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

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

#131

Post by jacquesm »

rdtsc wrote: post #41
microcentury wrote: post #39

"At my salary level, and with my expected advancement path, I could comfortably retire in my thirties." I've heard this or statements like it in quite a few articles over the years, but I've never actually met a retired thirties business consultant. Do they exist and am I just missing them? The only ones I know are well into their thirties, working 70+ hours a week, and looking forward to making even larger boatloads…

That actually undermines his main point -- that he stuck to his "morals" and forgone the "large" hush money check at the end. If he was making enough to retire by his 30s then $16k wasn't that significant of an amount. That means the didn't really lose a lot so his "moral" stance is more symbolic, and not the tough financial decision that article might imply.

The whole moral thing is questionable, if he would have taken his leave that would be one thing but the company initiated the termination, not the author.

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

#132

Post by rbanffy »

3pt14159 wrote: post #83
eru wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The joys of linear optimization. Do you know if it also supports integer optimization? (Doing that fast enough would be a feat in pure Excell.)

There are multiple versions of Solver. To get the free one to do this requires a hack (using some sort of Fourier Transform into a cell or something, I think there are multiple ways). There are paid versions of Solver that are far more powerful, with fully developed APIs. Also, Iron Python can be used with Excel, which makes the whole thing really intense because many Python Libs can be used. Excel truly is Microsoft…

> Excel truly is Microsoft's shiniest, best piece of software.

I would grant that honour to SQL Server. In fact, I regard SQL Server as Microsoft's third best product, lagging behind both the Natural Keyboard series (a must) and their mice ("honest value", reliable and comfortable). Never thought that, but Excel could be the fourth product in this list.

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

#133

Post by yummyfajitas »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #97
Silhouette wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Shareholders care only about relative performance. Absolute performance is irrelevant. So as long as all big companies in a particular sector waste X on consultants, that's fine for the shareholder. It doesn't even affect the dividend as you might think, because if everyone does it the cost can be passed on to clients. Shareholders start to care once a lean competitor enters the scene. Someone who does away with all…

Shareholders used to try to improve a company - it was quite popular in the 70's and 80's. Ever watch the movie "Wall Street?

What happened since then is that legislators and courts have become hostile to corporate raids, and have mostly made it toothless. We would have plenty of shareholder activism if it wasn't for that.

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

#134

Post by dhume »

barrkel wrote: post #70
barrkel wrote: post #21

Something that leaped out at me: "I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system". Voluntary exchange is not a moral system. A free market doesn't have morals.

I suspect (some) people misunderstood what I was trying to say. I wasn't trying to say that I thought free markets were immoral, or that they were not moral. (And so we should find a different economic system, or something). I was trying to say that you cannot replace your personal morality, your moral system, with a free market (whatever that even means). That is, I was trying to say that markets were amoral, withou…

I think some of it comes from confounding a moral system (i.e. a system for evaluating the morality of an action) with a system which acts in a morally correct manner.

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

#135

Post by jacquesm »

gjm11 wrote: post #112
jackowayed wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he was taking a double course-load and working, so that may count as being buried in sand. But still, even if he didn't know beforehand, he figured it out very quickly upon arrival and then stayed for a long time for the money, so I agree with most of your point.

Did he stay a long time? It doesn't look that way to me from the article, but maybe I just missed something. http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/06/third-day-... seems to imply that he started there in June 2009. http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/10/moral-impe... seems to imply he was still there in October. ... Ooh, and all four parts of the story of which the OP here is part 3 are together i…

However long he worked there, he didn't bite the hand that was feeding him, but when the party was over he did turn around to bite the hand that fed him.

Being moral about the NDA does not weigh up against working there in the first place, and I don't know what $16 K means to a high profile Dubai consultant, it may have been substantially less than the severance pay he was entitled to anyway.

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

#136

Post by pmiller2 »

shrikant wrote: post #121
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #99

"Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man" I'm not surprised that someone whose ideology makes him believe that Einstein's contribution to society was smaller than that of the bosses of Lehman or AIG would be disappointed by reality. Or is it that reality i…

I'm not surprised that someone whose ideology makes him believe that Einstein's contribution to society was smaller than that of the bosses of Lehman or AIG would be disappointed by reality. Would you care to clarify? I genuinely don't see where you are getting this from.

He's saying that since Einstein wasn't a rich man, by the author's logic, he couldn't have contributed much to society.

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

#137

Post by sree_nair »

tomjen3 wrote: post #115
api wrote: post #68

"I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying to mimic successful businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of being included in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual." WOW that is dead on. I get the feeling half the world is like that.

The problem is that it is not that simple, because just doing what others do works very well in most cases and you don't have the time to start questioning _everything_ - why do you shower in the morning? Why eat three times a day? I don't want to defend cargo-cults, but people copy because it works.

I think these comparisons are a little off base. If i am not hungry at night, I normally skip the dinner. If I am on a lazy mood on a weekend, I skip my shower/shower in the evening. You don't have to question everything, but you shouldn't do anything that doesn't make sense to you. and that's barely the case in big business environment.

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

#139

Post by sree_nair »

sigstoat wrote: post #18

i have the feeling, children or not, that we wouldn't have been hearing this story if the $16,000 offer had been a bit larger.

Can you tell me Why?. How can you morally judge a person without knowing him?,If his story is true, he gave up a $200,000/Annum Job.

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

#140

Post by oz »

edster wrote: post #61

Here is my best story about business consultants... I was contracting at a big three automaker and they had retained just such a firm, possibly even BCG, to "restructure" the IT department. So they had a team of overpaid consultants come and perform an analysis. I won't even get into the pointlessness of all that. However, the leader of the pack, the alpha male of the consulting team, would physically walk his laptop…

Striking fear into the heart of a self-important consultant?

Priceless!

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