[crazygringo]

> Consulting companies destroy valuable institutional knowledge and make the government less effective

Can you explain?

Because the entire idea is that they bring knowledge to the institution that hires them, and proposes/implements processes to make government more effective.

If a department needs full-time experts in an area for decades, they generally hire them. But very often, a department needs to make a complicated decision in an area that is not its core competency, and after the decision is made and implemented it doesn't need those experts anymore. Their job is done. That's where consulting shines.

[theFco]

Institutional knowledge stays in the institution and builds up after people have moved from those roles even. Consulting companies bring the operational knowledge to help with a specific situation. Sometimes you may need the institutional knowledge (if it aligns with the mission of the organisation) and sometimes it is better to concentrate on your mission and use the consultancy's knowledge to help you. Blanket statements are problematic. Particularly for something as complex of the goverment as a whole.

[drpossum]

That is the idea and that is not what happens. Management consulting companies like this are the literal analog of pharmacy companies not wanting to cure anything because then you lose business. If you spend more than a few days working with them you realize that they promote people who find and make long-term revenue streams, not anyone who solves or actually helps anything.

The actual people who do work are generally clueless recent grads on their first job, are trained to produce just enough to pass what is being sold, and they leave (or move up to selling) when they understand the game they have been playing.

[nunez]

See old.reddit.com/r/consulting for a ground-level view into the consulting machine

[mhitza]

The only palpable defense of hiring them, as a practice, lies in the fact that they are big entities and there's implied trust. In my view reality has shown time and time again that big companies are a liability to individuals and other larger structures.

Some fun reading

"Rental car agency Hertz filed a $32 million lawsuit in April against consulting giant Accenture because it “failed to deliver the website and apps for which it was so generously paid.”" https://madeintandem.com/blog/massive-hertz-accenture-lawsui...

"Deloitte treated Marin County as little more than a "trial-and-error public sector training ground" for its inexperienced consultants, the lawsuit claimed." https://www.reuters.com/article/business/deloitte-hit-with-3...

"And in May 2022, New York City stopped using McKinsey’s system for classifying detainees. In the end, the city spent $27.5 million on McKinsey’s services, with precious little to show for it. McKinsey, on the other hand, collected its money and moved right along." https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mckinsey-whistlebl...

For those bored, wikipedia pages are a good starting point. I would be surprised if there were many, out of the top 100 consulting companies, that didn't have a controversies (or similar) section on their wiki page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deloitte#Litigation_and_regula...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture#Controversies

[sam_lowry_]

That's the shiny picture. The reality is that they let outsource risk and competence, turning the business into an empty shell of a former valuable self.

[Zigurd]

That strikes me as expecting to find real followers of Jesus in American evangelical churches. Or maybe expecting the pro peleton at Soul Cycle.

[fransje26]

> Because the entire idea is that they bring knowledge to the institution that hires them, and proposes/implements processes to make government more effective.

No. That's the idea they sell.

What they bring is a cohort of interchangeable recent graduates, with flashy powerpoint presentations, fast talk, and "multidisciplinary skills". Which you can charitably translate to "no relevant knowledge".

[scarab92]

LLMs killed this grift.

They showed how easy it is to churn out consultant-level reports.

The bar will be raised for consultants now, and only those who can actually bring unique contextually relevant and sound insights will survive. Such consultants exist, but are rare.

[lumost]

Institutions can become caught in a trap of paying high prices for consultants and low/no prices for internal experts. Obviously, consultants are incentivized to cultivate this codependency. In many cases, the institution would be better served by building expert capabilities in the domains they care about rather than using consultants.

[TomK32]

You can buy knowledge in all sorts of form, from books to consultation hours, but the most efficient when applying this knowledge to a task is still a human being. A consulting company might not even guarantee you that the same person will be sent to you for the whole time of the project.