Of course, but that's only the deployment process for the deliverable. An art on itself but the value is on the problem solving.
What I admire from the McK/BCG/BAIN etc. cadre is their confidence on being able to solve any problem you can throw at them. Of course this does not always work, but the attitude is a mixture between hard-work, power, arrogance and being extremely smart people.
Plus the consultants working with clients have support from:
* The partners overseeing the client relationships, who have each worked with hundreds of clients, been involved with a thousand projects personally, and know something of 10x more. At that stage in their career, a huge amount of strategy consulting becomes instinctive pattern recognition.
* The firm's global knowledgebase, practice areas, research support teams, etc. These hugely accelerate your knowledge of an industry so you can productively and usefully engage with experienced managers at the client right from day 1.
I was a BCG consultant for a few years. Every 3 months, I'd be thrown into a totally new industry: forestry and paper making, clothing supply chains, retail banking sales incentive structures, car tyre manufacturing cost reduction, airline route pricing, production planning for brick manufacturing, ERP systems for electrical contracting wholesaling. Those were my first two years as a junior consultant.
On the day the project kicked off internally, of course I knew nothing. But a couple of days later, I knew how each industry worked, understood the competitive positions of the client and their main competitors, had some good hypotheses on the client's specific challenges, knew the terminology, and was fully equipped to start asking relevant questions.
I never pretended to know stuff that I didn't. Being humble, open, inquisitive, sensitive to others' perspective, and focused on the outcome gets you a long way.
Exactly! My feelings is that they pride not on knowing things, but on knowing _how_ to know things.
I had an ex-Mck associate partner as a boss and turns out he's a great guy (though his brain seems to be overclocked and that made it extremely difficult to work with).
The fresh out of undergrad associate probably isn’t going to fix your company, but the partner who has done 15 years of consulting and probably some leadership stints at clients will probably have something worthwhile hearing.
Consultants aren’t superheros. But if you’re looking for some smart people to grind on some question you have you they typically deliver what you want. Sometimes they crash and burn (had that happen with McK once).
If "making Powerpoint slides" is shorthand for being able to put organized thoughts and decision-worthy information condensed on a single page that an executive can rely on and understand a complicated issue, then let me make Powerpoint slides for the rest of time.
If it means churning out low value status updates then no thanks.
Just like how "coding" can be creating a work of art and delivering something amazing, or mindlessly burning down Jira tickets that you get shoveled on your plate.
I’ve gotten really tired of this trope on HN because it’s basically willfully ignorant. It is exactly equivalent to saying “why do software developers get paid so much when all they do is write some code?” Code is the output, but there’s a hell of a lot that goes into deciding what code gets written, what framework it’s in, how it’s integrated with other code, that it’s bug free, etc. Consulting outputs are often the same - you see only the end product and ignore everything else that goes with it.
Framed another way - The HN crowd loves to shit on PowerPoint slides right up until they need to make a pitch deck that doesn’t suck.
All that said, after many years of working with consultants from every major firm, I’ve definitely got mixed feelings about the actual value generated by a lot of engagements.
These are important though. They are perhaps the single most visible piece of work that is used to make a decision on something.
I understand the temptation to poke fun at this, but think of it from a startup POV. They do pitch decks as well, and they are making up numbers there too.
