The reason why so many people believe this is because they have directly experienced situations where these consultants come in, understand less than the people who work there, and do a below-average job. It’s the idea that these consultants are hired for their capabilities that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

I understand where you are coming from. Here you have two misaligned incentives.

You have people making coming from the outside, making decisions that would affect rank and file in a company. I think its natural for the rank and file to be biased towards believing in their own skills and dismissing outsiders.

Why would shareholders, the board and the CEO waste so much money on paying consultancies when the only value is being able to pass blame? Isn't it simply easier to believe that consultancies indeed provide valuable judgements and the price paid is worth it?

Accountability sinks is the buzzword we are looking at here. It's to do something that is not easy to do in an organization due to major breaks in the current status quo.

The risk of doing one thing and complaints hampering the progress there is often too high which is why you give authority to a third party who will just do it regardless of feedback. One time breaks are necessary sometimes but can also be misused a lot for things employees want to do anyway. It's up to leadership to identify what is necessary and not generally possible with the current crew.

This doesn’t check out. The org hierarchy exists and accountability is placed at the right level in the hierarchy.

The term accountability sink was originally intended to describe how bureaucracies cover their asses from customers, regulators and employees, but certainly not from the company owners.

> Why would shareholders, the board and the CEO waste so much money on paying consultancies when the only value is being able to pass blame?

Management does it in large part to provide external validation (most importantly to the board and shareholders) of the decisions they sought to take anyway.

The board and shareholders accept it because the external validation works exactly the way management intends it to. (There's also cases where using independent consultants as part of some process is a compliance checkbox thing, and in those cases they are used for that specific reason.)

You are assuming that decisions to hire consultants are driven by merit alone, that the outcome invariably matches what was desired, and dismissing any experience to the contrary as sour grapes. None of this is reasonable.

Please understand that I'm literally debating against a conspiracy theory. Sure some times they are not hired for merit but do you think all this is a pyramid scheme where massive amounts of money are wasted for no real value?

I'm the unreasonable one?

> I'm literally debating against a conspiracy theory.

You’re debating against things people have directly experienced for themselves. You asked:

> Isn’t it just much simpler to accept that they indeed provide value in making good judgements?

It is not simpler to accept that when you have seen with your own two eyes multiple cases where they definitely were not making good judgements.

Critical distance is probably what you are alluding to.

Naked Capitalism had a good take on the impact of AI on McKinsey:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/wall-street-journal-...

Or that they were hired by former mcKinsey consultants turned executives.

That’s the most egregious part imho, how when consultants get fired, the firm gives all the help it can so they can land a good job in a decision-making role at a potential client.

Have you heard of any company working as hard as mcKinsey, bcg, etc to help people they just fired?

This is not true factually and not true simply because you need the best person to do the job. Why would I hire an inferior candidate when I can hire a much better one that will make the company grow and make me wealthy as a consequence?

> Why would I hire an inferior candidate when I can hire a much better one that will make the company grow and make me wealthy as a consequence?

There are plenty of reasons why an individual's goals aren't aligned with the org they're in. The larger the org, the more reasons there are.

For instance, you could be looking for loyal allies, rather than competent competitors. Or you could be looking for someone that will just repeat what you say as an exterior pov, rather than do "the best work" and potentially contradict you in front of your superiors. Or you could be looking for someone to take the fall for a botched project of yours. Or you could be looking to hire a relative or a friend of your boss in order to curry their favour. There are plenty more.

As for the relation between making the company healthy and profitable and having a successful carreer ; except for founders and a few early employees, it's usually more profitable to look for individual advancement within the company (promotions, raises, etc) rather than to expect the company's growth to benefit you.

Of course, employees are supposed to have some deontology, but you can't expect that all employees in a company fit that ideal.

>As for the relation between making the company healthy and profitable and having a successful carreer ; except for founders and a few early employees, it's usually more profitable to look for individual advancement within the company (promotions, raises, etc) rather than to expect the company's growth to benefit you.

That's not the case for people at the top with extremely high salaries tied to stock. Which explains why their salaries are high.

In general you are not refuting my main point and you are bringing edge cases which I agree can exist. But in general the incentives are aligned to hire a CEO best fit for the job and not some one you know.

> In general you are not refuting my main point

I don't care about refuting a theoretical point.

Dissemination of big three alumni into companies, and their use of the services of their former colleagues is a thing I have witnessed, both from the client side, and from the experience from friends at these firms when they left.

It's simply the way these firms work: associates cultivate long-term business/support relations with executives, and they progress in the firm as these relations become more fruitful. It's honestly unsurprising that departing employees are seen as potential clients, and therefore that the firm helps them land as well as they can.

You are still not showing how the board members actively take suboptimal decisions that hurt shareholders.

You don't need board approval for every recruitment of an executive or every decision to hire a big-three contractor, at least not in large enough companies.

> Many McKinsey go on to be executives in companies

Many, nay most, executives at companies couldn't run a lemonade stand. In the real world having the job title doesn't mean they have any skills or judgement let alone those required to drive companies.

This is incredibly naive.

Startups, YC, pretty much all of Silicon Valley exists because management at established companies are useless.

Jeff Bezos would be scrubbing toilets for a living if Walmart, Target or any of the big retailers had managment with 3 braincells between them in the 90's.

I really don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but it honestly feels like a pyramid scheme. The MBAs/consultants help out the MBAs/consultants. Their effectiveness isn't super important. It's very rare I see a coworker who is actually effective get promoted––it's always the ones who are loudest, steal credit from others, and who are really social/fun to be around.

Why would shareholders and board agree to pay massive amounts of money for such a minimal value - the ability to pass blame?

Because as soon as you're 2-3 levels up it's all politics, no content. All information comes from people who know better than you. All execution is done by people who are better at what the company does than you are. The "base" level of playing politics, the table stakes, is to never get blamed. And there's regular fuckups who need guilty parties. Look up the 3 envelopes parable.

Let's put it this way: consultants provide a new envelope every 6 months or so.

> Isn’t it just much simpler to accept that they indeed provide value in making good judgements?

I have hard time to accept that one, because there is little evidence of them providing good value judgements. They come in and leave companies in disordered state. I have not seen or heard of them come and fix stuff.

And from what I have seen, they do not have processes or knowledge to not create mess. Their actual changes are made by people who have very little experience and whose experience is limited to being parachuted somewhere and leaving in few months. Otherwise said, they do not even know impact of what they do.