Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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Consulting firms such as McKinsey are undoubtedly filled with brilliant people. But because specific expertise in an area is worth more than general intelligence/accomplishments when it comes to specific, actionable recommendations, this cynical criticism (as used in the FT comments section) comes to mind:

>..."Consultants are people who charge you a fortune for interviewing you about your organization and then writing a report repeating what you've just told them and what you already knew!"

Realistically speaking, though, this is actually a very useful thing: providing political cover so that an executive can institute an unpopular but needed change. However, this is more indicative of a weakness in an organization's (perhaps unavoidable in all large companies) culture than it is the effectiveness of consultants.

It reminds me of Richard Feynmann's role in the post-Challenger disaster investigation. He's famously known for explaining the O-ring deficiencies during a televised press conference. But he admits in his memoir that the O-ring revelation was passed to him (through another intermediary), from an anonymous source -- most likely from an astronaut who worried about his/her job -- who had said that the O-ring problem was known to NASA's engineers but the bureaucratic managers had chosen to ignore it.

If all it took was a $1,000,000 fee to get in some consulting engineers (or hell, just Dick Feynmann) to spotlight this fixable -- if inconvenient problem -- so that the Challenger wouldn't blow up, I'm sure we'd all agree that would be money well worth spent.

I know people who go to fortune tellers even though they wouldn't put money on their predictions. But most fortune tellers at least can act as the friendly voice who tells their client want he/she needs to hear, whether it has absolute truth or not.

Has anyone here ever been the beneficiary of a concrete effect from a consultant's work, such as a tangible new idea that resulted in better profits/efficiencies, beyond what is merely CYA?

> Has anyone here ever been the beneficiary of a concrete effect from a consultant's work, such as a tangible new idea that resulted in better profits/efficiencies, beyond what is merely CYA?

Absolutely. When I was in the security group for eBay/PayPal, we had a consultant come in for about a month, and at the end he gave us a list of projects to keep us busy for at least a year that made tangible improvements to our security.

>Has anyone here ever been the beneficiary of a concrete effect from a consultant's work, such as a tangible new idea that resulted in better profits/efficiencies, beyond what is merely CYA?

since 9/11 it's become very popular to hire security consultants whose reports would strongly recommend to fly executives on private jets instead of common carriers. Business continuity, etc... So, there definitely are beneficiaries out there. Profit/efficiencies is in the eyes of beholder.

Well, a big share of the work I was involved in as a management consultant resulted in clear measurable $$$ to the client. Typically in the range of 5-10x the fee. One of the teams delivered something like 20x the fee in a project for the government.

And yes, that means that the client who payed 2 million USD to run a team actually got 40 million USD in payoff from this. This is of course an outlier, but it is still true. I have seen the details of this project myself (as it was a public engagement).

Why hasn't anyone heard of this? Because the glory of the successful projects are always given to the client executives/team.

I don't have the reference for this, but I recall the seals between shuttle booster segments were originally engineered to use asbestos, not rubber as the gasket. The engineery qualities of asbestos for this purpose were perfectly understood, lower tempature lift-offs would not have been an issue, and most importantly, all the expensive live testing had already been performed when higher-ups recognized how politically incorrect asbestos was, even though a program as high-tech as the shuttle program was perfectly capable of handling asbestos perfectly safely. There probably was no $1M engineering fee that would have ever fixed this, because the multi-$M live fire tests were complete. No one considered this relatively minor engineering change (after all, the seal was redesigned to work with rubber) worthy of another round of very expensive tests (which primarily focused on the motor).

In a similar fashion (sorry, also doing this from memory, no reference) sometime in the late 80s or early 90s the main fuel tank insulation was switched-out because foam manufactured with CFC became verboten, so another material, with apparently unknown (or not completely desireable) engineering characteristics, was swapped in. I never recall hearing about ice ripping off big chuncks of fuel tank foam during the boost phase in the 80s. I only remember hearing about this starting in the 90s (or at least after the Challenger accident).

This is certainly tangential to the OP, except that there probably was copious high-priced consulting which provided political cover for both of these mistakes.

Thirty seconds of googling reveals that this is a myth: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11031097/ns/technology_and_scien...

You're right. A little more googling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank reveals the old foam began to be phased-out in 1996, with complete phase-out in 1997. Tile loss and other damage starting even with the first flight were assumed to be related to foam loss, and the foam loss itself was determined/assumed to be due to anomalies in foam application.

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