The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies

Despite the subtitle, this is mostly about government’s usage of consultants.

It goes into the history of consulting, and how we ended up with the Big Three consultancies (McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain and Company) and the Big Four accounting firms (Ernst and Young, Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC).

The main problem is pretty clear: a consultancies job is not to solve their client’s problems. Rather, their main goal is to maximize billings over the life of the relationship. The goal is to wiggle into organizations, “hollow them out” by reducing their internal capacity, then become the thing they depend on.

There are some horror stories here about how firms like McKinsey take over large parts of governments, and the governments get to the point where they can’t do anything without paying eight figures for a “strategy.”

The firms even develop divisions based on world events – there was an entire division at McKinsey, for example, for Brexit-related consulting. Every global crisis can be exploited for profit.

And there’s a revolving door of hiring. Consultants go from the big firms to government or the firm’s clients, then back again. There’s a lot of cronyism at play here.

The consultancies also play both sides of the street. For instance, it’s very common for a firm to be advising fossil fuel companies on how to minimize government oversight, while at the same time having another division advising governments how to respond to the climate crisis. They can advise governments how to punish cigarette companies, and simultaneously be advising those cigarette companies on how to avoid being punished.

All along, internal government capacity gets reduced, government itself is demonized, and working for government is demeaned. The idea of a highly skilled professional going to work in public service is inconceivable, when consultancies suck the kids up right after college with massive salaries.

(For a good look at government service in a positive light, see The Fifth Risk.)

It’s all kind of sad. There’s four steps at the end to try to make things better, which boil down to building internal capacities and making sure there’s transparencies and end dates in contracts.