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167 points godelmachine | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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samdung ◴[] No.41888940[source]
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."

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crazygringo ◴[] No.41889037[source]
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.

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neilv ◴[] No.41889237[source]
> 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.)

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datavirtue ◴[] No.41889308[source]
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.
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stogot ◴[] No.41892451[source]
They’re usually expensive. How is a non manager authorized to order this engagement?
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1. datavirtue ◴[] No.41895692{3}[source]
Exactly.