The real skill isn’t the advice - it’s convincing executives that contradicting your previous $100M recommendation somehow validates hiring you again.
🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱
Consulting services rarely are there to help figure out what to do, they’re there to help convince other people that what you want to do is the right move.
TIl, I could do this job.
A lot of high paying decision making jobs could be done much better if they were actually given to people based on their talents and not who they know or are related to.
The hardest part about the job is getting it
Man I wish I knew how to grift rich people like this
All consulting is like this. It’s a way to offload blame for your decisions by not making any in-house.
Our company paid a consulting firm 100k to deliver the same message our internal had been saying for 5 years.
Oh yes. The board member used to work for that consultancy.
Sounds like they still get paid then!
From my (fortunately) brief experience in software consulting, I can confirm that is an important unwritten rule of the job. It doesn’t matter what exactly you sell to customers, as long as they are willing to buy it and come back. It explains why a lot of software is dogshit.
“I can’t produce anything, so I’ll take money away from other people doing business” ~consultants
TLC used to be The Learning Channel. Before it was “here’s a bunch of children who are being sexually abused behind the camera,” it was educational outreach. Vocational training. Satellite college courses for people in Alaska and Appalachia.
Then Discovery bought it. Fuck Discovery.
Yep. I thought for ages that it was a spinoff of discovery but no, it was a whole thing that went back to the 80s. After Discovery acquired it blam.
Why do I associate TLC with, like, Trading Spaces and other domestic not-quite-a-game shows like that? Am I conflating it with something else? Also I haven’t had “television” in decades now.
It used to be PBS for adults. I remember turning it on and there would be a documentary about like piano players and the connection to the brain.
Went down hill thanks to reality TV.
Because that’s the slop it turned into. It was a place for documentaries and educational content, just like MTV used to have music. But watching Kate torment her brood of children or Honey BooBoo eat sketti makes the kind of money airing a college lecture doesn’t.
This kind of content taking off and the popularity of the Kardashians were the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the intellectual apocalypse we’re dealing with now. We are what we eat, and what you watch absolutely influences how you think and act.
I used to watch Trading Spaces back in the day, and I remember when they started off and they’d actually do a good job, then I think there was an episode where the couple didn’t like what they’d done, that got more engagement, then it became a show about neighbors ruining each other’s homes, and thus was born reality television.
Well, consulting is often used because they need an answer to a question. That may be open-ended like:
“What moves should we make to expand our business?”
But other times they just want confirmation:
“Should we merge with Discovery?” (Sure, I guess. Here are some reasons you could. cha-ching)
“Should we split with Discovery?” (Sure, I guess. Here are some reasons you could. cha-ching)
Other times they just need to pay people to give them excuses to lay off people. McKinsey’s always available for that.
When Chipotle got a new CEO (Brian Niccol, who has since become the Starbucks CEO) a few years back, they were headquartered in Denver. But the CEO lived in Newport Beach. So they brought in a consulting management firm to examine where the best place in the country was for them to have their corporate headquarters.
After weeks of analysis - surprise, surprise - they determined that the best place they could possibly have a corporate headquarters was in Newport Beach, where the CEO lived.
So they fired most of their corporate workers and moved the office to be closer to the CEOs house.
“Sorry we don’t do remote work and you’ll have to come into the office.”
“Counterpoint: …”
Starbucks has a mandatory 3 day a week RTO policy, but this same CEO did not relocate from Newport beach to Seattle.
Instead, he has the corporate private jet fly him 2000 miles round trip every week.
I have experienced this where I work. There is a consulting company that gets rolled out to make packets full of “data”, graphs, summaries, and surveys that always manages to support the unpopular thing the boss wants.
Other times they just need to pay people to give them excuses to lay off people. McKinsey’s always available for that.
What would you say… you do here?
Get paid to do the work of someone who could be employed for a reasonable salary, but the board or CEO wants the answer to come from someone outside the company to avoid taking any blame.
Look, I already told you: I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have to. I have people skills. I am good at dealing with people! Can’t you understand that!? What the hell is wrong with you people!!
Bob, Bob.
Naga-naga-nagonna work here anymore, anyway
Sounds like a job that would be easy to replace with ChatGPT.
How should we defend Athens?
Consultancy says “A wooden wall will save Athens”
We’ve been doing this forever…
Consulting services are vital because they improving corporate synergy by utilizing market solutions and relocating potential where it is needed most.
Don’t forget that they also leverage institutional assets to extract value using best practices!
We’ll circle back to that.
Can I talk to you offline?
Then I apply an herb-mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturiser, then an anti-ageing eye balm followed by a final moisturising protective lotion.
I was expecting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
This company also advised multiple large opiate manufacturers.
In, fire 30 percent of the workforce, new logo, boom, out.
You are now a fully trained management consultant.
I had a friend who did consulting right out of college. Half the time he said it was his job to suggest layoffs so the people in charge could pretend it wasn’t their idea.
Is that normal shitposting you’re doing?
Lean leader certified
“What’s your advice?”
“My advice is to not take my advice. That’ll be 63 million dollars, please.”
More like "tell me what you already decided to do, and pay me out the ass to create a justification for it so you can pin it on us if it’s a giant fuckup after the fact’.
“Certainly Sir! Money well spent!”
You have to understand why they are employed though - somebody stands to gain from doing some thing, so the way they get to justify doing that thing is to hire these people, so they come in, deliver a report that says the thing is the best thing to do with graphs that go up, and it happens, McKinsey gets paid, the beneficiary gets what they want and life goes on.
That plus there’s a massive incentive for overpaid executives to farm out any actual decision-making to consultants. They could lose their cushy jobs if they did something unpopular that made the news and hurt stock prices. But if the decision was promoted by an expensive consulting firm, that launders the blame. It hurts the business in a fundamental way, obviously, but publicly traded companies have not been very focused on fundamentals up until lately. Tighter monetary policy should have changed this, but the paradigm has been slow to shift for many.
That would unironically be good advice which means he couldnt give it.
But if he did, would they take it?
Only if you also sold the idea to the investor class
It’s why companies all seem to lay people off and go to a subscription model in lock step - the stock price only goes up because they’re playing both sides
They’ve developed a perpetual consulting loop. Genius.
Isn’t the google ceo a McKinsey stooge?
Yes, he is. It explains a lot.
So is Buttigieg, but sharing that information seems to be unpopular.
I don’t care if you’re wrong, I will propagate it anyway.
I mean no need to spread misinformation. This information in easily verifiable.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, worked at McKinsey for ~2 years and then joined Google in 2004, eventually working his way into the position of CEO.
Pichai’s fuck ups are unlikely a result of McKinsey, at least not directly. That isn’t to say that McKinsey is completely off the hook. They work with plenty of “top” companies and I’m certain Google is one of them.
Pichai was so bad, even McKinsey didn’t want to keep him.
McKinsey likes to hire recent graduates who they suspect will wind up in high places. It builds them strong connections and lets them brag to potential customers as well as customers’ stakeholders that they have cutting edge talent and that they hire the best and to tell potential employees that a few years with them is part of how you move from an elite educational institution into high levels of business or politics.
The worst thing this says about Pichai is that he was the sort of person who seeks to be on the ladder to elite careers.
They certainly hire some “talent”
