Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

I have a small story about McKinsey from friend of mine in the Indian Bureaucracy from about 10-12 years ago.

McKinsey was doing some work for their dept. I asked him what they did. He said, "McKinsey asked us for lots of information. Then they put it into a dossier and gave it back to us."

To be fair, a lot of organizations can't do this on their own. Which is why they hire a consultancy.

Information is siloed, teams compete rather than cooperate, any team's own dossier is going to be seen as biased and unobjective.

There's real value in hiring a neutral, competent vendor to come in, assemble the relevant information using best practices, and present a "dossier" with common-sense conclusions. Then the leader who hired them can use that as political cover for taking the necessary actions they wanted to in the first place, because the leader is no longer siding with one bureaucratic faction against another, but merely taking objective advice from an outsider.

That's actually worth a lot.

Yup makes sense from that point of view.

> teams compete rather than cooperate [...] political cover for taking the necessary actions they wanted to in the first place

That looks like three deeper problems than the consultants were tasked to solve.

(Not only do you have counterproductive, misaligned culture; but even the CEO can't/won't fix it; and the CEO even has to play political games, just to work around the bad culture, for smaller goals.)

There've been variations on this saying/joke for at least as long as I've been working, not specific to McKinsey.

Example: "A consultant is someone who charges you $100K, to tell you at the end, what you told them at the beginning."

This comment and the parent sums up GE exactly. These consulting engagements were/are a constant stream there. However, they were often ordered by ineffectual, siloed pretend managers and absolutely nothing came of it aside from a bill and the manager getting to feel like a manager for triggering the engagement.

It’s part of the executive game. Make their position or opinion seem legitimate

> That looks like three deeper problems than the consultants were tasked to solve.

No, this is exactly the reason the consultants were hired. Not to solve the cultural problems, but to work the broken process. It's not really in the consultants interest to solve the cultural problems anyway, because it drives repeat business.

As the saying goes, you pay a consultant to look at your watch and tell you what time it is.

Sometimes this means consultants bring you back to the right perspective, sometimes it means they don't add any value.

> McKinsey asked us for lots of information. Then they put it into a dossier and gave it back to us."

To be fair, that’s exactly what a psychologist does

Very often it's yet another consulting company proving to their clients that the big cultural change they are suggesting needs to be done.

There is big money in doing that too - you gain a client for life if you're successful, and you get to recommend all your friends in Professional Services companies who give you a cut/forward strategy business your way.

That's how any financial consultant/auditor works: an outside team sets up shop in one of your offices with your management's permission to ask any person in your company for any related information. Then they compile a report/financial statements, send it to your management and collect their fee.

Yeah, but that report is required by government to be done independently. That makes it very different.

> McKinsey was doing some work for their dept. I asked him what they did. He said, "McKinsey asked us for lots of information. Then they put it into a dossier and gave it back to us."

Shifting context a bit, I used to experience school classmates complaining to me about some problem they had, and, when I repeated their information back to them, thanking me for being helpful.

That didn't feel like it was helpful to me, but other people seem to disagree. This can't even be explained by the internal communication barriers that exist within large organizations - an organization of one person has no such barriers.

Not every company has a group that reports directly to the top management and has access to all the employees/information in the company. Therefore the same people who do required audits are sometimes engaged by the management to prepare similar reports as consultants. I've read a few audit reports and they did sound like a set of recommendations to the management.

I’ve been doing tech consulting for about 15 years. At the senior levels, 30% of the job is like being a corporate therapist. Just listening to a client during a discovery phase go on and on and on and then saying it back to them causes all kinds of things to fall into place. It’s like helping someone do a puzzle, once you get them started and no longer overwhelmed by the scope of the problem off they go.

They’re usually expensive. How is a non manager authorized to order this engagement?

Exactly.

Glad you mention this.

Last year, we had 2 consultants hired from some Big 4 consultancy. The manager told us to give them whatever info they need. They came with us on a grand total of 2 calls. The scheduled 3rd call we could not attend coz of overlapping schedules. They never bothered blocking my calendar and I never heard from them again.

I reckon the manager wanted to use them for some political purposes.