The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

Spreadsheets are the most popular declarative (or zero order functional) languages in the world. There were even talks about spreadsheets on the International Conference on Functional Programming 2009.

This is so true. My father took on a nightclub all by himself. It was a stupid move, he lost a lot of money doing that. What he was missing was a partner. Not only to lessen his work load, but also to keep him motivated.

This is the reason you see musicians take 5 year breaks, or even quitting music. They are lacking in motivation. Look at the band Queen, They are still making music and touring, but half the band has quit. Freddie Mercury died and John Deacon quit music altogether. What did John Deacon lose? His motivation. Brian May and Roger Taylor both had a lot of say in the bands creative process, and that process motivated them to continue, even after Freddie had passed away. Now, Deacon, he wasn't as involved in that process, and he was the one who quit.

I don't think this is specific to business consulting, or to Dubai. I know several people who were hired by high-powered technical consulting firms here in the US; all of them were fairly bright, attractive young people with very little experience of any sort.

No, it really isn't.

Not at any of the small businesses I ever worked for, where the guys at the top probably decide these things themselves.

Not at a very, very large business I worked for, where the guys at the top probably didn't know the name of anyone in my building and everything was done by HR and Legal automatons.

And not at any medium sized businesses I have ever worked for, either.

The only time an agreement like this is standard is when you know you're doing something you shouldn't be, and you know you're about to lose your legitimate influence over people who could out you, so you try to buy their silence because to you the cost is cheap.

There was another important point: a guy new to the consulting business and with no significant amount of relevant training or support wound up being marketed as an expert and became the senior person on each project he joined.

I've seen this in action, both from the client side (management brought in absurdly highly paid consultants to back up what they wanted when their own people wouldn't support it) and the other side (friends and friends of friends who went into consultancy firms; few of them have stayed there much longer than this guy).

What I don't get is why shareholders (for big companies) or government auditors (for government organisations) don't openly criticise the policy of wasting money hiring these completely unqualified people who either offer no real benefit or actively cause harm to the projects they join. Obviously a genuine expert could offer useful consultancy in their field of expertise, but that doesn't seem to be the MO of these big multinational consultancy shops.