alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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
> 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.
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:
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.
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.