[_ptgt]

>All companies exist to provide profits to their owners.

Management consultants nearly always have a conflict of interest though (i.e. the preoccupation of consultants is almost always "sell, sell, sell" rather than "help the client make money") due to the nature of their work and their short-term contact-based engagements mean they rarely have to stick around and deal with the messes that they create.

Large management consulting firms IME tend to hire (or develop maybe) people who are smart and ambitious but highly conformist and reluctant to challenge authority. Combined with nature of the work I described above (and ofc existing to make owners /partners rich), this is sort of a perfect storm for lots of "semi-unintentional" unethical behavior and sometimes fully intentional unethical behavior.

Fwiw, from what I observed this dynamic actually makes the consulting work environment terribly exploitative and miserable for non-partner consultants but consultants tend not be the personality types who would leave consulting (and the prestige/"potential to become a partner") over it --unsurprisingly, else the industry wouldn't exist as it does now.

[harperlee]

> Management consultants nearly always have a conflict of interest though (i.e. the preoccupation of consultants is almost always "sell, sell, sell" rather than "help the client make money") due to the nature of their work and their short-term contact-based engagements mean they rarely have to stick around and deal with the messes that they create.

Not my experience at all. If you show value to the client and you build a trust relationship then you enter into a relational mode that is fruitful for both sides, and you skip/streamline all the tedious commercial topics (RFPs, competitors, beauty contests, the purchasing department demanding a 3% discount...). On the other hand, if you want to milk the cow dry then you end up on a very transactional relationship and you need to start cold selling from scratch after every project, which takes a lot of effort, time and energy.

In any case, again, the conflict of helping the client vs. overselling is hardly a consultant-specific topic; I’d say the smaller the shop, and the closer the ownership to the sales team, the more pressure there will be, in general. Case in point: the actual doctors that overprescribe opioids!

[_ptgt]

>If you show value to the client and you build a trust relationship then you enter into a relational mode that is fruitful for both sides, and you skip/streamline all the tedious commercial topics (RFPs, competitors, beauty contests, the purchasing department demanding a 3% discount...). On the other hand, if you want to milk the cow dry then you end up on a very transactional relationship and you need to start cold selling from scratch after every project, which takes a lot of effort, time and energy.

This is greatly at empirical odds with the near ubiquitous distrust for consultants among almost everyone who has worked with them.

And there is certainly no shortage of willingness to repeatedly cold sell in order to advance one's own career in consulting.

[harperlee]

> near ubiquitous distrust for consultants among almost everyone who has worked with them

Perhaps this empirical observation doesn’t have enough unbiased samples. Consulting in general, more in particular management consulting, and even more in particular strategy consulting (where MMB, McKinsey, Boston, Bain are leaders; and the kind that sparkled this discussion), are 3 different, huge, mature, global industries. So there are empirical odds enough to say that people trust them enough to pay them, which is at odds with that universal distrust you state.

Perhaps that “ubiquitous distrust” is just more prevalent in HN or in the IT industry.

[invalidOrTaken]

>i.e. the preoccupation of consultants is almost always "sell, sell, sell" rather than "help the client make money"

The hilarious part for me, as an independent consultant, is my partner and I often agonize over how to help the client make money in spite of themselves.

I'm not disagreeing with you---if we were employees for a big-c Consulting Firm we'd likely be under the gun to act as you describe whether we wanted to or not, and what we offer is definitely different from the most common experience people have of working with a consulting firm, but it's just funny for me to read.

[_ptgt]

Right! I should clarify that I'm only describing the big management consulting firms that most everyone has heard of. I should have wrote "management" before each time I wrote" consultant" but I didn't want to be repetitive and hoped it would be clear from the context.

Independent consultants are an entirely different group and behave very differently.