It's easy to be critical of executives. A naive narrative could sound like this: "Bob was hired to turn the company around, and 3 months later the company is still bleeding money. Bob sucks." But it's important to understand the two difficult tasks that Bob is facing:

1) Identify all mistakes made by the previous management and come up with a plan to correct them.

2) Get buy-in for your plan and execute it.

It might appear that 1) is harder than 2). But it turns out that the company's interests are not always aligned with each and every individual in the company, and implementing change always results in winners and losers. Getting the buy in from losers can understandably be quite hard. And then you also have the winners who sympathize with the losers and don't realize that they will also lose their jobs if the plan is not implemented.

When you're running a startup, a CEO can single-handedly turn things around. In a larger corporation, a CEO is going to rely on a chain of command to get things done. When you factor in the misaligned incentives or loyalty for people who are at risk of losing their jobs, it's easy to see how information channels can stop working and neither 1) nor 2) can be accomplished successfully.

I agree that brining in a 3rd party like McKinsey feels like a lazy shortcut to addressing the fundamental organizational challenges, but the more I see, the more I am starting to understand the upside of that option.

It is one thing to bring in some more workers to help you with research you don't have the ability to do. It is another thing to pay someone to make a report backing up a decision you have already made. It is another thing to pay someone to make a decision that you don't want to make, so they can take the blame. The first example is not why management consulting gets a bad name.

This is helpful for understanding why management consulting gets a bad name, and I am not pushing back on that. The parent comment I responded to was making the claim that executives who hire such consultants are incompetent, and I think we both agree that this is not about their competency.

> clients have incompetent executives

Nope. I don't agree with this at all. I'm saying, 100% clarity, that business is really hard. Working with a large organization is really hard. Many cultures are very rigid.

People are quick to comment about the intricacies of team dynamics, but hand wave the larger org stuff. There's a tough doublethink whereby I might say its not that hard to play the role of an upper level executive, because you can mostly just ride the tide and be fine, but effectively identifying a problem, a solution, and implementing it in a large org? Extremely tough.

Whose fault are all these “hard” negatives you keep citing? Why are they not universal?

Try “five whys” and see where you end up.

How are you going to suggest to the people paying you to replace them?

At the end of the day, someone is your boss and pays you, and you are gonna do what they want