alt Hacker NewsBeware Management Consultants
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
Looking around, I'm surprised this is common knowledge (j1/2k)
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)
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/
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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That last line: "...to demonstrate fiscal and HR dexterity for stockholders..."
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 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
This is great: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/the-chie...