[AlexandrB]

I had an Econ prof who described his consulting business as:

1. Coming into the company and gathering information from the low-level staff.

2. Presenting the information to management.

3. Collecting $1000/hr or more for his trouble.

Basically information washing to get execs to accept information that they would normally ignore. I wonder how much of this kind of thing goes on in industry.

[LAC-Tech]

IMO that's what a good consultant does! I mean that's much more useful than the big 4.

[acdha]

Where I saw that work it was effectively routing around the middle layer: the guy bucking for a promotion based on some project isn’t going to let any report mention that the users hate it, but they’ll certainly tell the consultants that.

It worked but was a very expensive way to about fixing social problems.

[Firmwarrior]

haha, I definitely saw some of that at Amazon

This highly-paid factory efficiency expert was enthusiastically explaining how he works. "You just listen to the workers. They know where the inefficiencies are"

[pempem]

No matter how many times you recommend managers do this very thing, they do not.

[ianmcgowan]

I've worked with senior managers who have zero regard for the knowledge of the people doing the work. It might be those workers don't have some over-arching conceptual framework for how the company works, but they do have intimate and sometimes deep knowledge of what they do all day. And not taking advantage of that is a huge blind spot.

[wahnfrieden]

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh... Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs elaborates on this

[UK-Al05]

That's lean.

[globalise83]

Not really, lean would be listening to the workers