Getting Drunk in First Class
Debunking Consulting Myths
“Consultants distract, demoralize, and otherwise slow down your best people.”
Of course we do! We’re there to light a fire under people’s asses, to re-shape your company to be better than it was before, which was failing. Besides, if your best people were really the best, then you wouldn’t need us in the first place, now would you? We know everything about you, your business, your competitors, and your industry. We can do anything imaginable.
Seriously, though, demoralize? Inconceivable; this is more than likely an unintended and completely rare side-effect. Armed with our Big 10 and Ivy League degrees, it is plausible your so-called “best” people might be put to shame at least from an education standpoint. Sure, we bring in mutts-off-the-street undergraduates and bill you $245/hr for them. But demoralize? No way, just because your employees’ annual bonus budget is now making a big sucking sound towards our $10,000 bar tabs and frequent visitations to the titty bar doesn’t mean your people should feel demoralized. I’d rather think of it more like subsidizing their future, not demoralizing them. We’ll compromise; we’ll invite your employees (as Optional, not Required, in Outlook) to the bar with us.
We definitely do not slow your people down. For most of them, it might be the first time in their lives that they have had to stay past 5:01 PM at the office. That is surely a shocking moment for some, indeed. Slowing them down is so far in the opposite direction of what we’re really doing for them and for their own good. Driving up the company’s stock price a quarter of a point for every 100 slides in a deck is simply not slowing your people down. We’re showing them the next industrial revolution, all the hidden gems of management expertise that they have been without for so long. Besides, once they have all that management expertise (which we intend to knowledge transfer as soon as possible), the people we ‘let go’ will be well-prepared in the marketplace to find new jobs somewhere else.
“Companies with a high ratio of consultants to employees are companies that do not perform well.”
This is entirely common-sense. We’re not trying to foster investor confidence the moment we land troops on the ground after they scale the rope from the Blackhawk helicopter (aka Boeing 757 jetway). We’re trying to build that investor confidence over time by helping the company achieve increasing profitability and efficiency. We don’t expect the company’s stock value to necessarily rise while we’re working with you to transfigure your company into the most amazing business machine ever known to man. The people who spout this idea have no idea what they’re talking about and are not considering the long-term horizons of the companies that make strategic use of management consultants and all their right-sizing half-baked goodness.
Sure, there was Enron, but we all know that was entirely due to Andersen’s mischievous accounting practices and an unscrupulous executive team, not McKinsey. Or what about Victoria’s Secret? I know they have some consultants on the ground now but just because their stock is tanking doesn’t mean the fees aren’t worth it. And what can be said of Capital One?
“Consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time.”
Oh, it’s silly, symbolic remarks like this that get our goat. What exactly does it mean anyways? We’re petty watch thieves? Maybe we tell people what they already know, perhaps? How so? And by who’s account, exactly? Back to my claim above, we help companies succeed in the long-term. We are not in the business of mere short-term investor gains and temporary popularity.
We are business professionals, damn it!
We… are… management… consultants.
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