Comment by _petronius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _petronius | Hacker News Reader

I am a consultant, and while I agree with the sibling comment from jonathaneunice (especially the point about being what I call "business therapist"), there is one thing I will add: a lot of what you are paying a top-tier consulting for is _speed_.

Many organizations, especially large ones, are very slow at making decisions, even if they ultimately make the right ones. Bringing in people outside the hierarchy to synthesize a great deal of info from across the org, and give upper management the insight to make a decision quickly (and, depending on the engagement and the firm, also implement it) is very often worth the bill at the end.

I will not pretend all of the work we do is 100% the most urgent work all of the time, but I have helped make the sausage for a number of years now, and despite the usual disparaging comments in this thread, it really is often an intellectually rewarding environment where you work with smart colleagues and help people solve real problems.

My wife is a management consultant and it feels 80% of her job is just interviewing people across different levels of the org and tell executives what the hell is actually going on and what the real problems are.

The amount of filtering of information going on throughout several layers of management is insane. People just keeping their heads down and not forwarding important information because it will affect short-term results/workload is insane in large companies.

IMO every large company should have dedicated people conducting _actual_ interviews with all employees regularly, outside the normal chain of command. Not that bullshit anonymous peer assessment crap. There is no reason companies need to pay external consultants crazy amounts of money for this kind of service.

By the way, the other 20% is usually just applying some common sense and/or industry best practices to the problems detected on the 80% part.

Worked with McKinsey once as a senior product manager at a computer company. The partner was sharp as was one of his associates; the other one not so much. But they talked to a lot of people. Basically, they created a big spreadsheet that kept our business planning people busy and off our backs. And told senior management that we knew what we were doing (which we did).

Yes, it was expensive but it kept the company afloat/independent for a few years longer which is about all you can ask.

>There is no reason companies need to pay external consultants crazy amounts of money for this kind of service.

I think there's always a degree of suspicion that the person from internal audit or HR can really be trusted vs. an external consultant.

I've never done management consulting myself although I have done IT industry analyst consulting (with jonathaneunice). But I have worked with management consultants and consulted with large IT companies. My general sense is that it brings clarity and outside affirmation to issues that upper management was unsure about. So, in that sense, it accelerates processes that people are unsure about. Doesn't mean it's always right. But a lot of time making a decision is the important thing.

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