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Comment by hubraumhugo | Hacker News Reader

Well, this sounds like perfect tasks for GPT:

"Participants responded to a total of 18 tasks (or as many as they could within the given time frame). These tasks spanned various domains. Specifically, they can be categorized into four types: creativity (e.g., “Propose at least 10 ideas for a new shoe targeting an underserved market or sport.”), analytical thinking (e.g., “Segment the footwear industry market based on users.”), writing proficiency (e.g., “Draft a press release marketing copy for your product.”), and persuasiveness (e.g., “Pen an inspirational memo to employees detailing why your product would outshine competitors.”)."

Here is the GPT response to the first task: https://chat.openai.com/share/db7556f7-6036-4b3d-a61a-9cd253...

A confident GPT hallucination is almost indistinguishable from typical management consulting material...

View on HN

1) Your ideas are bad.

2) Spreadsheets exist.

3) No-one cares about your marketing copy.

4) No-one finds your c-suite babble inspirational.

This is almost perfect input to an LLM exactly because of how low value it is in the first place.

Ha it's fun to dunk on management consultants but I think the magic is they are like pop music producers.

Somehow they're able to make the C suite hoover up LLM shovelware the same way top producers can take super obvious music and sell I V vi IV but when we try the same chords it's uninspired and no one wants to listen to it

Or, you have a break out hit like the Spice Girls.

If it was so bad, then why do people listen?

There is still a market.

Does the market suck? Full of idiots?

Your argument ends up being that successful things are bad, because humans are just idiots and thus if something is successful it is because it is just liked by idiots.

As much as I might agree generally, it doesn't get you far.

Back then, payola meant that people listened whatever the labels wanted to make popular. it's very much an intentional, manufacturered factory.

Honey, everything is an "intentional, manufactured factory". Or do you just wake up every morning and say to yourself "let me type some random code and see what kind of software comes out"??

> Your argument ends up being that successful things are bad, because humans are just idiots and thus if something is successful it is because it is just liked by idiots.

I mean I'm not sure that this is that far from the truth in some domains, though it depends on how you define idiocy. There is, for example, a market for demolition derbies. Of course all of us are idiots in some ways so we should be careful about whom we disparage.

The magic is in:

A) Forming cross company cliques (a lot of C suite is ex consultant and they scratch each others' backs).

B) ego stroking and typical sales ("this executive is a visionary who must be furnished with top quality steak and strippers")

C) Letting you know on the sly what their other customers are doing that seems to be working.

D) Providing industrial grade ass cover for decisions that the C suite want to make but are afraid to make by themselves (like layoffs).

Don’t underestimate the ass covering.

I recon 60% of management consulting work is just to ass cover for a director with no conviction

Yeah, I think that's the majority of the grunt work done by junior consultants.

I don't doubt that if the high level decision agreed upon is "more layoffs because AI" and they were asked for a 60 page report to justify it that ChatGPT would help inordinately in fleshing it out with something that sounds fairly plausible.

There's a lot of boilerplate that actually takes quite a while to write from scratch. If the people involved have a pretty good idea in their heads of what fundamentals are fairly sensible and which are probably sort of irrelevant or even wrong, something like ChatGPT is actually pretty good at churning out at least a decent pre-draft that can save quite a bit of time. I've used it a fair bit for introductory background that I can certainly clean up faster than I could put together from scratch.

The more expensive the cover the better.

“I paid a world-class consulting consultant company top dollar to vet this idea and they produced ton of documents about how great it was. And, yet it failed. But, I’m not at fault here. What more would you have had me do?”

There was an article on HN years ago about top grade from Harvard-like schools being sucked into consulting companies and discovering their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear.

Do you have a link? I can't find it.

> their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear

Sounds like an extremely nice job.

Not really.

Well, depends on how much money is "tons of money".

So much of it is about information awareness. Like it or not, these consultants and analysts talk to hundreds of C-levels all the time. They become excellent information sources about what is working, what is not working, and about business risks that a particular executive may not be aware of. Yes, there is the potential for group-think, and the bad ones shill for a particular technology or process without any basis in success. But the good ones provide guidance to the executives that might be working in information-free areas, making them aware of concepts, technologies, and processes that either present risks to their businesses or represent good practices they really should adopt. It's easy to be cynical about this, but there are many good business leaders who are not analytical, and are in need of this kind of guidance.

>It's easy to be cynical about this

It's probably easier to assume that their job is to provide objective expert advice since thats what they say they do.

I'm being realistic here, not cynical.

the comment might be spot-on for some companies and industry, but really.. not all business culture is the same. By painting "all management" in this light you are showing the same one-dimensional thinking that is being criticized here..

Did you think I was making some comment about the millions of businesses and many governments that don't use the services of these consultants?

I can assure you I wasn't.

>It's probably easier to assume that their job is to provide objective expert advice since thats what they say they do.

You are mistaken "expertise" with fashion and a good voice.

It’s insane that people think producing pop music is easy. Competing on the pop music market is a cutthroat business with a lot of competition and the good ones get their price back in gold.

When Scorpions wanted to be resurrected they hired Desmond Child to produce them and he absolutely crushed. These people are very good at what they do and there are very few of them.

It’s also insane people think running a large business is easy, or that management consultants aren’t worth what they’re paid.

Worth here is the key word. I did an MBA which was specifically designed to get people into consulting, we did many consulting projects for real multinantionals and the key lesson was: "What does the hidden client want?"

i.e. someone has been tasked with getting some consultants to come up with a suggestion, the key question however is what does THEIR boss want to hear. If you can work that out and give it to them then you've earned your 'worth'

Well, there's also the case where some internal engineering and product management think they have the right answer. But it may be a literally bet the company sort of thing. (Especially outside the software realm where once the bus has left the station it's not turning around.)

Now I know there are people here whose reaction is that executive management should just shut up and listen to what the worker bees say. But it actually doesn't seem unreasonable to me (and I've been on the product management end of things in a case like this) to have some outside perspective from some people who are mostly pretty smart to nod their heads and say this seems sensible.

As a bonus they create big spreadsheets that make the business planning types happy and keep them out from underfoot.

Wow I’m sure someone that paid some money for an MBA and then stopped at the gate of an entry level position has expertise in this matter.

I hope someone builds a management consultant gpt to find out.

Until then, our leaders, experts and institutions were few of those things during the pandemic.

How large businesses are built and run has changed faster and more in the past few years than the principled predictions of a business’ future vector that are based on lagging indicators.

It also depends on how cookie cut the management consultant frameworks and “toolkits” are.

It’s no coincidence that it’s mostly juniors doing so much of the work and billing. New or average talent is more profitable per hour to bill than experience.

Financially, if $7-8 of every $10 for improvement went to a management consulting undertaking, the other $2-3 is what’s left over for the rest without even knowing. This would be the coup, if this were true.

The fun part to watch for is is tech people will be able to learn business easier than business people will be able to learn and apply tech when they can’t understand it’s capabilities or possibilities beyond speaking points.

The technical analyst will M&A the business analyst. Maybe they learn to extract Management Consultant type value too.

Mangement consultants get comparatively small money from (large) firms. The total revenues going to McK, BCG, and Bain are only about $30B annually.

Well, if it was that hard, chatGPT wouldn't be able to help them.

The perception is that success in the field is driven largely by factors other than the quality of music. It'd be extremely interesting to see a Richard Bachman / Steven King [1] type experiment with a Desmond Child, Max Martin, or whoever else.

Keep their existence completely out of the picture, and have them scout and produce talented no-name, but require the no-name to use only the sort of avenues that would be openly available to anybody/everybody: YouTube, Tunecore, social media, etc. Would the new party now be meaningfully likely to have a real breakthrough?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

> other than the quality of the music

The ‘quality’ of a pop song is how much popular appeal it has. That’s the basis of the genre, even reflected in the name.

But the qualities of the song are not what make it popular. With "pop" music there are far more important forces at play, namely the quantity and quality of the song's publicity. One of the big things you get with a big time producer is big time connections and a lot of "airplay" in mixes, commercials, TV shows, etc. You also open the door for more collaborations with other popular artists.

Occasionally you'll have a song that breaks through due to sheer catchy-ness, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

In practice you need both. Max Martin himself has produced and songwritten for plenty of no-names, but for an artist that has the requisite marketing support, bad or uncatchy pop songs can absolutely ruin an artist who would otherwise make it big.

There is a third factor; the quality of the mix. People like Serban Ghenea[0] get hired to make the sound world class.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serban_Ghenea

Which is why Michael Jackson hired Quincy Jones to fix his music.

Define quality

A lot of the public believes that what you're talking about already happens, for what it's worth. "Industry plants."

Something can be extremely catchy yet widely panned as low quality in music, so even within "just the music" there are several dimensions at play regardless of marketing, etc. Such as whether it's timed right - are there enough people ready for that song at that time?

The idea that "most people will just listen and be fans of whatever the big media companies put out there" doesn't stand up much examination or conversation with "most people."

People do often make breakthroughs on soundcloud, TikTok, whatever - do you think having the invisible support of a Max Martin would lower their chances? You'd need to do your experiment a hundred times or thousand times or so before you could really compare the success rate of your plants to the rest of the crowd, but it's hard for me to believe that they wouldn't have an advantage. The music industry isn't known for their charity, if they could get away with not paying those people without another label beating them in the market, why would they?

“Just Blaaaaazzzee”

This is admittedly very niche but I see your point.

Also: I remember a time in the early 00s when almost every song on MTV began with Rodney Jerkins whispering “DARKCHILD” over the music.

Ultimately isn’t it just branding though? Would you buy Coca-Cola if it had some other label on the bottle? Or watch Mission Impossible 14 starring Some Dude? I’m not sure there’s a lot of fields where things are really competing on their own merits rather than the accumulation of their past successes.

Is there a HN for management consultants?

Depending you ask pop music is a formula and that one dude from Sweden has the formula perfected.

fishbowl?

There's the story of David Cassidy. He got cast in the Partridge Family (the rock band family) largely because of his looks and his mother (Shirley Jones). His voice was set to be dubbed for the songs, but it turned out he had a golden throat. (The rest of the cast, besides Jones, could neither play nor sing.)

The producers hired top shelf songwriters to write the songs, and several hit albums were produced. (It really is good music, despite being bubblegum.)

Cassidy, however, decided that he had songwriting talent and chafed. He eventually left the show, and with the megabucks he earned on the show, produced albums. They're terrible.

The same thing happened to the Monkees.

Check out the movie "The Wrecking Crew". It's about studio musicians fixing, rewriting, playing, and singing the music created by the "bands" you've all heard of, so the albums were good.

Then, the bands belatedly had to learn how to sing and play in order to go on tour.

I think about The Wrecking Crew whenever I hear the sob stories about bands being underpaid and the producers reaping the lion's share of the profits.

Sounds like you are tunnel visioning in your analysis of the music? There are so many more things to it than the chord progression.

On the songwriting side, there's the lyrics which have both a phonetic and a semantic component. There's also the fact that many people will mishear the lyrics and their evaluation of them will be based on the mishearing. There's the melody. Does it work together with the chords to highlight the key parts of the lyrics?

Then there's the performance where there are a million ways to stand out or flop. Loudness, timbre, timing and even detuning can all be used for expression.

Are you trying to tell me that "starbucks lovers" was intentional?

Often the benefit of management consultants is they help the company feel better about firing or laying off people.

Actually a robot would be perfect at that. No one likes doing layoffs but chat gpt won't mind

> Actually a robot would be perfect at that. No one likes doing layoffs but chat gpt won't mind

Maybe chatgpt should be trained to care.

> A confident GPT hallucination is almost indistinguishable from typical management consulting material...

If you're measuring based on output, sure, but... the value of any knowledge worker is primarily driven by the input, that is, a client doesn't want "10 ideas" they want "10 [valuable] ideas [informed by the understanding of the business and the market they're operating in]". If a management consultant said "boat shoes" in response to this question they would not have a client much longer.

You could apply this same nonsense task to software engineering, i.e: ask ChatGPT to "write 10 lines of code" and it'll be indistinguishable from the code we churn out day after day.

So you ask for 20 ideas and filter. Even if you throw away 19, it's still useful.

They’re all bad ideas, though.

Not necessarily if the remaining one idea is still garbage.

It's not. That's the purpose of filtering them.

How many turds should i filter though until I suddenly find gold?

How bad do you want the gold?

Probably should have chosen a valuable but inedible element.

Even if you throw all of them away, the point is the human is simply more effective in their role. Just breaking the ice, the writer's block; anything to get out of the creative rut that we all fall in, is worth its weight in GPUs.

Thank you, you express it much better than I can. "Diabetic-Friendly Shoes" from the above list immediately had me thinking in half a dozen different directions at once.

> Target: Dog Walkers

> Features: Built-in waste bag dispenser

I'm not yet sure whether I hate it or love it.

> Target: Visually Impaired Individuals

> Features: Haptic feedback

Haptic shoes, how revolutionary!

Yeah some of those have potential lol

I’m just imagining stepping in dog poop and my only way to help myself is also covered in dog poop.

The shoes seem to give you two options for cleaning up your dogs poop: (1) Bend down twice, once for the bag, once for the poop. (2) Bend down once nice and close to the poop and get a bigger whiff than otherwise.

I’m just not looking for ways to interact manually with my shoes more than I have to…

I saw a built-in waste bag dispenser recently while helping walk a friend's dog, and honestly it was pretty convenient.

Yes but how much more convenient would it be with haptic feedback‽

> A confident GPT hallucination is almost indistinguishable from typical management consulting material...

Sounds perfect for both Harvard and those linked to the institution.

My employer has hired McKinsey a few times, known to recruit from HYP, and their output has been subpar to say the least. My entire experience with these institutions has been fairly uniform in that regard.

I know it’s anecdotal. But it feels like there’s a lot of confirmation bias with these sorts of studies.