Don’t underestimate the ass covering.

I recon 60% of management consulting work is just to ass cover for a director with no conviction

The more expensive the cover the better.

“I paid a world-class consulting consultant company top dollar to vet this idea and they produced ton of documents about how great it was. And, yet it failed. But, I’m not at fault here. What more would you have had me do?”

There was an article on HN years ago about top grade from Harvard-like schools being sucked into consulting companies and discovering their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear.

Do you have a link? I can't find it.

> their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear

Sounds like an extremely nice job.

Not really.

Well, depends on how much money is "tons of money".

Yeah, I think that's the majority of the grunt work done by junior consultants.

I don't doubt that if the high level decision agreed upon is "more layoffs because AI" and they were asked for a 60 page report to justify it that ChatGPT would help inordinately in fleshing it out with something that sounds fairly plausible.

There's a lot of boilerplate that actually takes quite a while to write from scratch. If the people involved have a pretty good idea in their heads of what fundamentals are fairly sensible and which are probably sort of irrelevant or even wrong, something like ChatGPT is actually pretty good at churning out at least a decent pre-draft that can save quite a bit of time. I've used it a fair bit for introductory background that I can certainly clean up faster than I could put together from scratch.

So much of it is about information awareness. Like it or not, these consultants and analysts talk to hundreds of C-levels all the time. They become excellent information sources about what is working, what is not working, and about business risks that a particular executive may not be aware of. Yes, there is the potential for group-think, and the bad ones shill for a particular technology or process without any basis in success. But the good ones provide guidance to the executives that might be working in information-free areas, making them aware of concepts, technologies, and processes that either present risks to their businesses or represent good practices they really should adopt. It's easy to be cynical about this, but there are many good business leaders who are not analytical, and are in need of this kind of guidance.

>It's easy to be cynical about this

It's probably easier to assume that their job is to provide objective expert advice since thats what they say they do.

I'm being realistic here, not cynical.

the comment might be spot-on for some companies and industry, but really.. not all business culture is the same. By painting "all management" in this light you are showing the same one-dimensional thinking that is being criticized here..

Did you think I was making some comment about the millions of businesses and many governments that don't use the services of these consultants?

I can assure you I wasn't.

>It's probably easier to assume that their job is to provide objective expert advice since thats what they say they do.

You are mistaken "expertise" with fashion and a good voice.