Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

With labor becoming fungible in the eyes of c-suites, the holders of institutional knowledge are the libraries of the consulting firms. Consulting firms also have tech talent that traditional businesses had no access to in the past, so any large scale data driven related project is done with consultants.

However: 1. The costs are insane and probably we reached the point where the benefits do not justify the prices they are charging. 2. Wfh is a cheat code to get access to cheap tech personnel that is pissed with the RTO of big tech. I keep hearing tech folks working at traditional manufacturing shops remotely these days.

This is a surprising take, considering the consultants I’ve worked with never took the trouble to learn anything about the business despite sitting shoulder to shoulder with us for weeks, and then proceeded to give us spectacularly terrible technical advice. “You need machine learning for this. Trust us, we’ve done this before.” They hadn’t, and it became clear they’d wasted our time and hadn’t listened to a word we said.

There is nobody left, old enough, to remember that the last project with that consulting firm failed.

Are we living in middle ages that electronic records don't exist of what happened in the past engagement. Maybe one can locate the last McKinsey dossier on OneDrive? The problem is and always was of incentives of people involved.

Would you trust a random soggy doc for which you don't know the person who wrote it and their competence, or the flashy deck from McKinsey? The answer is 99% of the times: McKinsey.

Only time that answer is different is when a person in power is still around and they pretty much veto the engagement with a consulting company.