Years ago, Nordstrom had an employee at the store that was to be fired when a customer got super angry. They would be hauled out from the back and fired. "Fred, this lady doesn't like her pants. I believe that is your department. You're fired. Please accept our apologies, ma'am. " Then Fred would go back to the break room and read the paper until it was time to be fired again.

Do you have a link where I can read more about this? Nothing came up from my googling.

See Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC. And then the second tier below that.

They also offer the lead-in service of making your idea into pretty slides with their logo, so it's clear later that they endorsed the idea from the get-go.

Uh, I'm pretty sure BCG is in the first tier, and the others you mention are in the third tier, when it comes to the Scapegoat as a Service business.

I don't mean the tax/audit arm of those companies. They all do the generic management consulting. I left several off. Here's a market share chart: https://imgur.com/a/O1Urjkm

I wasn't going by market share but by pricing. MBB charges the most per amount of "value" /"intangibles" delivered.

haha this.

This is exactly 'Scapegoat as a Service'.

You jest but there are some real people like this. My spouse once worked at small (1-200 staff) but profitable SaaS/service firm in a niche market. Another firm bought it, the Founder/CEO and some other top execs cashed out. The new parent firm folded the software and book of business into its own operations, and brought in a new CEO for the subsidiary...who methodically ran it into the ground over the course of a year or two, basically wrecking it by stages so that staff could be laid off without violating employment laws.

Mystified by this apparent gross incompetence (my spouse had been an early hire and knew the firm's operations inside out; they still had a healthy client base in addition to the software portfolio), we looked into the background of the CEO and discovered the person had done the same thing at several other firms.

In italy a classic movie series "Fantozzi" has a scene dedicated to a "career" as scapegoat[1]. I really cannot suggest the first two movies (and the original book) enough.

[1] (partially NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EJ3VyM12qM

This exists and is called management consulting.

this niche is apparently quite packed with individual contractors.

I'd actually like to invest.