I’ve met dozens of management consultants over my fairly long career in business. Some of them were really smart guys who really can help companies.
Even so, I think that the vast majority of management consultants are worse than useless. In most cases, and particularly when you’re dealing with the big providers, management consulting is the Ferrari of corporate ripoffs.Here’s how these guys work.
During the sales cycle, they get the big guns involved — the partners that are full of experience and know how to glad-hand top management. Then, once they’ve gotten the contract, they pad the project with fresh-off-the-campus MBAs who’ve never run a lemonade stand.
Here’s a real example from my personal experience.
When I worked for DEC in the early 1990s, the company had an 800 person software development organization. It was structured into teams consisting of:
- a manager
- a system architect
- a product manager
- a project manager
- a marketing manager
- a programmer
The manager was the highest paid individual, and the programmer was the lowest paid. The only person on the team who actually developed software was the programmer. The rest of the team went to meetings and traded diagrams describing what their team was going to program… some day.
Once the programmer actually programmed something, he or she was expected to support it forever. Which essentially meant the end of their career, because then they’d have no hope of becoming one of the “managers.”
Anybody want to guess how much software came out of this organization, which represented an $80 million a year investment for the company? You guess it. Bupkis.
The problem wasn’t rocket science. Obviously, DEC needed to fire everybody in that group who didn’t know how to program, and then reward people for more programming than for managing programmers.
Top management hired McKinsey to help them solve the problem.
McKinsey did the old “bait and switch” and the the hordes of fresh MBAs attended dozens of meetings, conducted interviews, etc. The process took six months and cost $2 million. The result was an inch-thick report, full of diagrams describing the problem (incorrectly) and proposing a (wrong) solution.
As somebody with a background working (at another company) with the most productive programming team in the world (see: The Tao of Programming), I was asked my opinion of the report.
My comment to top management was pretty much as follows:
“The report has 40 diagrams in it. Since the report cost $2 million, that’s roughly $50,000 per diagram. Might I suggest that, next time, we consider using that money to buy fine art, because then we’d have something to sell when we go out of business.”
True story.
Since then, I’ve investigated at least a dozen consulting engagements that went wrong, mostly in the area of IT. I’ve had management consultant assure me (privately) that many of them are aware they’re running a scam, but that there’s so much money involved they can’t resist.
READERS: Had any personal experience with management consultants? Were they any help?
If I had a dollar for every time a salesman tried to close a deal with no margin -- or worse, below cost -- just to make his quota at the expense of the company, I could have retired a wealthy man long ago. There's a reason why the plaid jacket and bow tie are iconic and culturally repugnant. There's a reason why its been said that "the sale is a fear-driven transaction: The salesman is afraid the customer won't buy, and the customer is afraid he will." There's a reason why the Brooklyn Bridge and swampland in Florida and the Susquehanna Hat Company are proverbial. There's a reason why selling ice to Eskimos is the mark of a motivated but unethical salesman. There's a reason why the terms "slimey", "sleazy" and "slithering" are closely associated with sales. Of course, I could go on and on and on. But the readers get the point here. Yes, sales makes money for a company...but they're not alone. A lot of great people with tremendous skills support the sales team, packing their parachutes as it were, daily making the sales force more effective in their jobs. Come on, Geoffrey. You've written a bit of good stuff before, interesting enough, somewhat thought-provoking, maybe even insightful at times. Give the rest of us a little break from the broad spectrum finger pointing and profession bashing. Drop the Don Rickles routines and try to get back to substantive arguments that evidence a little brain sweat, some intellectual rigor and essence of mind. Put some muscle in it, Geoffrey. Why risk making a lot of truly great and humble sales professionals appear to be egomaniacal self-aggrandizing line shooters when they don't deserve it. You can do better, Geoffrey, for yourself and your fellows in the field, by doing more than elevating sales by attempting to make others look bad. That's the method of a weak minds and poor performers.
