> What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work
Good sentence.
But anyway, consulting is a sham business. Anyone can tell you that.
The problem is sometimes you need a third party to tell you what to do. I'm often reminded about how McKinsey told UBS in the early 2000s that they were missing the boat on mortgage backed securities. They went all in and were one of the banks that lost the most in the GFC. Of course McKinsey walked away with millions for their brilliant insights.
UBS was missing the boat on the world's most profitable and popular financial instruments. The bank wanted to know what its competitors were doing better than it did, why it's stock price was lagging, and why it was losing business. McKinsey told them exactly what the problem was. It isn't up to McK to manage the bank's risk, nor to call UBS back 5 years later and say it might be time to quit with the MBS.
Makes you think of index funds / ETFs. For most small investors following what everyone is doing is the correct advice.
It might be similar for most businesses - you will never become a superstar, but you will likely be somewhere close to matching your competition in outcomes.
To my mind consultants have carved out a niche whereby through experience, research, and by the virtue of having already visited everybody's offices, they can tell you what the "best practices" are in your industry. Sometimes this plain means what everyone else is doing, hence the UBS Mortgage Backed Security advice.
Kind of. There are conflict rules so consultants don't share specifics about clients. We tend to share general trends and stick to long term relations. I've seen situations where the partner has been consulting for a client for longer than most CxOs tenure.
It's still less of an issue of a competitor poaching your key people. And by not hiring consultants, you do risk getting behind on a lot of practices.
I just went through this with some super green Ivy school minted Deloitte hires that clearly were making things up as they went as someone in our industry can tell BS when they see it.
So why didn’t your company fire those unexperienced expensive consultants and hire good ones?
Consulting deals are sold on the golf course, noone at that level cares what actually happens as long as the slides produced justify what they wanted to do anyway. Individual consultants just go through the motions to make it look semi-plausible.
This exactly, we had no say in the matter just that consultants were coming in and we had to help them get up to speed with our tech stack and get out of our way.
I’m a consultant and love my work. I’m convinced I bring value to my clients most of the time.
In Data Management consulting, it’s an in-and-out process where you come in, model the processes in place, compare with the standards, adapt it to the business, and propose improvements. You
You provide additional value also by not being on payroll: who wants to internalize a temporary function? In France you can’t fire an employee that easily. I don’t work in Strategy consulting or in one of the big firms, my daily rate is around 1000€ before taxes, and my clients call me back for more of my time.
It really depends what you do as a consultant. Are you just a glorified temp worker? Are you here with a clear mission? Are you a general advisor who brings experience or knowledge?
Like any job, there are shitty companies and people, but most aren’t.
I haven't personally heard of that job title before. How technical would you say you are? Do you advise on or design technological solutions as well, or is it about org charts, BPMN, etc?
Good sentence.
But anyway, consulting is a sham business. Anyone can tell you that.
The problem is sometimes you need a third party to tell you what to do. I'm often reminded about how McKinsey told UBS in the early 2000s that they were missing the boat on mortgage backed securities. They went all in and were one of the banks that lost the most in the GFC. Of course McKinsey walked away with millions for their brilliant insights.