A Lot Of Consultants Aren't, Well, Um, That Bright...

Sometime around the winter of 2012, or maybe a little bit before, I really wanted to be an organizational Development consultant. It is almost 12 years later now, and I’ve never done this. In fact, currently I generate most of my paltry income from writing here and from bartending. So no, I never ended up in the random downtown Houston corporate board room telling people what to do. But I made some steps in that direction in general, most of which ended up being wrong, when I went to a grad program at University of Minnesota in OrgDev (most of the jobs coming out were HR-based). It may have been among the worst decisions of my adulthood, all-in. Anyway, that’s just some backstory.

Good, funny report from Last Week Tonight here on McKinsey:

I do think most people who think about the business world critically understand that McKinsey is kind of a giant shell game. It takes seemingly-elite minds in their 20s and says, “Your career will be minted if you’re willing to fly to Denver a lot and tell company leaders very basic things that harm the employee class and benefit the owner class.” That’s the basic rub on McKinsey, BCG, Bain, etc. In recent years, it’s gotten a little bit darker once we learned more about McKinsey and Saudi Arabia, or McKinsey and Purdue Pharma.

I did my immediate post-college “I think I am elite, although adulthood will cement the opposite!” deal with Teach For America , where you go into inner-city schools and teach. It's also a pathway to law school and prestigious white-collar careers for most, but it’s less drastic than McKinsey, because maybe 1 in every 12 TFA teachers end up sticking around education and becoming a principal, etc.

When I watched the above YouTube, I tried to think of all the consultants I know. I got to about 12 people. I legitimately think maybe 1 of the 12 is smart in multiple definitions of the term “intelligence.” Most of the others are good bullshitters or good at conveying some sense of “I am giving you value, even if you could figure this out yourself in 10 minutes,” and thus billing more hours for said value.

Consulting has carved out a nice niche for itself, though.

The real game is that executives and founders want air cover on layoffs or strategic pivots, so they bring in consultancies, which are typically staffed by people who have elite degrees but essentially no practical experience, and the execs get the air cover for layoffs but they don’t really get any type of new strategy. I worked with a kid once who went on to do eight years at BCG. We were working with a brewery who wanted more reach. In one meeting, he said, “So like, do you guys post on Facebook?”

I took some classes at Minnesota with a few MBA guys who went to McKinsey. In one of the classes, they just sat and did a SWOT on Wal-Mart for 2 hours, mostly talking about how “poor people need groceries.” While that’s true, and that has helped Wal-Mart a lot especially in this era of inflation, I’m not sure these are the sharpest minds of our time.

But you can always justify consulting re: “We need an outside perspective” or “We need someone that has worked with our rivals and knows what they are doing,” etc. In reality, it’s a profession designed to further bankrupt the middle class, which ostensibly is what most solid professions do these days anyway.

But would I say these are the truly “elite” of our current youth, intellectually? No. As the video says near the end, it’s mostly a mix of guys named Braden, American Airlines business class warriors, and a few guys who couldn’t age out into anything else later in career.

Now, I will say a managing partner at Bain did this research.

… and while that research is explicitly designed to make you want to hire a consultant, it’s also pretty good research on how internally-dysfunctional most companies are.

What’s your take on consultants?