Comments:

1. Maarten on August 27th, 2010 at 9:00:

   Oh goody, if the pilot based on a DNA script is successful, then they’ll get someone to write some new material and hope that it’s just as good.

Comments:

1. Maarten on August 26th, 2010 at 13:15:

   “it found labour productivity growth was much higher in the countries where it is hardest to fire people. The better you treat a workforce, the better they work. “

   Uhm, *growth* can be higher for A than for B without actual productivity being higher or becoming higher in A than it is in B. Maybe those countries where it’s hard to fire people had disastrous productivity to begin with.

   Going by the examples cited seems a bit like evaluating software engineering based on examples of programming you read on DailyWTF.

2. Steffen on August 26th, 2010 at 13:42:

   Some years ago, a book made quite a stir here in Germany. The title was “Beraten und verkauft” (‘consulted and disposed’), a pun on the german saying “Verraten und verkauft” (means ‘sold down the river’, literally “betrayed and disposed’). I don’t know whether there is an english translation, but it is really worth a read. It is a shocking and revealing book about the nasty internals of consultancy.

   The first chapter was written by a young student in journalism, describing her experiences when she applied for an entry position at McKinsey. At a certain point, the parallels between management consulting and a certain other dreaded enterprise became way too obvious: It’s all more or less the same like a harmful religious cult based on exploitation and greed for money; let name it: Scientology.

   During the application phase, she was invited cordially to McKinsey’s ‘Training Camp’. There she encountered all the mind control tricks typical for religious cults: Doubt, scepticism or questions about McKinseys practices were a strict taboo. Anybody asking the wrong questions was silenced very fast by social pressure. An atmosphere of “We are the elite! Everybody else is inferior! To work for McKinsey is the only best job in the world!” was erected. When she returned from that training camp, all her friends were shocked. They told her that she became a completely different person during that weeks.

   She then had a final job interview, and afterwards was offered an entry position with a salary of 70.000 Euros. With still no clue what she should do there.

   Fortunately, she got very scared of the whole thing, declined the job offer, and wrote down her experiences instead.

3. murph on August 27th, 2010 at 0:59:

   I’ve encountered enough “consultants” in my time, and it all boils down to this:
   When was the last time a consultant came in and concluded “you know what, you don’t need me here, you’re doing it right.”
   They’ll stay on as long as possible to keep that coin coming in.

4. Maarten on August 27th, 2010 at 9:08:

   @murph: That’s not really a strong argument, is it? If you’re doing it right in the first place, you’re probably not bringing in consultants. People who don’t have a problem don’t go hiring expensive consultants to fix nothing.

5. John Sinteur on August 27th, 2010 at 9:42:

   If you’re doing it right in the first place, you’re probably not bringing in consultants.

   I’ve seen companies that did it right, where the consultants were called in to listen to the employees, and then bring their suggestions to management, who would then accept the suggestions – they would not listen to their own employees, outside advise, because there was money paid for it, was far more valuable. So, yes, even if you’re doing things right, consultants can be brought in. Although you could argue in that case that everything EXCEPT management is doing things right in the company.

6. Maarten on August 27th, 2010 at 11:25:

   in that case that everything EXCEPT management is doing things right in the company.

   Yeah, bingo, that way to win the argument occurred to me and I left it out because winning the argument doesn’t really say anything about the real world.

   But look, “I’ve seen X” is a really feeble argument. As I said in my first comment, I’ve seen all kinds of bad coding on DailyWTF, and that doesn’t mean all coding is criminal malpractice. The fact that you’ve seen this happen with consultants is proof that it has happened, not that it’s common.

   In general, you hire a consultant when you have a problem and you don’t know what to do. Maybe the situation you’re talking about is one in which management didn’t have expertise to evaluate work going on in the company (e.g. IT work) and hired outside expertise to evaluate it? Making the assumption that the consultants are hired with care (e.g. with reference checks), how is this not a reasonable thing to do? You can’t just say “they should listen to their employees” because the employees (a) may not be competent, and (b) are biased in the my-paycheck-depends-on-it fashion.

   The situation “we have to evaluate something that requires specific expertise that we don’t have” seems like the exact right situation in which to hire a consultant with that expertise. The interesting situation is the one in which you hire a general management consultant to tell you what to do with your company in general. That situation makes me wonder whether management should maybe fire themselves.

   But hey, maybe a few key people left the company and you inherited the management of this division, and you’d like to hire experienced permanent management for it but it looks like that won’t happen for a few months, and you need to make some decisions right now… who do you call?

7. John Sinteur on August 27th, 2010 at 11:30:

   who do you call?

   Definitely not one of “the Big Five”.

   More seriously – I’m sure there are situations where getting in a consultant is the right thing to do. Just like I’m sure that in the majority of cases where consultants are called in, that’s not the case.

8. John Sinteur on August 27th, 2010 at 11:32:

   thinking some more on it – in your example I would not call a consultant. I would call a temp agency specializing in the field and level of expertise required, and tell them I need somebody for three months with possible permanent position, and see what they would come up with.

9. Maarten on August 27th, 2010 at 12:38:

   I’m curious, in your mind how is the temp agency approach substantially different from a consulting agency, other than that you’re allergic to the term “consultant”?

10. John Sinteur on August 27th, 2010 at 12:54:

    the goal of a temp agency, especially in higher functions, is usually to find you a new employee. The temp bit is there basically to supplement that function whilst looking for you.

11. murph on August 27th, 2010 at 14:00:

    @Maarten
    Guess you are:
    a) a consultant
    b) naive with regard to management vs union objectives
    I’ve been around long enough to remember “time and motion” studies, whose objective was simply to justify downsizing. With labour relations at the state they are in today, compounded by management’s “greed factor”, things are more adversarial than ever. I’ve been involved with enough consultants who came in as ex-employees for company xyz (read – they were canned) who came in and kept harping about how “at company xyz, we did it this way”, to which the obvious response is “where’s company xyz now?” (Ans: bankrupt). My favorite response to this stuff is Bob Prescott’s (look him up) statement “We’re unique, so let’s not imitate. Imitation lets you catch up to the guy ahead, but never let’s you pass.

12. Mr. N on August 27th, 2010 at 15:24:

    I’ve seen to many people that right after getting their university degree were sucked straight into the consultancy business. They weren’t the brightest of the bunch, some of them have had serious troubles with the Basic Economics exam.
    A girl who completely skipped the Manufacturing Technologies & Management course (in favor of something like “History of Textiles”) went to work as a consultant in a firm specialized in management of manufacturing plants: after two ‘decisive’ weeks of training, she was deployed in a notorious IT components firm to suggest new best practices for component machining…

    No one who is in their right mind and honest may say that the consultancy business is anything else than a scam.

13. Maarten on August 27th, 2010 at 17:08:

    @John: So basically if you need some business decisions within a month, you’d leave them to whatever temp the agency sends you? Really? Why does this work out better?

    @murph: well, I’m not a consultant, so I guess that leaves naive. I’m definitely naive about the fact that there’s a need to cast everything in Us vs Them, Labor vs Mgmt light.

14. murph on August 27th, 2010 at 17:17:

    @ Maarten
    If you’re staying current with labour relations in the year 2010, you should no doubt be aware that “us vs them” is endemic everywhere today. Check with anyone whose job has been “outsourced” or management that received bonuses for “trimming the fat”.

15. itspast on August 28th, 2010 at 3:32:

    I’ve seen many consultants come in, talk to the employees and then recommend what the employees were saying. Management refuses to listen to it’s employees, they don’t have the credentials that a consultant has. How very, very sad.

16. consultant on August 28th, 2010 at 23:59:

    Everyone is missing the real point of a corporations management bring in management consultants, or for that matter, why people are fired/laid off. It has nothing to do with making the company more profitable. It has everything to do with making the companies management more profitable.
    There is no link between how well a company runs or how much profit it makes, to how much the management profits from the company. Most could care less if the company goes bankrupt, they still get(got) paid.
    Bringing in a management consultant has everything to do with just doing something, anything. Whether or not it works is beside the point. The point is that they are being seen as doing something.

17. Maarten on August 30th, 2010 at 16:45:

    Sure, sure. I’ve read about malpractice in hospitals and know people who felt better after homeopathic treatments.

Comments:

1. matt w. on August 26th, 2010 at 16:51:

   I apreciate this, too, to a degree. He was complicit in a lot of nasty shit though. I will wish him a nasty case of anal warts and then a happy gay retirement.

2. Karl on August 26th, 2010 at 19:58:

   I think it can only be a good thing for gay rights when a powerful, well connected conservative comes out in such a positive way, and perhaps it will provide cover for other conservative gay people to be honest about their own sexuality.

3. John Sinteur on August 26th, 2010 at 20:02:

   Not bothering to apologize for years of anti-gay-rights crusading is “positive”?

4. Sam on August 27th, 2010 at 6:44:

   As long as he doesn’t try and desecrate marriage or adopt children, it’s all good.

5. barth@israel on August 27th, 2010 at 9:16:

   he will be 43 soon. for all his life he did not demonstrate his sexual orientation and suddenly he decided to make it one of the most discussed topic. pretty brave step.

Comments:

1. itspast on August 27th, 2010 at 3:31:

   Is it that much different from just following you in a car? Seriously, I’m more concerned with them following where my computer goes.

2. John Sinteur on August 27th, 2010 at 6:16:

   Is it that much different from just following you in a car?

   Actually it is – for several reasons, but I’ll give you just one example right now: you won’t see them doing this people rich enough to afford a gate around their house, or afford a closed garage.

3. Maarten on August 27th, 2010 at 11:02:

   I find it troubling to try to dismiss this on an Equal Protection argument rather than a more fundamental Right to Privacy argument. The distinction being made is not whether you can reasonably expect to be free from tracking while driving but rather whether you can expect your car to not be tampered with when parked on your property. It’s the former that’s important.

   With regard to whether GPS-based tracking is the same as following someone using manpower, I think the argument here is more analogous to the public availability of phone listings. When listings were only available in phone books, it was effectively intractable to ask “who has phone number 1234567?” or “who lives at address X?” and answer it using the phone listings. When the listings were digitized, suddenly those questions became trivial to answer, and issues about their usage ensued. Ditto for robo-calling. Should robo-calling be legal simply because one could theoretically do it by hand?

Comments:

1. Mr. N on August 26th, 2010 at 20:02:

   What the hell, I can’t understand all that jersey shore thing. Isn’t it just the usual, overused stereotype of a reality show?