What’s funny is that bullshit factories like McKinsey and BCG convert shallow insights such as this into billion dollar pipelines. You could turn this blog post into a PowerPoint presentation, and corporate boards will happily pay you $250k a pop to interview people and diagnose their company as too sales or product driven, with the recommendation to become market driven. Even the football offense/defense thing, delivered verbally during the board presentation, will be met with deep nods of understanding and help energize the room and make you look like a rockstar. Some of the board members will literally be thinking, “we need a CEO like this guy”. Once their check clears, you give the same analysis to the next company down the road for another $250k.

Speaking from 11 years of consulting experience (and 5 years of SaaS product dev BTW), when I was consultant we always used to say that the price was part of the medecine.

People tend to clear their agenda and listen closely more easily if they think you are worth listening to. Hence the suits and ties. It's stupid, but it works.

Even if it's the placebo effect, if McKinsey can make organizations operate more effectively with pre-fab slide decks, then it's worth it. They are providing value to the organization.

The point is that probably 20% of the ICs at the company could diagnose the problem over a beer but management keeps such a stranglehold over access and narrative that only an overpaid consultant wearing a nice suit is acceptable politically.

Sure. Similarly, the US government "knew" about 9/11 and Pearl Harbour hours before the planes hit anything. But understanding which signals to pay attention to and make decisions upon is genuinely a hard challenge of leadership.

Agreed. But are you saying McKinsey is better at that?

For better or worse, McKinsey and outfits like them have an ability to package a given set of advice in a way that the needed audience will be more likely to heed. Partly because they can MBA the lingo, but also just from the imputed competence that comes from having spent a goddamn boatload on their brand name.

That makes sense, and is a really good example of organizational cognitive dissonance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

McKinsey are overpaid lifestyle coaches for companies.

The difference is that with football every single week you get to see the score and watch the defense and offense separately. So it is very obvious that your awesome offence didn't make up for your lack of a good defense. With a startup you can end up with the equivalent of the coach saying that although the defense never stopped a single play, the offense should have done a better job running out the clock, and that is why they lost. Or the coach saying that although the offense never got a single first down, the defense should have returned some of the interceptions for touchdowns and that is why they lost.