Beware Management Consultants
about.iceland.co.uk
about.iceland.co.uk
> Malcolm has only ever had three paid jobs, and so far he’s been fired from two of them.
the irony is definitely intended
I don't think I'm one of the red team's 7 captains, but I don't exactly have my hands on the paddle every single day. After all, I can find the time to lollygag on HN between 9-5.
In this day and age, bad UX is great for preventing ADHD users
Perhaps it’s a characteristic of closed groups. SQLite has its moral code that is the Ten Commandments++. Good stuff.
The film also has loads of actors from the 1950s/1960s golden age. It was made in 1984 so for some it was their final roles.
If you’re the private owner/CEO you just get to be steered by the customer, and can even stop growing if you want.
They remind me a lot of Valve in that they are able to chart their own path and find success.
Bronners certainly isn't without its problems as a company. But I find it to be very inspirational that companies can find success without having to devolve into the bland milquetoast mediocrity that feels like 95% of US business culture. We need more people being visibly, authentically, and unashamedly weird.
This is a classic hierarchy-brain/ bureaucracy problem, where "leaders" think the top is more important to the org than the bottom.
It's also a criticism of management-heavy offices who have lost touch with reality, but consultants are a byword for such things, so I guess the title is succinct at the cost of accuracy.
A consultant is someone who borrows your watch, tells you the time, and keeps the watch.
> He replied: "Well, that's the Irish, isn't it?"
so his big bad mistake was to make a remark about how the Irish are more picky than the Great Brits about having horse meat in their burgers?
You can be like see these very smart people that we are paying a ton of money, agree with me, the fact that i hired them is completely coincidental.
If you're the CEO, maybe you know exactly how your org should be restructured. But maybe it means stepping on a lot of toes and hurting people you have close relationships with.
If you get the blessing of management consultants you can at least say it's not personal.
A thing to keep in mind is that expecting the systems humans built to act rationally at all times is perhaps expecting too much.
I know plenty of really smart people who are frustrated by this.
And some of those smart people can't see their own blind spots, for example making a completely rational case for why a woman should be with them romantically as the most obvious course of action, and being mad when they don't agree.
2. Management consultants get paid by shareholders to outsource blame for decisions made by management.
I used to work in engine development and calibration. There aren't many people who know how to do engine cal and it's incredibly important to get your engine emissions certified to sell in a market like the USA. The problem is that most people who know how to do it work for a car manufacturer (OEM). So when I had that on my LinkedIn I would get pretty regular messages from some consultancy or another offering hundreds of dollars per hour to chat with me about my expertise. Of course I couldn't go talk to a competitor but I'm sure a lot of engineers were happy to make a few hundred bucks chatting with some generic consultant who was writing a general industry report with anonymous data and background info.
Well the customer was usually a competitor or a foreign automaker exploring entering the US market. Everyone who could help them understand the timelines, cost, and process worked for their competitors. So the critical info got passed through consultancies into sanitized anonymized reports; laundering.
Note: I'm not sure whether talking to a consultancy would have violated my employment contract at the time but I never took the calls so I had no reason to look it up. I know that coworkers did and just called it a gray area. I pass no moral judgement one way or another.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/10/kpmg-...
What does that have to do with providing value?
Their preferred working style was to not make decisions, and to hire consulting firms to make the decisions for them. So they hired these even younger consultants, who would work for a few weeks, and make their recommendations, and then those recommendations would not be put into action. No. Instead, more consultants were hired to review and then discard the work of the previous consultants. Rinse and repeat for a few cycles.
I cannot resist one story. The initial HBS/management consulting CEO was replaced by a new CEO, someone who had run one of the early search engine companies, and had a similar background. He turned out to be no better. What I found very entertaining about CEO2 was his business past. He was known for two decisions. 1) Declined to buy the very early Google for high six figures, when he had the chance. 2) Decided to buy Blue Mountain -- think Hallmark cards but online -- for $780M. Greeting cards. 3/4 of a billion dollars. 1000x the cost of Google at the time.
Yes, hindsight and all, but still. If I had made both decisions by flipping a coin, my expected value would far exceed what this business genius accomplished.
The same is true of the consulting industry. Because companies _also_ have certain misgivings or insecurities or unrealistic goals with regard to their health.
But the reason people feel dehydrated is because Brawndo ads tells them they had a thirst that needed mutilating.
The best supermarket in the UK is Waitrose but the price premium is excessive compared to the quality.
https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/the-chie...
Like, it's the only page with the 'we're in the UK and I don't want to be sued for libel at the drop of a hat' disclaimer at the bottom.
2006 A spectacular turnaround sees a 10% sales decline turned into growth of 20% year-on-year by March 2006, making Iceland the UK’s fastest-growing food retailer.
2005 The Big Food Group is taken private and Iceland returned to the management of Malcolm Walker and other senior executives who had been ejected in 2001.
2004 The Big Food Group is nearing bankruptcy as provisions made in 2001 come close to exhaustion.
2002 Iceland-Booker is renamed The Big Food Group and launches a grandiose recovery plan (Click here to read the saga of ‘The one, two, three, four, five year recovery plan’) but customer numbers and sales remain in steady decline while costs escalate.
2001 New Iceland chief executive Bill Grimsey issues a massive profit warning, and Malcolm Walker and other senior managers are forced to leave the company
and thought it was interesting enough to submit on its own
but the same thing keeps happening.
top heavy organizations.
https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/recovery...
...is analogous to the "Friedman unit of progress" during the second Iraq War. The context is that Thomas Friedman, New York Times tenured op-ed columnist, stated that "the next six months" were the most crucial for changing the direction of the Iraq War, justifying the US presence there. He cited "the next six months" repeatedly, over the course of about 10 years.
Because he beat up all the other captains.
> why isnt he rowing
Because he’s the Captain and he doesn’t want to.
> why are we rowing, and where are we rowing to?
The Captain knows. Don’t you trust the Captain?
Which is quite common.
'Good use' of management consultants are for things like M&A research, some structural issues etc.
Most companies are not full of smart people, and even when they do have very smart people, they're usually in narrow roles.
Companies can't afford to have 'a strategy team' internally that look at issues broadly. When they try, they end up in 'committee failure'.
It makes a ton of sense for a manufacturer to have consultants come in and look at supply chain issues - especially if those consultants are led by someone who just did that for 5 other companies.
$1M is 'nothing' to find the issues underlying a lot of nuanced things at scale.
The other 'positive magic' of the consultants, is that they are able to put in 'authoritative researched way' what the company might already know broadly but where the knowledge is scattered.
CEO wants to make a big change, the consultants can dig deep, scour the data, come up with plans.
That's very valuable.
It's very destructive when the CEO pays $1M to justify his own egoic delusions; which is common.
The consultants will be happy to take the money to find research to justify the delusions though.
They are overused, but they're useful when used properly.
Even when they are used properly, it can be too expensive.
The city of NYC deciding on exactly how to do recycling bins, I think famously cost a few million - but that's not entirely outrageous. You want to spend a lot of energy up front thinking through those, researching what happened in all the other cities, best practices, supply chains, operations etc.
NYC is 20 million dam people. It's way bigger than Sweden.
And city bureaucracies are not ready to do that kind of hard hitting research.
So - the right team, for the right cost (which can seem like a lot, but it might not be in context). But again, what would be a 'very valuable $1M spent' can end up being '$10M' kind of thing, so even when 'it was the right move' it could be disproportionate.
If the ideal scenario never happens in practice, it's a flawed concept to begin with.
Most of the time, in fact.
The level of lack of self awareness is really just staggering, as if these companies exist and claim billions in revenues, over, over and over again by the same customers ... by 'not doing anything useful'.
It's really an embarrassing posture.
'Management Consulting' is one of those things that is just culturally orthogonal to HN. There's a derision combined with a total lack of understanding, and so it ends up being a difficult thing to debate, like going against consensus on a reddit board.
They're' about as problematic as basically any other type of organization, aka we can loathe Google for all sorts of reasons, but they still do many things well, we mostly use them for various things.
amazing
Some people have no shame at all. This is so absurd it read like a comedy sketch.
I think a key takeaway is the human nature to constantly act, and not just sit and do nothing. Lot's of value in sitting around, especially in investing.
Let’s crowdsource examples of management consultants delivering a huge amount of value to a company or society in a way that the company couldn’t have accomplished without them.
I’ll start:
sometimes, employees are bad at their jobs, or organizations are unable to solve their own problems. people who have no long term loyalty or political agency within the organization can help resolve internal issues, provide external validation and new perspectives, and solve problems.
I tire of the snide arrogance of people like you; you think you can solve everything if you cared to. not every organization can afford to hire people as amazing and all knowing as you.
making talented people available on short contracts, for employers with terrible reputations who cannot hire the right people able to deal with ambiguity and short timelines can be a win win arrangement for both sides.
Are there issues across the industry, including misaligned incentives? absolutely. but that isn't a reason to dismiss the entire industry out of hand.
perhaps we should be equally dismissive of all software devs given the sheer amount of terrible software and predatory revenue models? or are we also going to blame some other faceless group for that as well?
Why do only management consultants defend management consultants? Why don’t employees, C-suites, taxpayers, watchdogs, or anyone else ever sing their praises?
I also asked for an example of a good consulting project with real ROI. Please share one.
Misaligned incentives are alone enough reason to dismiss the entire industry.
But more widely if an organization cannot manage itself it has no business being an organization. It has to either go bust, or have senior management let go.
By hiring management consultants the senior management is acknowledging it cannot run the organization.
As a consultant myself, I don't get it, that might be true for management consultants, but not for technical ones.
As a software engineering one, there hasn't been a single time where I wasn't among the top performers after a month.
My incentive was always to do a good showing so they may call you for other projects in the future.
A consultant, in most people’s minds, is someone they would consult with, who would tell them what to do, in an advisory capacity; not someone who would actually do any kind of work. (In other words, a management consultant.)
The only people who use the term differently are consulting firms themselves, because they think “consultant” sounds fancier (and worth paying more for!) than “contractor.”
But appaltatore isn't strictly a contractor in the generic term either, its mostly related to win a "gara d'appalto", so winning a tender.
You gotta provide why it's bad instead of whataboutism direction you took.
The two consults in Office Space absolutely nailed it.
“Accenture tells us we have 50% more middle managers than our peers” or “Bain tells us our customers don’t like us despite the internal CSAT scoring”
disclaimer: ex management consultant
Smooth, but deep burn. Masterfully done!
in theory, an expensive outside consultant does not have those incentives: they are being paid 800/hr, have no dog in any fight, have a fixed contract and no reason to worry about getting promoted or fired next cycle, and have already been pre-vetted for expertise.
if I do not have faith in my goober, fork-and-spoon operator employees, I pay for these folks to validate the approach. that's not incompetence, that's due diligence.
it's not my money, nor my department -- it's the shareholders -- and I need to convince them that I've done all I can to confirm we need to invest X million in initiative Y.
however in practice consulting falls victim to plenty of bad behaviors, rent seeking, and risks, too
Well that's cursed
My company is "AI native" in the sense that even though we are not a tech company we are using it heavily to build a bunch of tech that makes us more efficient.
Think building better SaaS products around our actual process rather than whatever bespoke niche SaaS product provides. this has yielded real savings in both software costs and efficiency. Compared to our peers, we are light years ahead. Even the supposed "leading AI readiness consultants" hired by the group board agreed.
our board have still hired kpmg[1] or some other vague merchant to come and help us deliver "efficiencies"
[1] its not them, but I want to keep some level of mystique about where I work
I have a steer that people, process and services are all in scope, but again thats vague-as-a-service™
Many consultants and entrepreneurs are too shameless to do that. AI only amplifies their dysfunction.
What most businesses are doing instead is squeezing their middle management to do more with less. No consultants. AI is cheaper. This squeeze happens every time the economy stagnates, and adding AI as "help" is irrelevant.
It’s very satisfying to get rich by doing pretty much nothing. And there’s some sadness when some rower does their best but doesn’t even come close to directors/captain positions.
Some excellent rowers can make it sure, but we all are not excellent. Oh well, I stop
You don't know what other roles that try-hard "rower" has outside of your imagined scenario. There's nothing even stopping them from being the "captain" of another more impressive boat when he's not on yours. Sure he's not the best, but he's doing the job and you're not. He has more experience than someone who never gets their hands dirty. More experience always makes better leadership. You'd be surprised how easy it is for someone else to steal your little hat and how often it can happen. It's definitely easier than the rowing, which I guess was your point?
I really don't mean this in a sour grapes kind of way. I'm totally serious. You'd never know that until it's too late if you're being disrespectful to the rowers. Don't let ego squander opportunities.