they wanted a consulting report that parroted back their pre-determined conclusion
Precisely: Someone at a high level wants to do something, a major change or costly initiative. They have to justify it, so they hire a consultant to tell the company it's fine, it will work out, it's a great idea.
I have actually worked with a consultant that told the truth. It was even done nicely, polished and presented in a very palatable style. It was ignored. Also everything it predicted came to pass.
Yeah, BCG have a history of that with our Government here in Australia too, as well as all the other big consulting groups.
We had a Government body rolling out a National FTTH network (called the NBN), and the opposition party didn’t like it (they have strong links to the media industry, Mr. Murdoch in particular, who owned most of the cable TV infrastructure here). The experts all said their policy was a terrible idea - switching to upgrading the degrading copper phone lines and buying the under-maintained HFC assets and upgrading those where they existed. When that party won Government in 2013, they got BCG to write a report saying their policy was great and would save us $20 billion. Well, we’re now more than $20 billion over what FTTH was going to cost based on the actual rollout costs, and it’s regarded as a huge mess and a big waste of money.
More recently, the same party got BCG to write a report saying they should do what they’ve been wanting to do in selling off the profitable parcel delivery from our national post office. Problem is, that parcel service very effectively subsidises the delivery of essential services to regional communities through post offices, which will have to close or be massively Government subsidised if they sell it. The party in Government have a habit of these kind of privatisations of important services, where we always find in hindsight that we’ve sold it for far less than it’s worth, and it always just happens to be somebody politically connected to the party too...
Using consulting groups like BCG who write reports with exactly what the Government wants in them is basically used in some of these cases as part of a kind of corruption racket.
Precisely: Someone at a high level wants to do something, a major change or costly initiative. They have to justify it, so they hire a consultant to tell the company it's fine, it will work out, it's a great idea.
I have actually worked with a consultant that told the truth. It was even done nicely, polished and presented in a very palatable style. It was ignored. Also everything it predicted came to pass.