How management consulting went rogue
When a professional service became a marketing machine
“The scale of contracts with the consulting industry — via roles as advisors, legitimators of controversial decisions and outsourcers — weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies. The cumulative use of big consultancies that operate with extractive business models stunts innovation and capacity development, undermines democratic accountability and obfuscates the consequences of political and corporate actions. In the end, we all pay the price through the lack of in-house investment and learning: public funds and other resources are wasted, decisions in government and business are made with impunity and little transparency, and our democratic societies are deprived of their dynamism. The Big Con imperils us all.” — Mariana Mazzucato 1
In a 35 year career focused on helping organisations around the world create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness there are many questions I’ve been asked time and again.
So, I thought it might be useful to address some of these frequently asked questions in bite-sized videos.
Here I’d like to address why mainstream management consulting firms undermine the futures of the organisations that hire them, and how they ended up doing so.
Mariana Mazzucato describes the negative impact of big consulting in her recent book The Big Con — with a summary of her perspective in the quote above.
But this wasn’t always the case.
Until about 60 years ago, the consulting profession provided a valuable service.
But then it began morphing from a professional service into a marketing machine…
The 11 minute video below describes why and how this happened, and the problems organisations create for themselves when they hire consulting firms to do work that’s outside the scope of their competence.
“The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies” (2023) — by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington on Goodreads