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I understand there's lots of consultants who are paid for giving an opinion in a fancy way, preferrably with slides or on a white board, but there's lots of different kinds of consulting. I've done a lot of it, and for me it usually consists of building a product for the customer, either on-site or remote, usually in close cooperation with the company's own employees. It is a job that is mostly interesting and often challenging, because you're thrown into a completely different project every so often, and are expected to get up to speed asap.

I believe those types of management consultant workshops are some kind of "gotta look like we do something to improve" type of box checking.

My current boss is nice in this regard. He holds the sessions himself at some sort of resort and pocket the money to buy us booze and spa time instead.

Typically, there's some issue that management has found intractable by their usual methods. Not the usual methods, but their usual methods. This is always local. They do not trust the peons. Management beyond them does not want to change anything.

The consultants come in, talk to everyone, get a list of what needs to be done from the peons, reframes that list and presents it to the middle managers, essentially laundering the peon's opinions. "Wow! Great!"

Middle management says to their boss, "Well, the consultant said ..."

It's essentially a ritual in which time is consumed and a sacrifice of cash is made to purify the unclean words of the lowers so that the high priests might hear them.

> essentially laundering the peon's opinions

That's more than a bit unfair. They're generally taking in information from the entire workforce, including management, and they're analyzing the whole picture. Trivializing it by describing it as "purify the unclean words of the lowers so that the high priests might hear them" is not accurate. What they're ostensibly providing is unbiased and potentially more competent judgement/analysis of information that the company already has (and really, it'd be weird if the company didn't already have the information, right?). Sure, in practice the bias and competence aspects deserve an asterisk (by virtue of being compensated by an organization, consultants have many of the same biases of the people who are also compensated by said organization, and there's a Dunning-Kreuger problem with hiring either employees or consultants to compensate for competence), but consultants are absolutely in a position to provide the value they are paid for.

In a long ago job, we had a consultant come in and start talking to us plebs. I later provided a sealed envelope to my peers of my predictions as to what the consultant would recommend.

It's been a while, but something like eight out of my nine items listed were in his recommendations, and not much else. All of the items were things I had said before.

I am sticking with laundering, plus a dash of sunk cost fallacy ("we paid money to hear this advice so we must take it").

When you’re facing critical issues that require specific expertise outside of the current team’s core competencies, bringing in an experienced consultant makes a lot of sense.

Of course finding one you trust is even harder. The vetting process itself is lengthy and tedious, so the natural tendency is to lean towards people/orgs in your trusted circles that your trusted friends can vouch for.

Or, you have one or more management team members who aren’t pulling their weight, what do you do? If there’s a chance spending $50k on a consultant will fix them you try that first before swallowing the $200k hidden cost bill of lost time, training, legal, onboarding, and opportunities costs replacing them.

Management consulting is very much so the blind leading the blind. I would consider it to be a pretty bearish signal for management to be hiring consultants for leadership guidance. Hiring contractors or agencies to deliver actual work is a different matter altogether though. When it costs well over six figures to hire a professional full-time, and you have less than full-time year-round needs, then the economics of contracting may be attractive for both parties.

It's mostly a cover for wealth redistribution as you noted.

Do the manager class really have that much "solidarity"?

Isn’t it more “I scratch your back, you scratch mine”?

Sure but the consultant is getting alot a scratched back for not a lot of scratching himself.

But maybe I am looking at this wrong. I.e. the buying manager is fine with getting a future favour or some wine and dine since it is not his money he is using anyways?

Like money loundering. You expect a bad conversation rate.

I think it's just "class solidarity".

executives want to deal with other executives.

> I've seen this countless times both in both Tech and the NGO world - some roadmap is running pretty good, managers then hire a bunch of "cool looking people that come in with a big old white board to make a cool workshop" then follow the process for a short amount of time, giving extremely shitty advice because they haven't been involved in the process at all and are going to leave soon without delivering anything.

Management consulting is a specific subset of consulting, and while it does sometimes provide no value or net negative value, even when it seems to provide little to no value from the perspective of other employees, they often just aren't in a context where they could see that value.

As scape goats.

John Oliver did a piece on Mackensie recently:

https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DAiOUojVd6xQ&ved=2ahUKEwjbw... w0N9I7Chg83d0utMHc4ijJU

I've been through several of these engagements from the inside. They're usually hired so the leader who is about to be fired (whether they know or not). Then when they get fired or it goes south they can just say they were doing what the expert consultants told them to do.

This isn't really all that different from the stated purposes of consulting businesses: they're often hired to be a disinterested third party with relevant expertise to make decisions/take actions that whomever hired them might be deemed too biased and/or too incompetent (in the relevant area of expertise) to make.

one reason this happens is Executive A needs to justify a non-obvious decision to other executives (or perhaps it's not in their interests) so A dresses up the decision in status credentials and money to get the others will respect it. A can shift culpability off themselves in this way as well.