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.