You just listed the standard elitist silver spoon CV. She had a stellar career because she was born into it. Her track record at all of these institutions speaks to her actual talent.
Meritocracy, my ass.
https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicti...
In fact, under your philosophy, how could one be successful at all and not have you scoff at their success? Does the person have to literally go from rags to riches?
I do not deny that each step in her journey made it easier to take the next step. They made it easier because they were necessary. They are also hard work and long hours. It’s not a life I would volunteer for.
Now, if you want to talk about folks plopped into plumb positions by family members of powerful politicians, cough Hunter Biden, cough Jared Kushner, then you can talk about silver spoon elitism all you want.
Sure, she was good at working the system that her elite upbringing put her on track for. Among the managerial caste, she was unusually good at ladder-climbing. And she was certainly lucky to join a dot-com success story at the right moment. But being good at managerialist skills and selling one's self aren't all that it takes to succeed at business. Indeed, that can be a real handicap, because being good at working other Harvard MBAs doesn't mean a thing when it comes to pleasing people you want to pay $4.99 a month.
Speaking of, what managerial caste are you talking about? Your use of that term insults people living under an actual caste system.
Whitman's success to failure ratio is astonishing and that failure tends not to be attributed to the prestigious education...oddly.
Only wierd part of this is the comment of how "children dream of"
So if one is playing to maximize cash, the optimal strategy is to be very good at bullshit, self-promotion, and generating impressive short-term metrics without regard to long-term impact. You have to look good, and then you have to avoid the long-term consequences of your choices. Then when you get to the top, it's even more important to juke the stats so that executive compensation is maximized. Because by then you're standing on top of a pyramid of bullshitters with little devotion to the workers or the customers.
Your comment is emblematic how how inefficient our oligarchical system is. It's like saying someone would be a good general because his father is an important feudal lord. That's the way it was throughout the vast majority of history, but we pretend it is different now.
But thanks for sharing, I guess?
I don't work with any. I exclusively work on early-stage startups, so all my companies have teams of 3-20. They're also mostly bootstrapped.
I've tried partnering with ex-consultants in the past, but they add no value. They don't have deep industry contacts to sell to. They don't have hands-on experience actually building anything. They make nice PowerPoint presentations, and that's literally it. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver.
They also often demand high salaries at early stages, because they're used to making $300-500k, but that's a whole other issue.
I wasn't being trite. I consider having management consulting (especially MBB) to be a negative on a resume of someone I'm considering working with. It's essentially a disqualifying issue for me after many bad experiences. Maybe the next person is the exception, but it's not worth the risk for me anymore.
Being in leadership is even worse, because you're complicit in destroying so much shareholder value. You charge $100M for something that delivers no real value and costs your firm $10M. Why is that something we should admire?
> Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good.
What are they spectacularly good at, though?
I completely agree that many of them are brilliant, but what skills are they honing, exactly? Brilliance by itself is not enough to make me want to work with someone. Experience is much more useful.
The experience gained tt consulting firms seems to be sales (of a very specific type), making beautiful presentations, and bending data to fit whatever narrative people want it to. Maybe they do some legwork gathering data or running some regressions, but they're usually starting with a preconception of where they should end up.
I have a friend who's a partner at Accenture, and he feels exactly the same way about management consulting that I do: it's bullshit. Another friend at McKinsey described his analyst job as "knowing how to wear a suit and be on time".
I've heard of so many disasters caused by management consultancies. Where are the success stories? At best, they just give a company's managers some data that validates what the company already wants to do, but maybe it's a little too risky.
Somewhere in the middle, perhaps they find a way to sneakily kill a pension program or fire 10,000 people. They're creating value for the company, but it's not exactly work your family will write about in your obituary.
At worst, they burn through piles of cash and accomplish absolutely nothing.
Often MBB consultants are brought in with privileged permissions too - they get access to data, meetings and personnel that internal staff don’t get access to, and the end result is a fancy PowerPoint with a few well-spaced bulletpoints about simplification, efficiencies and renewed cost cutting. Hardly rocket science.
Further, their tendency to use the latest hype (big data! blockchain! data is the new oil! machine learning! etc) in their consultative sales model often shows their hand. They read the same stuff as everyone else, they just went to a fancy university and as you note ‘know how to wear a suit’.
Then once the PowerPoint has been presented, they go off into the wilderness after cashing their checks, or appear at another part of the company working on an unaffiliated project purely based on their connections and brown-nosing.
Has any research been done on the efficicacy of decisions that MBB consultants make in corporates? What empirical evidence is there that these consultants actually deliver value over the medium and long terms in relation to a placebo (ie the current management of a company)?
I don’t doubt they are generally intelligent and well-read, but so are a lot of internal staff and non-consultants.
Update: added last sentence, fixed some spelling errors.
Bain Capital, the PE raider made (in)famous thanks to the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign? Sounds more like everything she touched turned to shit.
otherwise all you’re saying from the get go is she had her foot in the right doors and was able to get good jobs at P&G and Bain. Do you think she truly earned the jobs or was truly the best candidate for those jobs out of everyone? Her eBay tenure is not destroying the company, but instead letting it do its own thing without actually doing anything else. You can see the results for yourself over the past decade.
You’re right most people can only dream of such things because dreams usually contain thinking about luck, lucky breaks, winning capitalism, though not necessarily out of skill and talent.