The question is how you organically build up to take on the banks and consultantocracies. Their ecosystem is about as far from a competitive market as you can imagine.
Their hiring practices might seem illogical, but I would disagree. They're just not hiring for what you think they are. It's fundamentally about hiring people who have a lot of cultural capital coupled with a work ethic and an above-average-but-not-spectacular amount of intelligence. This has only a weak correlation at best with ability to allocate capital, manage, or "consult." (Those latter skills are genuinely rare, valuable, and hard to identify anyways, so they're increasingly being replaced by organizational and technical solutions.)
Why that group of people? The types of organizations we're talking about are successful because they have secured a privileged place in the network of our economic and political economies. Their target hiring group is people who are consciously or subconsciously supportive of that existing network and will be effective at using and extending it.
So, if you had to name a group of people who are generally content with the status quo, familiar with the world of the rich and powerful, hard-working, and smart-enough, who would you go for? People who graduated from an Ivy League and have access to the resources to spend on things like climbing Mt. Everest or winning an Olympic gold medal in lacrosse.
Their hiring practices might seem illogical, but I would disagree. They're just not hiring for what you think they are. It's fundamentally about hiring people who have a lot of cultural capital coupled with a work ethic and an above-average-but-not-spectacular amount of intelligence. This has only a weak correlation at best with ability to allocate capital, manage, or "consult." (Those latter skills are genuinely rare, valuable, and hard to identify anyways, so they're increasingly being replaced by organizational and technical solutions.)
Why that group of people? The types of organizations we're talking about are successful because they have secured a privileged place in the network of our economic and political economies. Their target hiring group is people who are consciously or subconsciously supportive of that existing network and will be effective at using and extending it.
So, if you had to name a group of people who are generally content with the status quo, familiar with the world of the rich and powerful, hard-working, and smart-enough, who would you go for? People who graduated from an Ivy League and have access to the resources to spend on things like climbing Mt. Everest or winning an Olympic gold medal in lacrosse.