I might point out, after reading many of the comments here, that people who are currently or have done management consulting in the past all say essentially the same thing about the experience -- it was great for them, they saw lots of stuff, traveled a bit, made some money. But none of them say they actually helped a single employee of a single organization actually accomplish anything in particular for all the fees…
Strategy consultants are extremely highly paid, extremely specialized temp workers. We only create as much value as the client asks us to get. It's a time-money play. We do the work that creating or scaling a corporate strategy group would do if you had the 6-12 months to go out, hire a team, train them together, create the necessary links to the organization, and go do the work. With consultants, you can hire and fi…
And here it is, I would argue that consultants offer (to each reference point):
a faster time to [a], you hire them as a group instead of sourcing each worker separately
no [b], after all, they are ~20 year old "experts" led by an experience consultant manager or firm partner who's sole job is to stash the squadron of kids at the other company and check up on them every so often, then give a grand presentation at the end of the contract term. Why would they need to understand the particulars of how a company works or how to move them to a path to success? After all, probably nobody on the team has actually run a successful company. And businesses all fit into nice b-school categories anyways.
no [c], it's like a group of shock troops falls out of the sky on an organization and commences to create chaos. I've never seen something so disruptive to a company as a consulting team inserting themselves into the day-to-day of an organization. They don't know anybody, they don't want to know anybody, and it doesn't help them to know anybody beyond charting out the organization and work structure of the company.
a debatable [d]. Oh, okay, I'm being harsh about [d]. All of my friends who work in mgmt consulting work their gosh darn asses off, generating thousands of powerpoint slides and binders full of diagrams.
Does it amount to much? I dunno. There's some value from a Knowledge Management perspective for an organically grown organizations to understand how information and communications occur in their company. Mapping out de facto business processes I guess is helpful.
Does it require a team of consultants to come in and do this? Nah, most companies could do this with one or two dedicated hires for far cheaper and far less disruption.
In my personal, admittedly anecdotal experience, these things could be useful if they were done properly. But I've never actually seen a consultant team actually interview the line workers who would actually know this stuff.
It's like it's beneath them, and too time consuming to figure out that the blue form #4 doesn't go from department x on floor 5 to department c on floor 6, but actually goes from John in department x to Lisa in admin, who then brings it to her boss Karl who then collects them in a stack to give out at the weekly management meeting to Jessi who works on floor 6, but not in department c, but who is married to John (no relation to the previous John), and gives it to him at night over dinner in department c, who works for the ultimate recipient of the form, John's brother Jake who is supposed to manage the department and initiate processing the forms, but has a drinking problem and only shows up to work in the middle of the week to do so.
Why this convoluted process? Why not just have blue form #4 go from x->c like the manager in x believes happens (but doesn't because she doesn't follow the de facto processes enough to know this)? Who knows? The consultants don't know that's for sure because they never investigate this Rube Goldberg machine.
And when analyzing why it's so slow and convoluted, they analyze it to death and might just decide that department c is the slow boat in the fleet and its more cost effective to eliminate that department by merging them with x and eliminating redundancies when really they just need to replace Jake and make the form electronic so the form is emailed between floors.
You think I'm making the previous example up, but I'm not. And what actually happened is that when they merged the department they fired John (#2) which sparked Jessi to desire to leave the company, and she brought along half of her department which didn't need to have that happen. Within a year 12 other key people left out of bad blood with the company sparked by this initial round of redundant layoffs. And oh yeah, Jessi, who left with her team, started her own company with her husband John and that staff, who ultimately ended up contracting back at their old company, to do their old jobs, at 3x the hourly charge rate.
And Jake still works there, whenever he feels like coming in. But to make up for his personal failures, the company has had to hire a fleet of subordinates.
End result? 3 failed multi-million dollar projects, not late, failed. Rehiring the same employees at 3x the charge rate as contractors, and to support Jake they had to increase head count to the point that it's virtually unchanged from before the entire merger of department x and c.
And oh yeah, the company is out a $2 million dollar consulting fee.