{"id":57,"date":"2012-08-01T12:45:05","date_gmt":"2012-08-01T01:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eclectic-consult.com\/mooseblog\/?p=57"},"modified":"2012-08-01T17:25:49","modified_gmt":"2012-08-01T06:25:49","slug":"consultancy-conschmultancy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eclectic-consult.com\/mooseblog\/2012\/08\/01\/consultancy-conschmultancy\/","title":{"rendered":"Consultancy conschmultancy…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My favourite quote of the moment is\u00a0“Refactoring the strategic value proposition in real-time with agile implementation\u201d or “Making it up as you go along” thanks to Charles \u00a0(one of my favourite authors).<\/p>\n

Stross is a master of parody, and although the quote is funny (and\u00a0particularly\u00a0so in the context of his latest book, “The\u00a0Apocalypse\u00a0Codex”) it’s also a sad reflection on modern business and, in particular, consultant speak.<\/p>\n

I’ve just spent a year in a senior role in one of the “big 4” consultancies. It was an interesting year. I learnt several things: i) the business world is less competent and more evil that I previously believed; ii) that consultants can charge insane amounts of money (and get paid!) for refactoring the strategic value proposition in real-time with agile implementation – usually with a very pretty Powerpoint presentation and booklet to back it up; 3) they talk the talk, but DO NOT walk the walk and; 4) I hated working for a large consultancy.<\/p>\n

I’ll try and explain each of these points… Apologies if I get a bit ranty…<\/p>\n

1) I’ve been either an academic or in private practice (or both) for nearly all my adult life. I learnt a lot during this time, lots of academic learning anyway, and I honestly believed that most big\u00a0organisations actually had their shit together. I’ve learnt that in many ways they do (that is, lots of very competent people work for them), but they also are extremely bad (mostly) at not being evil. For example, currently in Australia, there’s a massive demand (mostly from China) for our raw materials. So large mining companies have realised that they need to get as much out of the ground as they can, by tomorrow. I’m not kidding; if they could dig it all up overnight, they’d be happy, because they can’t guarantee future commodities prices. Does it occur to them that our resources are finite? Do they consider the consequences (apart from fiscal ones) of their actions? They do not – because they’re not capable of doing so. Despite being a collection of people (some of whom are very nice and really do care), the system itself cannot think morally, nor can it evaluate its actions in a wider context. The company exists to make money for its shareholders and it will do that wherever possible. A long-term plan isn’t really important when you’re making money hand over fist now.<\/p>\n

What\u00a0happened? For a while there it looked like the limitless resources fallacy was being recognised, and that people might actually matter… But no, when the GFC\u00a0happened\u00a0(itself\u00a0the actions of a hyper macho world of mega bullshit),\u00a0organisations\u00a0decided that being human-centric was too expensive, and when\u00a0commodities\u00a0prices climbed (because China needed the raw materials to make gizmos to sell to the rest of us) mining companies leapt at the opportunity to make money now.<\/p>\n

So it\u00a0comes\u00a0down to the distinct human failing: if I’ve got it now I don’t need to think about the future. I’ll only start thinking about the future when things start to look dodgy…<\/p>\n

2) My charge out rate as a senior manager was about $3000 – an hour… Of course I didn’t get anything like that, but we regularly sold projects to other\u00a0organisations\u00a0 for money that makes normal people balk. We recently charged $250,000 on developing a very pretty Powerpoint pack to tell the client what we were going to do when the client gave us more money to actually start the project. The crazy thing is that, in the world of big\u00a0business, these sort of figures aren’t considered a lot of money. Not when you have operating profits in the billions…<\/p>\n

But the scariest thing (especially for an ex academic) is that we charged this sort of money for making shit up as we\u00a0went\u00a0along. Not that the stuff we did was incompetent, the people I worked with were all very talented and good at what they did, it’s just that we often offered solutions that weren’t solutions at all, but pretty bundles of maybe. And the client was really happy to pay for and believe in what we\u00a0offered.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, as a one-man consultancy I couldn’t dream of charging that much and offering so little – I wouldn’t even if I could…<\/p>\n

What disturbed me most though, and this makes perfect sense from a\u00a0business\u00a0sense (which\u00a0disturbed\u00a0me even more), is that we took whatever work was offered. I don’t mean anything criminal, I mean that there was no evaluation as to whether what we were doing was ethically justifiable, or even a thought that we might not want\u00a0to\u00a0be involved with an\u00a0organisation\u00a0that is actively contributing to humanities’ downfall. Nope, if it paid well, we were there…<\/p>\n

3) This brings me to the walking the walk thing. Big consultancies do a lot of talking – it’s what they’re paid for. They like to tell\u00a0other\u00a0organisations how they should function, and charge a lot of money to tell them how to be more effective, or people oriented, or productive. But when it comes to applying this advice, forget it. Don’t get me wrong, they pay their people well, but they demand it back in blood. Consultants are\u00a0eminently\u00a0replaceable in this mind-set, so: work someone until they drop, show no regard for their life balance or health, and just get someone else when, in the organisation’s eyes they “fail”… What this meant in real terms, was a lot of talented young consultants being burnt out early on, the consequence of ridiculous demands, with little regard given for their wellbeing.<\/p>\n

4) Do I sound bitter? I really don’t mean to. I’ve learnt a lot in the last year, and I’d really like to use that knowledge to do something\u00a0worthwhile. I’m no longer na\u00efve enough to think that I’m\u00a0going\u00a0to change the world. I’ve certainly learnt that I hated working for a large corporation, I hated the\u00a0hypocrisy, and the double talk, and the “agile implementation”, and the bleeding their people dry. So I’ve quit and I’m doing something else. Maybe together we can try to do something about it? I’m not talking revolution, just thinking a bit more about what’s going to come next instead of sitting around and consuming. Maybe thinking more about the human factors of work, and the limited resources this planet can provide us before we make ourselves extinct.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My favourite quote of the moment is\u00a0“Refactoring the strategic value proposition in real-time with agile implementation\u201d or “Making it up as you go along” thanks to Charles \u00a0(one of my favourite authors). Stross is a master of parody, and although the quote is funny (and\u00a0particularly\u00a0so Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[15,1],"tags":[16],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":88,"url":"https:\/\/www.eclectic-consult.com\/mooseblog\/2012\/08\/20\/genius-authors-other-peoples-great-ideas-and-a-few-thoughts\/","url_meta":{"origin":57,"position":0},"title":"Genius authors, other people’s great ideas and a few thoughts","date":"20\/08\/2012","format":false,"excerpt":"This week I thought I'd do something a little different. 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