked in the IT for 10+ years before becoming a consultant. Enjoying it. Here are my two cents for a balanced perspective.
On a recent project we
- made the C suite hard-stop an IT program that had a projected cost/time overrun of three figure mUSD and two years, while the operative levels were still riding the dead horse
- Pulled long hours for 4 months straight to come up with a new solution approach that was technically feasible AND (techies might not get that this is important) at the same time acceptable to the stakeholders and employees
The recommendation that we gave was exactly the opposite of what the C exec who hired us thought would be the best solution when we started. It was not the 45 slides that were the hard work. The hard work was to get the facts together, engage in difficult conversations with all levels of the organization, creating conviction to change course without giving anybody the feeling that what they did before was wrong.
“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
My ex-consultant led company is letting hundreds of engineers go slowly over the course of this year, and told all of us that when our day comes, we'll get a nice exit package... oh, as long as we sign some agreement to be penned later and that we only get to see on the last day.
I fully expect it to be exactly like this - non-disparagement, non-disclosure, and non-compete in exchange for the exit package.
But the author has it right - it is a choice. When these situations arise, you exercise your own judgment and conscience to decide which you care about more: the cash, or being able to talk. Personally, I'll probably take the cash - it is no secret that the consulting world is flawed, so adding my voice to that conversation won't really change anything. And being able to just mutually walk away from each other and close that chapter of my life really doesn't sound bad.
The author articulates very well the life of a consultant. I really reccomend University students take heed because there seems to be a disconnect between what the image of the job is, and the actual reality. I worked as a finance and economics consultant in electricity, water and gas. I did learn how to write properly (in plain English) and how to methodically solve problems, but you can learn these things from two books:
1) Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, and
2) The McKinsey Way.
I can't stress enough that eventually consulting becomes a vapid and soulless way to make a living.
As someone who has hired and worked with consultants, these make me chuckle a bit and I think speaks more to a problem of lack of self-awareness of the consulting side (and in the world in general) around consulting's primary role (false view driven mostly by recruiting material), and a bit of arrogance. Clients aren't just hapless rubes. They are domain experts in their industries and organizations and are quite aware of what consultants provide and what they don't. Consultants are a tool. If you're running an org, you don't have time to make excel models and presentations really at all. It's so freeing to be able to dump a bunch of raw data and some direction on a consultant and to have them drive a structured process of analysis product development. A less morally loaded way to think about what is being said in this story in the "I modeled a billion dollar loss story" is that on one side of the table you have a 22 year old with a lot of mental horse power but 0 years of relevant experience or context and 0 ownership of consequences of action. On the other side you have an exec with probably 10-25 years of industry and company experience and a vision, and skin in the game who is going to use the model probably mostly as a sensitivity analysis mechanism with colleagues and not a "this is an accurate state of the world in 2028" kind of way, which is the way that any model or simulation is used in real world decision making.
"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?"
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.
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.
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.
Sweden is trying to build a hospital, which has become the most expensive building in the world. Among other things, BCG was charging $100k per month for a bunch of fresh grads.
Anyone in the trenches who worked with people from McKinsey, BGC, Accenture and the like knows this. But you're being told to shut up about it by management...
... very rarely, though, they do fuck up. There was this epic time when they were tasked to improve development speed, and after four weeks, they brought a powerpoint presentation that talked about gamification and similar fluff words. Our top management decided to ask for a new consultant team and redo, as it was clearly not what they were told management wanted. Six weeks in, and yo and behold, the same presentation - with the same typos - was presented as the new result. Seems somewhere in India, some powerpoint specialist was slacking off.
Took the consultancy firm a lot of clout to prevent us from suing them for fraud.
The role of these consulting groups most of the time is indistinguishable from the role of the shamans who performed elaborate rituals (a.k.a. consultant analysis) to present findings that aligned with the desires of the king thereby justifying their continued utility.
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.
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."
"A high income is not only justified, but there is nobility to it."
( .. a couple of paragraphs pass ...)
"With a diligent enough effort, one can morally justify nearly anything."
Should have at least seen if they'd pay $32,000. Severance contracts are negotiable. You can even red-line them. Of course, the employer can and probable will say "no."
I've been through many audits: SOX, SAS70, SixSigma, HIPAA, Security, and other such audits. Can't even recall some of them. (all from an IT/OPs/Sec/Data perspective - not so much on business model/function/whatever the other depts in the company were required to do...)
Typically, they will have a very long list of questions of your data, process, systems, staff, access, security handling policies, procedures, finance, etc and complete a gap analysis, and ask for proof/validation, documentation of all such questions.
Many times the questions are redundant, many times they are vague - but in all, such audits and the questions are really anything that a sound C-level (cio/cto/cso/blah blah) should know to hire and instill in their employees they put in place to own such areas of the business.
The audits are tedious, and the consultants can be annoying.
Most of the time, the audits are actually done in order to prove to high-profile potential investors or customers that "yes we are a mature company and we have done the appropriate due diligence in all of these areas in order to gain your faith in our ability to be worthy of your business/investment, Look! even the big auditor says we are good!"
There will always be a few things that you may have either missed, were to young a company to yet have needed it, or its already in the pipeline, but you don't have staff on hand yet to take care of it etc. The most important thing is be honest about everything in your org/systems/infra and accept any findings and build a plan to take care of them.
Ideally - your leads, managers etc are already thinking about sound practices that mitigate any scary findings. I've never failed an audit.
My gripe with all of these companies who do the audits are WAY to overpriced for their stamp of approval - and their recommendations are very high level.
Such as "Do you have a security access policy? Can I see it?" "You should have a list of all the people who have access to system X" (when all this information is already available through any given system (AD, SSO, ROLES, whatever)
In my experience, C-levels like having these on their belt of accomplishments so they can brag about familiarity with each audit type, when in-fact, all the work is delegated to staff and SMEs for each system.
Its also an "whom you network" which really bothers me about it.
> I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system
It’s always amusing how an organization made up of the most energized believers in free market capitalism go on to reproduce most of the institutional groupthink and bureaucratic stupidities of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union.
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?
For what it's worth, as much as people here are criticizing consultants it's also very difficult to run massive corporations and make some of the decisions executives are asked to make, in timeframes required. While some answers may be 'bad', I'd be curious to see if anyone can provide a better answer in the same timeframe on a regular basis (not just occasionally).
> 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.
Armies of consultants would try to do “analysis” to justify their recommendations but the analysis was a total charade of numbers nobody checked and models full of inaccurate assumptions. It was a lot of complexity designed to make it look like someone knew what they were doing. Teams would send you crazy Excel templates at 5 PM, say this is needed by 7 please for the CEO, then they’d work through the night to prepare stacks of terrible PPT nonsense for a 9 AM meeting. In the end their recommendations nearly destroyed the company, which was a surprise to nobody that actually knew what was going on.
The experience taught me a lot about business and business leadership. Many times I’d ask myself “what would McKinsey or BCG do here?” Then I’d go do the exact opposite. That’s proven a good course of action at many critical junctures.