How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class

Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities.

What Top Consulting Firms Get Wrong About Hiring

Each year, around 185,000 MBA students graduate in the U.S. alone. A significant portion of these students spend more than 100 hours each preparing for so-called case interviews — the favored evaluation method of elite consulting firms such as McKinsey, in which candidates are presented with a business problem and asked to talk through how they would solve the problem. This is a colossal waste … [ Read more ]

Management Consultants as Professionals, or are They?

Managers make great use of consultants, giving rise to a rapid annual growth rate of 15% in consulting industry revenues where the authors estimate that today there are over one million consultants and $200 billion revenue worldwide. High industry growth has a big negative “Con” attached to it with a large influx of new consultants each year with problematic qualifications. Being a consultant is a … [ Read more ]

How to Lead Consultants to Exceed Expectations

If a client doesn’t control the consulting relationship, a project will fall short of expectations. Only when clients engage consultants based on merit and manage those consultants carefully, and only when company staff are seen as integral as the individual consultants, can companies hope to achieve or even exceed the goals they set. These authors tell readers how they can do that.

The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World

In what amounts to a vigorous defense of management consultants, Kiechel explains how business became an intellectual endeavor over the last half century, maturing from commonsense practice to theory-driven discipline, and how ideas now underpin the way corporations function today. “What companies didn’t have before the strategy revolution,” he writes, “was a way of systematically putting together all the elements that determined their corporate fate.”

In … [ Read more ]

Opinion: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

A story from Keith Yost, an MIT grad, about his relatively short experience working at BCG in Dubai as a management consultant. [Hat tip to Brad Feld]

How to Succeed in the Age of Going Solo

Anybody can become a consultant. But not everybody does it well. Here’s what you need to know to thrive.

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used

The second edition of Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting gracefully updates what many consider the best resource of its kind. New chapters on implementation, “whole-system” strategies, and ethics are included, but in general it simply fine-tunes Block’s proven advice to match the transformations that business and society have undergone since initial publication two decades ago. “The days of long studies and expert-driven answers are passing,” the … [ Read more ]

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion : A Guide Understanding Your Expertise

Following on the heels of the best-selling Flawless Consulting comes The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion. Whether you work as a consultant or you work with consultants, this relentlessly practical guide will be your best friend as you discover how consulting influences your business- and real life-decisions and those of others.

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion is packed with:
* Sample scenarios
[ Read more ]

Management Consultants Are Often More Project Workers Than Ideas People

The popular impression that management consultants are key to spreading new ideas in organizations is exaggerated and misleading, according to a unique fly-on-the-wall study. The consultant’s image as an expert outsider bringing new knowledge or understanding to clients is firmly contradicted by findings from the three-year long project. For the investigation, researchers spent 30 months working alongside consultants and their clients in four diverse consultancy … [ Read more ]

Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting

This expose is sure to incite envy and lust for the power and influence consulting entails, while simultaneously inciting dismay at the underhanded tactics consultants apparently use as a matter of course. Pinault, an international player in a number of major consulting organizations, narrates the story of his life as a participant in a number of corporate takeovers, reengineerings and project startups. The book is … [ Read more ]

Smart Questions for Your Tech Consultant

Your IT system needs a major overhaul, and hordes of consultants would love to fix it for you. How do you find one who’ll get the work done on time and on budget? Start by asking these questions.

Why Management Consultants

The management consultant has come to be taken for granted. But the management consultant is an extraordinary and indeed a truly unique phenomenon.

House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time

With sharp wit, consultant Kihn tears down myths surrounding the highly profitable and revered management-consulting industry. Presenting stories from his own career in a large management-consulting firm, this tell-all book sketches a picture of a consulting firm with teams of brilliant professionals who are hired by companies that pay millions of dollars in fees for an analysis of their organization and its processes. The author … [ Read more ]

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used

The second edition of Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting gracefully updates what many consider the best resource of its kind. New chapters on implementation, “whole-system” strategies, and ethics are included, but in general it simply fine-tunes Block’s proven advice to match the transformations that business and society have undergone since initial publication two decades ago. “The days of long studies and expert-driven answers are passing,” the … [ Read more ]