The many-sided crisis in consulting

I ONCE worked for a large magazine company in the US that was worried about falling revenues and loss of readership amid what was then called the dot-com revolution. Corporate leaders decided to hire a major management consulting firm to analyse what should be done. After months of meetings and millions in fees, the verdict came in. Apparently, we just needed better story ideas. Needless to say, this sage advice saved neither readers nor the product.

For this and other reasons, I’ve always been sceptical of management consulting. For starters, the “if you can measure it, you can manage it” approach to business just misses so much. Certain things, such as input costs and share price, can be discretely tallied. Others – such as culture, loyalty and creativity – cannot.

Then there’s the buck-passing problem: Companies very often hire consultants so they can blame someone else if the solutions to challenging problems go awry. Add to this the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) can increasingly do the lower end of consulting work, and you’ve got a profession that may very well be in for secular decline.