Yawn. Popular as it is to falsely attribute blame for all of the corporate world's ills on consultants, it's inaccurate and lazy.
When you've worked for a consulting company, you learn that none of them are centers of innovation. They didn't create these trends. That's not what their strength is. They're not (and weren't) the ones inventing offshoring, telecommuting, barcodes, bluetooth, etc. They only greased the wheels to help existing trends in business to happen. How could they be the leaders of important business trends? The average tenure of people in consulting is about 3 years. They get in, help do some work a company wanted to do anyway, and get out. Maybe make a few 2x2 charts while they're there to point out the obvious to the oblivious.
Don't blame the consultants for getting companies or governments to become the soulless entities they are today. Blame lazy (or malicious or incompetent) thinking at companies and governments, fueled by the desires of everyone to have things at lower price, faster, and smaller, and to not pay for it now but shirk it off as debt to be paid by the future responsible people who can't vote right now.
We're all responsible for the trends in business, every one of us in our daily civic and commercial behavior. Consultants were just some of the messengers.
Not just the world's consultants, on one particular consultant who kept getting called out, and who is presently running for office. Not that I have any particular support for the 2020 candidates, but what does this author have against that particular individual? It's like the whole thing is written to get at the candidate by convincing people that McKinsey consultants are evil and then mentioning that he used to be one of them.
When you've worked for a consulting company, you learn that none of them are centers of innovation. They didn't create these trends. That's not what their strength is. They're not (and weren't) the ones inventing offshoring, telecommuting, barcodes, bluetooth, etc. They only greased the wheels to help existing trends in business to happen. How could they be the leaders of important business trends? The average tenure of people in consulting is about 3 years. They get in, help do some work a company wanted to do anyway, and get out. Maybe make a few 2x2 charts while they're there to point out the obvious to the oblivious.
Don't blame the consultants for getting companies or governments to become the soulless entities they are today. Blame lazy (or malicious or incompetent) thinking at companies and governments, fueled by the desires of everyone to have things at lower price, faster, and smaller, and to not pay for it now but shirk it off as debt to be paid by the future responsible people who can't vote right now.
We're all responsible for the trends in business, every one of us in our daily civic and commercial behavior. Consultants were just some of the messengers.