this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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At a lot of orgs, I think executive leadership are basically buying the service of assigning blame to the consulting firm if things go wrong. If that happens, they can tell the board they took the advice of one of the big consulting firms everyone has heard of. The consulting firm got paid and will still get business, so I doubt they care. Though they are certainly also farming out critical thinking at the same time.
I tend to agree with that, the backlash at my company has been wild. Lot's of people making "career inhibiting" statements on Slack out of anger of the new policies, and in my opinion the executives have been extremely rude and disrespectful in their responses. I believe they want their US employees to leave the company so they can outsource to lower cost labor markets. Which never works out in my industry and in the early 2000s almost destroyed the company I work for, but these people never learn or care. They just want their 5th house and 2nd yacht.
If that’s the case though, why wouldn’t the consulting company just throw the workers a bone since it’s no skin off their back either way.
Because McKinsey wouldn't want to follow that advice themselves. They want their analysts in the office where their MBA managers can micro-manage them and can make sure that they work 12-15 hours a day.
My executive director said this in no uncertain terms. I had pointed out that some enterprise support was stupidly expensive, and that in my entire time with the institution, we hadn't ever utilized it once. And in fact, if it ever came down to involving lawyers for breach of contract, the CEO said "no, why would we ever bite the hand we have to work with? we'd part ways first".
And that's when the director told me on the side: It's a single throat to choke, something that can be pointed at and assigned blame, how to CYA at this level of the game.
Edit: And to clarify, a new SoW was being negotiated, and I was pulled in as a SME to advise on the technical aspects of potential support that we could possibly need.
Chainsaw consultants.