>In short: The people you’re talking to aren’t the people who are doing the actual work, The people who are doing the work have no industry experience And the numbers they’re basing their analysis on are probably whatever they found on google.
this has always been the most mindboggling thing about consultants. I have a few friends working as consultants and occasionally when they discuss cases, I always think to myself, "who on earth are you to advise them about so-and-so management when you literally just graduated college a year or two ago?"
The value is that (ideally) they've asked around and figured out how half a dozen peer firms do what you're struggling with. So while they may not have solved your management problem personally, they can give you an idea of what's worked for your peers without all the icky industrial espionage and antitrust violations you'd need to find it out yourself.
Where did they learn what’s changed in best practices for fast food logistics since the last time they consulted for Burger King? Well, funny enough, they were recently engaged by McDonalds…
This. You can have an open acknowledgement that the consultant knows jack as long as they can give you the sourcing of their underlying insights and best practices and it passes the sniff test.
I had a similar reaction, the first time I heard a graduating CS undergrad say that they were going into management consulting: "But you don't know anything yet..."
But I guess it's not that different from the new grads who are instantly called Software Engineers.
Some percentage will rise to quality work, through mentoring&training, effort, and experience... and quickly earn the title.
And some percentage will go through the motions... and still get paid lots of money.
To me, the point of a software engineer is to write code. An experienced software engineer can quickly write quality code while also doing other responsibilities, but their fundamental job is still code. A new grad may not be good at writing code, and they may not be as good at ancillary things, but fundamentally they are still capable of writing code.
In contrast, the point of a consultant is to provide expertise in an area that some company doesn't have. A new CS grad may have more expertise in software than a non-tech company, but they definitely have less expertise in software than a tech company, and less experience in management than almost any company with more than 1 person in it.
In Norway the only difference between consultants and everyone else is that we cost more and are easier to fire.
Besides that we just do software development like everyone else. And sure we have colleagues to lean on but so do the companies we work for. Most of them are huge.
Consultants are software engineers for human software, i.e. how a business runs itself. Just like software engineering, there are best practices, state-of-the-art, ways to pass on knowledge from seniors to juniors, etc. Just like software there are company 'assets' (the source code repository) with past cases, problems that were solved and how (or not solved and why not), etc. They are very similar businesses actually that just scale differently: consulting scales worse than software but at much lower risk as all 'development' is funded (typically mostly by the first customer than partially by N+1).
In defense of consulting the “sales pitch” on consulting is that the people on top, the partners and managers, have the industry experience to guide the more junior employees who don’t have experience but have good analytical skills. How true that is is up to interpretation but that’s the steel man version
A friend of mine who worked as a very high level consultant for years once said that consultants are often wrong, but never in doubt. Having just graduated doesn't really change that dynamic, as long as you have the confidence to pull it off.
The idea is they reduce problems to conceptuals. You don’t need experience, and in fact industry or specific experience is often a hindrance, to solving conceptual problems.
They do this many times a year (see: young people working crazy hours). Pattern recognition develops. They now lead 20-somethings doing this work.
this has always been the most mindboggling thing about consultants. I have a few friends working as consultants and occasionally when they discuss cases, I always think to myself, "who on earth are you to advise them about so-and-so management when you literally just graduated college a year or two ago?"