> The last consulting firm I worked for had over 70% of their revenue coming from two contracts, and neither contract used any of the tools or philosophies the consulting company claimed to espouse.

Assuming you're talking about philosophies that are considered good practice because they lead to more sustainable design practices and smoother development later, I have doubts those ever survive in long-term consulting contracts. The way pressure flows in those scenarios always leads towards emphasizing speed of development. Anything else requires multiple points in the management path both in the local firm and client firm to be willing to forego short term cost for potential long term gains, and if any one of them is out of alignment it causes problems.

If the client is not short-sighted they'll realize that asking to cut corners in the short term results in higher costs in the long term. But if they were this smart they might be doing the development inhouse in the first place. :)

But why wouldn't you pick a cut-rate consulting firm in that case instead of one that claimed to be doing deep work in a number of areas?

The point is not that people don't want to encourage behavior that pays off in the end, it's that it takes alllinks in the chain to be vigilant about it to happen. Anywhere in the line between the the client company's CEO to the consultant company's developer if someone decides to cut corners because of time, cost or some other unknown reason, that will flow down through each subsequent level to the actual developers. There's probably five people in that chain minimum (including the developer, the client CEO, the consultancy CEO, and any managing coordinators), and any one of them can easily change this because of their own pressures. It's an inherently fragile system.