“The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in areas they’re advising in”
"A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time." During my time as a consultant I can affirm that this is 100% true. But it cuts both ways - you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist.Most of my time as a consultant was asking low-level employees very obvious questions: What are you wasting your time on? What's the bottleneck on X? What could you be doing that made the company more money? Then we would compile a bunch of squishy numbers into some fancy looking charts in a slide deck for the executives.In my mind this is more of a symptom of a crisis of leadership in business. Absolutely none of the value we provided couldn't have been replaced if executives actually learned to trust their own teams. But MBAs are trained to be drawn to the shiny allure of "data" over quality insight. Or they are so myopic that they need outside help to find solutions they are not bothering to look for.