&#62; 9 times out of 10, if it would increase their income, they would have<p>If you've ever worked on a design project inside a big company, you'd know that's simply untrue.<p>Big companies are not actually streamlined profit machines, they're streamlined ego-perpetuating machines. Which is why you have the 10-committee problem, the 50-stakeholder problem, and "Marketing" owns the sidebar and news area of the site, while Copywriting owns only the front page and About Our Company pages, and Operations and/or the Boss' Secretary owns everything else...<p>It's inefficient as hell to have 10+ people in a design meeting, for example. Wastes profits by the boatload. Committees do not create profits, they just increase the wastefulness of most meetings.<p>And so on, so forth -- the good news is, as a consultant, they were wasting my time at $300+ an hour.[1] As long as I was content to sit there and do nothing but count my money in my head, it was a great gig.<p>I remember one client that paid us quite a lot of money for research and initial redesigns, but in the end, the CEO got talked out of approving our $60k budget. Because Marketing was afraid it would cut into their budget -- which was $300k/mo.<p>Keep in mind: This particularly company's whole business was delivering a web video experience.<p>12 mos later, they went from several hundred employees to about 60. Last I heard (months after that), they're down to 20.<p>What a surprise.<p>This problem doesn't exist only at startups, though. I've worked with a lot of big name companies you'd recognize, and almost everywhere it's the same.<p>[1] The great thing about being a consultant to big biz is that your rates don't matter. Occasionally a client will initially balk when you throw out $300, $400, whatever per hour -- but it's usually them 'playing poker' with what they are willing to pay.<p>The fact of the matter is, when they overstuff meetings (which they all habitually do), they are wasting $1000s per hour of their own employee time.