JAUNDICED EYE
Consultants: The Bain of our lives
Management consultants are the people who borrow your watch to tell you the time, then charge you for it.
I know, that’s a really old joke, rehashed also as the subtitle of Martin Kihn’s House of Lies, the book and then TV series about the amoral world of advice for hire. But the reason that the jest has remained spry beyond pensionable age is that it continues to ring true.
This is a business sector with $600bn in worldwide annual earnings, so some management consultants presumably do deliver value for money. However, many are simply fast-talking, soft-shoe shuffling hucksters with zero ethics, adding very little real value to the organisations that they purport to aid.
In many cases, they do actual damage, but most of their failures are quietly swept under the carpet. No CEO is keen to draw to the attention of shareholders that the supposedly innovative strategy or organisational changes sold to them at eye-watering cost by a team of consultants, has turned out to be a crock of crud.