I smirk and laugh this little slideshow and then remember that my own work involves internal tools to promote governance and productivity while formalizing requirements to two outsourced developers.
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.
Private firms are entertainingly idiosyncratic in ways only founder-powered public firms barely approach. The other big one I find entertaining is Dr Bronner’s soap which has a massive label full of dense text that is totally stream of consciousness sentences. Amazing.
Perhaps it’s a characteristic of closed groups. SQLite has its moral code that is the Ten Commandments++. Good stuff.
Weird story ... Dr Bronner also appeared in the greatest unreleased movie ever made. With Bill Murray and Dan Ackyroyd and Liz Taylor's ex husband. And it was the only movie Dr Bronner appeared in according to imdb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0111462/
> Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
If a public co CEO acts differently than others and then underperforms the market, shareholders then look at rhe idiosyncrasy as a bad thing. So they naturally all start to act like each other. Buffett had a similar idea he termed the institutional imperative.
If you’re the private owner/CEO you just get to be steered by the customer, and can even stop growing if you want.
Dr Bronners is local to me and they are very active in the burner scene (I believe the founder is an OG burner). I have a few friends who work there and Bronners often has a presence at local burner events (and Burning Man) -- notable because these are environments where commercial expression is generally forbidden. Yet they sometimes get a pass, I think because they embody the burner spirit and often supply a needed service (showers) totally free and in a way that fits in with the culture. It is the most guerilla marketing you ever saw and I would not be suprised if that wasn't their intent -- rather its just the company gifting itself and embodying the spirit of the ten principles.
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.
I think generalizations are usually bad. I genuinely am weirded out by management's fascination with consultants. It really is about incentives, and consultants usually do not have the right ones, at least the big ones. Also, there are management which feel like companies always need change, but really you have to examine the competitve position within the broader industry not just a vacumm. Things honestly stay the same for a long time. IBM had more revenue then Microsoft all the way up to the early 2010s. Switching costs are powerful - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-dropbox-is-a-obvious-pe-tar...
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.
In my experience senior management hires management consultants to tell them to do what they wanted to do anyway but now they can blame the consultants.
The two consults in Office Space absolutely nailed it.
It seems that management in most organisations can't believe something unless they've paid vast sums for it. So they can't believe their own staff if they say X, even if it's right, because they haven't paid enough for it. Then the consultant comes along, interviews the staff, finds they say X, tell the client, charge buckets for it, and are believed. Weird human behaviour...
I see it often at work. I say something and it's met with "you have a very bad attitude". They hear the exact same thing (ex. "we should see where our responsibility begins and ends according to the contract made with the client, and tell them to fuck off otherwise") from someone else, and then it's the next big thing.
The term most people here would use for your job is “contractor”, not “consultant.”
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.”
TFA surely refers to management consultants, your parent looks like it as well (when they talk about management obsession with consultants).
Technical consultants are mostly OK if their skill is not your main line of business, you just need a few of them or you need them temporarily. Companies employing thousands of software engineers or other professionals from consultancy firms only demonstrate their inability to plan, hire and organize people. It usually correlates with companies employing swats of management consultants.
Generalizations can be bad, yes. Everyone knows about management consultants ruining companies and governments, contributing to the opioid crisis, etc. But what else do they do?
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.
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?
> Are there issues across the industry, including misaligned incentives? absolutely. but that isn't a reason to dismiss the entire industry out of hand.
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.
Nah management consultants are leeches. If they really thought their clients could turn it around with One Simple Trick (that only 22yo ivy league alums could see) they would close up shop and move into PE.
Software devs have actually hard skills and don’t charge $1,000 an hour to develop a PowerPoint.
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.
Generalizations are heuristics we build upon our experiences. Not 100% correct but a good mental model to adopt situationally.
You are shooting down the whole notion of generationalizion without much backing.
You gotta provide why it's bad instead of whataboutism direction you took.
And then they came up with a brilliant term called "agile methodology". The word "agile" was a big selling point. Under the new methodology, there will be standup meetings and introspection every 5 minutes during the race.
My interpretation of the parable is really just that management consultants are paid to tell you what you already know and give you the conclusions you want to hear - hence why their "solution" is non-specific and the retrospective analysis vindicates what upper management already wanted.
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.
I see a disconnection here. Every once in a while we see a article criticizing management consultancy, yet the business is still booming and very powerful and sophisticated corporations still hire them. So, I'd assume that the consulting companies do offer some value, in fact billions of dollars of value. What are those values, then?
You have to think of it like the nutritional supplements industry. They make mountains of money because people have certain misgivings or insecurities or unrealistic goals (or all of these things) with regard to their health. Would life go on just fine without the entire supplements industry? Sure. But that wouldn’t do anything to assuage the health concerns that people perceive themselves to have.
The same is true of the consulting industry. Because companies _also_ have certain misgivings or insecurities or unrealistic goals with regard to their health.
I've always suspected that at least some of it is information laundering.
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.
Not sure about high espionage, but information laundering is the right phrase for how it usually works: consultants cut across organizational boundaries, gathering useful information from the people who know what's actually going on (the rank-and-file employees) and packaging it for CxOs in a way that allows them to present an opportunity as their own idea, or a risk as not their fault. Nice, safe, clean information.
Major scandal in Australia was PwC secretly passing government secrets (tax changes consulting work) to private corporations [1]. And another one was KPMG passing secret client information to win contracts [2]
I've also seen public information (from SEC filings) being sold by a consulting firm as competitive intel. Which I guess it kind of is competitive intel, but you can download it for free.
My working theory is that in many cases, it's one of those absurdities that are actually necessary because the world isn't always rational.
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.
Or likely workers on the ground know exactly what’s wrong—management is poor, uncommunicative, or perhaps filled with unqualified nepo hires. This isn’t able to be stated out loud by folks whose jobs would be at risk. So MCs can come in, gather the info, and fix the symptoms at least.
Human beings are quite rational. But they are not rational in the classical economics sense. Human beings recognize social aspects. They also have their own social status they want to improve. They also know that they can exploit their social status and gain advantages, favors, mates and power over other human beings. They know that openly backstabbing one of your key players may discourage other ones from obeying your power, so they let others do the stabbing take the blame.
Yes. I've seen people attempt to argue that the existence of racism/sexism is proof of the inadequacy of the discriminated group, because otherwise it isn't rational and humans are rational. Which is either a concerning level of trust in economic theory or a disturbing use of economic theory to justify existing bigotry.
Scapegoat as a service. You hire them to put a stamp of approval on any silly idea you have, implement it, etc. Then, if it turns out badly, well...it wasn't your fault.
Management consultants exist as a liability shift. Boards or exec management pay them money, the consultants interview them in private, the consultants give them their ideas back. This provides two things: cover, and political lubricant. Worth every penny when the alternative is completely dysfunctional management teams, or when it is your reputation or job on the line.
1. When I was 8, my mom told me that people got paid what their work was worth to society. When I was 12 she told me not necessarily. She said this: "You were only 8. I was trying to make it simple for you."
2. Management consultants get paid by shareholders to outsource blame for decisions made by management.
It's self-propagating nonsense. In the immediate post-dotcom crash, I worked for a company that was run by a bunch of young HBS grads, who all had management consulting backgrounds, (and a few minor dotcom successes). They regarded themselves as geniuses. They couldn't make a decision on anything.
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.
It's easy -- because companies are people. Management is also people, and sometimes management admit that they may not know what others know. Especially if that management came from the trenches, not and MBA school, so they know very good how to row, but not so well in management (or at least they think they are). So, having money, they seek paid advice from someone who knows it more.
Not gonna lie, the website of a remarkably ordinary frozen food supermarket found on most UK high streets is not where I'd expect to find this kind of content :)
Malcolm Walker, the founder and his son Richard Walker the current chairman are (for such an ordinary seeming supermarket) surprisingly progressive and have often spearheaded sustainability and corporate responsibility campaigns. Malcolm Walker was an active member of Greenpeace and Iceland worked with Greenpeace on several campaigns over the years.
Richard Walker tried to become a Conservative MP, but when no constituency party selected him as their candidate defected to Labour, who put him in the House of Lords.
I wish I new of more gems like this. Company sites that go into detail where they went wrong and how they turned things around make for both amazing reading and great educational material.
At the possible expense of just linking every page of their dark ages saga, The Chief Executive's handbook is somehow even more mask off 'but really, just absolutely fuck that guy'.
Yeah, except profits are down from the peak. I do not know enough about the market, but my suspicion is that they basically benefited by focusing on a specific market, "Focus," and will basically see this erode over time as more companies in the high end move into their market.
pivoting is useful if you are doing several things, one well and the others badly. You stop doing whatever it is you are bad at and focus on what you are good.
If your company is going strongly overall, you can just continue doing whatever you are doing (adapting to the market is still necessary, but not with huge changes)
I spent a few years on and off consulting working for two of the Big 4. I can’t speak for all the teams but the ones I worked with provided good value. Our job was to protect our customers from poor designs and lack of accountability. Some of the projects I worked with were very big involving dozens of suppliers. Our customers didn’t have the capability to coordinate so much work and they also lacked the know-how and expertise in many of the domains. Also many of the big engineering and tech companies out there can be very sloppy. Don’t think because they carry a recognizable name (I don’t want to name them but they are SP500) they always do good work. I have seen stuff that is really really bad, like unsafe bad. That’s where my team would step in and fill those roles on the customer side. Many of the projects I participated were also highly regulated, and that’s a whole additional layer of complexity for which you need people with experience in very particular areas. A bad design that leads to an environmental disaster or even a violation of regulations can be extremely costly.
Score-settling by the ousted (and then returning) CEO Malcolm Walker. After Iceland merged with Booker in 2000, Walker was pushed out and a new management team led by Bill Grimsey took over. Sales declined, head office staff ballooned and they hired a lot of McKinsey types. Walker's point is that they'd overcomplicated what was basically quite a simple business.
I worked for a public sector organisation around then that had the same chairman (not CEO) as Iceland, sorry, “the Big Food Group”. He was genuinely one of the most obnoxious, bullying people I’ve ever encountered - known internally as the Poison Dwarf. So none of this greatly surprises me.
Reading between the lines, you kind of get the picture...
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
...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.
Metaphor is that in rowing the rowers face backwards they don't see where the boat is going. So you need at least single person to look forwards. And to steer you have to command rowers. It is a valid role to have in large row boat. But you only need one of them.
In most cases, the bad application of Management Consultants is 'user error'.
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.
Totally disagree - and - ideal scenario happens all the time.
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.
> The ruling stated that the supermarket chain founded in 1970 "cannot reasonably trademark the name of a country that has been around since the 9th century"
Not in the UK. This was an EU ruling. In the EU you could theoretically open your own store named Iceland but you’d have to be careful about doing absolutely anything that might be intepreted as impersonating the existing store.
Thats a good point of view of the traditional Managment consultants, now for the "AI era", this type of interventions will not exist
Maybe now the Big coorp will finally get closer to real life solutions to the problems companies face
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
Nope. Everyone has their strengths and should avoid some types of work. AI doesn't change this.
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.
I won’t lie. I want to be Captain/Director, not the rower.
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
I'm not sure how serious you are with this comment, but I'll give you another perspective.
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.
This is great: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/the-chie...
Especially because further down the page is a link to, “ Sir Malcolm Walker CBE Biography”. I assume the irony is intended
Considering the biography having lines like:
> Malcolm has only ever had three paid jobs, and so far he’s been fired from two of them.
the irony is definitely intended
The intentional bad UX made me read the whole thing, instead of skimming through.
In this day and age, bad UX is great for preventing ADHD users
a bad UX would be the same thing with new ad prints on each page
They may want to secure the services of a consultant.
I smirk and laugh this little slideshow and then remember that my own work involves internal tools to promote governance and productivity while formalizing requirements to two outsourced developers.
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.
I'd probably consider how the Red teams 7 captains feel about themselves and their own work though. It's always part of the critical path, no?
Private firms are entertainingly idiosyncratic in ways only founder-powered public firms barely approach. The other big one I find entertaining is Dr Bronner’s soap which has a massive label full of dense text that is totally stream of consciousness sentences. Amazing.
Perhaps it’s a characteristic of closed groups. SQLite has its moral code that is the Ten Commandments++. Good stuff.
Weird story ... Dr Bronner also appeared in the greatest unreleased movie ever made. With Bill Murray and Dan Ackyroyd and Liz Taylor's ex husband. And it was the only movie Dr Bronner appeared in according to imdb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0111462/
“Liz Taylor’s ex-husband” is extremely vague…
Eddie Fisher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Fisher)
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.
> Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
If a public co CEO acts differently than others and then underperforms the market, shareholders then look at rhe idiosyncrasy as a bad thing. So they naturally all start to act like each other. Buffett had a similar idea he termed the institutional imperative.
If you’re the private owner/CEO you just get to be steered by the customer, and can even stop growing if you want.
I imagine that Dr Bronner's unhingedness is a net asset for the brand. I always prefer to buy things that seem less sterilized by corporateness.
Actually had no idea Dr. Bronner's was this weird. The guy started it as a tax-exempt religious organization!
Dr Bronners is local to me and they are very active in the burner scene (I believe the founder is an OG burner). I have a few friends who work there and Bronners often has a presence at local burner events (and Burning Man) -- notable because these are environments where commercial expression is generally forbidden. Yet they sometimes get a pass, I think because they embody the burner spirit and often supply a needed service (showers) totally free and in a way that fits in with the culture. It is the most guerilla marketing you ever saw and I would not be suprised if that wasn't their intent -- rather its just the company gifting itself and embodying the spirit of the ten principles.
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.
Haha my friend buys that stuff and the label text reminds me of Timecube.
Dr. Bronner lost his family in the Holocaust and it seems to have broken his brain a little.
"After escaping from a mental institution in 1945, Bronner went into business"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Bronner's_Magic_Soaps
I don't imagine doing time in a 1940s mental institution did his brain much good either.
I think generalizations are usually bad. I genuinely am weirded out by management's fascination with consultants. It really is about incentives, and consultants usually do not have the right ones, at least the big ones. Also, there are management which feel like companies always need change, but really you have to examine the competitve position within the broader industry not just a vacumm. Things honestly stay the same for a long time. IBM had more revenue then Microsoft all the way up to the early 2010s. Switching costs are powerful - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-dropbox-is-a-obvious-pe-tar...
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.
In my experience senior management hires management consultants to tell them to do what they wanted to do anyway but now they can blame the consultants.
The two consults in Office Space absolutely nailed it.
yeah that's fair, Office Space is goated.
It seems that management in most organisations can't believe something unless they've paid vast sums for it. So they can't believe their own staff if they say X, even if it's right, because they haven't paid enough for it. Then the consultant comes along, interviews the staff, finds they say X, tell the client, charge buckets for it, and are believed. Weird human behaviour...
disclaimer: ex management consultant
I see it often at work. I say something and it's met with "you have a very bad attitude". They hear the exact same thing (ex. "we should see where our responsibility begins and ends according to the contract made with the client, and tell them to fuck off otherwise") from someone else, and then it's the next big thing.
> So they can't believe their own staff if they say X, even if it's right, because they haven't paid enough for it.
Smooth, but deep burn. Masterfully done!
> It really is about incentives, and consultants usually do not have the right ones
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.
The term most people here would use for your job is “contractor”, not “consultant.”
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.”
Maybe you're right, my language has no such distinction (Italian) it's one term.
wouldn't that just be: "subappaltatore - una persona incaricata di svolgere un lavoro"?
Subappaltatore means subcontractor. When a contractor hires a second contractor to do part of, or all, the work.
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.
TFA surely refers to management consultants, your parent looks like it as well (when they talk about management obsession with consultants). Technical consultants are mostly OK if their skill is not your main line of business, you just need a few of them or you need them temporarily. Companies employing thousands of software engineers or other professionals from consultancy firms only demonstrate their inability to plan, hire and organize people. It usually correlates with companies employing swats of management consultants.
yeah but are you independent?
Yes
Generalizations can be bad, yes. Everyone knows about management consultants ruining companies and governments, contributing to the opioid crisis, etc. But what else do they do?
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:
sent you a email :)
i was a management consultant.
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?
> Are there issues across the industry, including misaligned incentives? absolutely. but that isn't a reason to dismiss the entire industry out of hand.
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.
Can you give an example, understandable to hackers, of how you fixed an organizational problem? Genuinely interested :)
Nah management consultants are leeches. If they really thought their clients could turn it around with One Simple Trick (that only 22yo ivy league alums could see) they would close up shop and move into PE.
Software devs have actually hard skills and don’t charge $1,000 an hour to develop a PowerPoint.
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.
No defintley I would love to be consulatants, I think they can create value, It just depends.
Generalizations are heuristics we build upon our experiences. Not 100% correct but a good mental model to adopt situationally. You are shooting down the whole notion of generationalizion without much backing.
You gotta provide why it's bad instead of whataboutism direction you took.
And then they came up with a brilliant term called "agile methodology". The word "agile" was a big selling point. Under the new methodology, there will be standup meetings and introspection every 5 minutes during the race.
That's why mums go to Iceland.
The antique illustrations on this are fantastic.
They’re a set of clip art provided with Microsoft PowerPoint called ‘Screen Beans’.
Am I misreading something, or was it not in fact the corporate leaders who torpedoed the reorg suggestions they knew were coming, who were at fault?
This is a classic hierarchy-brain/ bureaucracy problem, where "leaders" think the top is more important to the org than the bottom.
My interpretation of the parable is really just that management consultants are paid to tell you what you already know and give you the conclusions you want to hear - hence why their "solution" is non-specific and the retrospective analysis vindicates what upper management already wanted.
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.
When I was a consultant, the saying was:
A consultant is someone who borrows your watch, tells you the time, and keeps the watch.
You have a watch and don't know what time it is, you clearly need help.
You are afraid to tell the time to other people, as the time is unpopular. So you hire someone to do it for you.
I see a disconnection here. Every once in a while we see a article criticizing management consultancy, yet the business is still booming and very powerful and sophisticated corporations still hire them. So, I'd assume that the consulting companies do offer some value, in fact billions of dollars of value. What are those values, then?
You have to think of it like the nutritional supplements industry. They make mountains of money because people have certain misgivings or insecurities or unrealistic goals (or all of these things) with regard to their health. Would life go on just fine without the entire supplements industry? Sure. But that wouldn’t do anything to assuage the health concerns that people perceive themselves to have.
The same is true of the consulting industry. Because companies _also_ have certain misgivings or insecurities or unrealistic goals with regard to their health.
> that wouldn’t do anything to assuage the health concerns that people perceive themselves to have
But the reason people feel dehydrated is because Brawndo ads tells them they had a thirst that needed mutilating.
I've always suspected that at least some of it is information laundering.
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.
Not sure about high espionage, but information laundering is the right phrase for how it usually works: consultants cut across organizational boundaries, gathering useful information from the people who know what's actually going on (the rank-and-file employees) and packaging it for CxOs in a way that allows them to present an opportunity as their own idea, or a risk as not their fault. Nice, safe, clean information.
Major scandal in Australia was PwC secretly passing government secrets (tax changes consulting work) to private corporations [1]. And another one was KPMG passing secret client information to win contracts [2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/10/kpmg-...
I've also seen public information (from SEC filings) being sold by a consulting firm as competitive intel. Which I guess it kind of is competitive intel, but you can download it for free.
My working theory is that in many cases, it's one of those absurdities that are actually necessary because the world isn't always rational.
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.
This is how it was explained to me by an actual management consultant
Or likely workers on the ground know exactly what’s wrong—management is poor, uncommunicative, or perhaps filled with unqualified nepo hires. This isn’t able to be stated out loud by folks whose jobs would be at risk. So MCs can come in, gather the info, and fix the symptoms at least.
Human beings aren't fundamentally rational. We have to work at it, because it's not in our nature.
A thing to keep in mind is that expecting the systems humans built to act rationally at all times is perhaps expecting too much.
Human beings are quite rational. But they are not rational in the classical economics sense. Human beings recognize social aspects. They also have their own social status they want to improve. They also know that they can exploit their social status and gain advantages, favors, mates and power over other human beings. They know that openly backstabbing one of your key players may discourage other ones from obeying your power, so they let others do the stabbing take the blame.
Yes. I've seen people attempt to argue that the existence of racism/sexism is proof of the inadequacy of the discriminated group, because otherwise it isn't rational and humans are rational. Which is either a concerning level of trust in economic theory or a disturbing use of economic theory to justify existing bigotry.
people are emotional first and rational second
Scapegoat as a service. You hire them to put a stamp of approval on any silly idea you have, implement it, etc. Then, if it turns out badly, well...it wasn't your fault.
Not only scapegoats but also backup as a service. I.e you are an executive with an unpopular plan, you bring them in to carry your message.
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.
this is the correct answer. nobody internal ends up as the "bad guy".
Also works if you want to derail someone else's plan
Management consultants exist as a liability shift. Boards or exec management pay them money, the consultants interview them in private, the consultants give them their ideas back. This provides two things: cover, and political lubricant. Worth every penny when the alternative is completely dysfunctional management teams, or when it is your reputation or job on the line.
1. When I was 8, my mom told me that people got paid what their work was worth to society. When I was 12 she told me not necessarily. She said this: "You were only 8. I was trying to make it simple for you."
2. Management consultants get paid by shareholders to outsource blame for decisions made by management.
My brother still believes this and he's 46 :(
It's self-propagating nonsense. In the immediate post-dotcom crash, I worked for a company that was run by a bunch of young HBS grads, who all had management consulting backgrounds, (and a few minor dotcom successes). They regarded themselves as geniuses. They couldn't make a decision on anything.
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 people criticizing use of management consulting are not usually the same people who make the decision to use management consulting.
There is no disconnect and your comment does not attempt to explain why this is some sort of contradiction.
Read it twice then
It's easy -- because companies are people. Management is also people, and sometimes management admit that they may not know what others know. Especially if that management came from the trenches, not and MBA school, so they know very good how to row, but not so well in management (or at least they think they are). So, having money, they seek paid advice from someone who knows it more.
Not gonna lie, the website of a remarkably ordinary frozen food supermarket found on most UK high streets is not where I'd expect to find this kind of content :)
Malcolm Walker, the founder and his son Richard Walker the current chairman are (for such an ordinary seeming supermarket) surprisingly progressive and have often spearheaded sustainability and corporate responsibility campaigns. Malcolm Walker was an active member of Greenpeace and Iceland worked with Greenpeace on several campaigns over the years.
Well, ah, selectively progressive: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-21508758
> Mr Walker had been asked to explain why Iceland burgers passed British tests for equine DNA but failed the Irish tests.
> 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?
Richard Walker tried to become a Conservative MP, but when no constituency party selected him as their candidate defected to Labour, who put him in the House of Lords.
I wish I new of more gems like this. Company sites that go into detail where they went wrong and how they turned things around make for both amazing reading and great educational material.
Never thought I'd see them posted on here, but I honestly have a lot more respect for them after seeing this.
and here I thought it was from the Nation of Iceland and was very impressed by the volume of their anti-management consultant stance.
"What would you say you do here?" - The Bobs
Office Space[1], for those who somehow haven't seen it yet.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
Funny because the tier list sub on reddit had a vote just a week ago about the UK supermarkets and Iceland only got a D https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fh... (not that it matters considering Tesco got an A)
They got a D in "willingness to pay for a certificate for their shopfront"..
Icelands products are legit trash. Tesco is marginally better.
The best supermarket in the UK is Waitrose but the price premium is excessive compared to the quality.
Looking around, I'm surprised this is common knowledge (j1/2k)
The entire section of the website about 'The Dark Ages' is priceless. They don't pull any punches: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/
The operating profit chart too, oof:
https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-performance/
At the possible expense of just linking every page of their dark ages saga, The Chief Executive's handbook is somehow even more mask off 'but really, just absolutely fuck that guy'.
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.
That's pretty shocking.
Yeah, except profits are down from the peak. I do not know enough about the market, but my suspicion is that they basically benefited by focusing on a specific market, "Focus," and will basically see this erode over time as more companies in the high end move into their market.
It’s been twenty years. What’s the timescale that makes it worth wrecking your company in anticipation of a competitor moving in… some day?
Well I mean you have to pivot to survive, they likley should just sell to a larger dominant omnichannel retailer.
pivoting is useful if you are doing several things, one well and the others badly. You stop doing whatever it is you are bad at and focus on what you are good. If your company is going strongly overall, you can just continue doing whatever you are doing (adapting to the market is still necessary, but not with huge changes)
For an ignosecond, I thought Iceland the country was talking about its 2008-2011 crisis, they rewrote their constitution and imprisoned a bunch.
I can't get that to load at all. Hug of death, maybe?
Same here. I just get a blank page.
I spent a few years on and off consulting working for two of the Big 4. I can’t speak for all the teams but the ones I worked with provided good value. Our job was to protect our customers from poor designs and lack of accountability. Some of the projects I worked with were very big involving dozens of suppliers. Our customers didn’t have the capability to coordinate so much work and they also lacked the know-how and expertise in many of the domains. Also many of the big engineering and tech companies out there can be very sloppy. Don’t think because they carry a recognizable name (I don’t want to name them but they are SP500) they always do good work. I have seen stuff that is really really bad, like unsafe bad. That’s where my team would step in and fill those roles on the customer side. Many of the projects I participated were also highly regulated, and that’s a whole additional layer of complexity for which you need people with experience in very particular areas. A bad design that leads to an environmental disaster or even a violation of regulations can be extremely costly.
The work is important and mysterious
I’ll just point out that the management consultants don’t seem to be the problem in this story…
I think I'm missing a _lot_ of context here. Obviously management consultants are sycophantic but why post this now?
Score-settling by the ousted (and then returning) CEO Malcolm Walker. After Iceland merged with Booker in 2000, Walker was pushed out and a new management team led by Bill Grimsey took over. Sales declined, head office staff ballooned and they hired a lot of McKinsey types. Walker's point is that they'd overcomplicated what was basically quite a simple business.
I worked for a public sector organisation around then that had the same chairman (not CEO) as Iceland, sorry, “the Big Food Group”. He was genuinely one of the most obnoxious, bullying people I’ve ever encountered - known internally as the Poison Dwarf. So none of this greatly surprises me.
Interestingly the "dark ages" subpage is not linked from the parent page: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/
Reading between the lines, you kind of get the picture...
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
The "our story" menu bar item has it in the drop down.
Grimsey was boss of Iceland, but also, Grimsey is in Iceland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%ADmsey
someone saw this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350677
and thought it was interesting enough to submit on its own
They saw it commented on another thread.
What is this? A picture book for adults?
This is nice big fat fuck you to the mercenaries that come and destroy companies. Well done Iceland.
scary shit is this is out there for people to read & learn.
but the same thing keeps happening.
top heavy organizations.
The "recovery plan" described elsewhere on the site:
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_Unit
I mean, the movie "Office space" could have taught you that lesson almost 30 years ago.
Why is there still a single captain, why isnt he rowing, why are we rowing and where are we rowing to?
Metaphor is that in rowing the rowers face backwards they don't see where the boat is going. So you need at least single person to look forwards. And to steer you have to command rowers. It is a valid role to have in large row boat. But you only need one of them.
You also want them to be the person with the most ideal weight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxswain_(rowing)
> Why is there still a single captain
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?
Class
In most cases, the bad application of Management Consultants is 'user error'.
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.
I'm sorry but that's like saying communism is 'user error'.
If the ideal scenario never happens in practice, it's a flawed concept to begin with.
Totally disagree - and - ideal scenario happens all the time.
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.
PE turning a beloved brand into a soulless skin suit exhibit no. 63631
Isn’t this the same company that had the trademark dispute with Iceland the country?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland_v_Iceland_Foods_Ltd
> The ruling stated that the supermarket chain founded in 1970 "cannot reasonably trademark the name of a country that has been around since the 9th century"
amazing
So does this mean I can start a supermarket chain named Iceland, and that’s fine?
Not in the UK. This was an EU ruling. In the EU you could theoretically open your own store named Iceland but you’d have to be careful about doing absolutely anything that might be intepreted as impersonating the existing store.
This is a great read thank you.
> Iceland Foods' managing director Richard Walker said the supermarket will "vigorously defend its intellectual property rights"
Some people have no shame at all. This is so absurd it read like a comedy sketch.
That last line: "...to demonstrate fiscal and HR dexterity for stockholders..."
>HR dexterity
Well that's cursed
Heard "liquidity in human capital" used to describe a CEO's plans
Thats a good point of view of the traditional Managment consultants, now for the "AI era", this type of interventions will not exist Maybe now the Big coorp will finally get closer to real life solutions to the problems companies face
I wish.
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'm curious to know what they have been providing in suggestions up to now, can you tell us?
Sadly I'm not privy to the internal workings, they are due to report in the new year (got knows how much this is going to cost)
I have a steer that people, process and services are all in scope, but again thats vague-as-a-service™
Maybe GMPK should do a protection racket of sorts. Pay us 1% of revenue and we wont send the consultants j/k
Nope. Everyone has their strengths and should avoid some types of work. AI doesn't change this.
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.
I won’t lie. I want to be Captain/Director, not the rower.
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
I'm not sure how serious you are with this comment, but I'll give you another perspective.
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.