The Worst Kind of Consultant

I recently read the 300+ page book, Rip-Off! The scandalous inside story of the management consulting money machine, by UK-based author David Craig.

This isn’t a review of the book, but I want to challenge some of Craig’s claims.

Craig paints the consulting industry with broad, black strokes, citing routine incidents of lying, falsifying results, plagiarism, greed, manipulation, and more. It’s not clear if the author is using a pen name, and the book is shrouded in secrecy, providing no way to deal with his allegations.

The author relates his first-hand knowledge of unethical, underhanded, and illegal behavior toward clients, but he goes to great lengths to disguise the consulting firms on whose behalf he supposedly spent twenty years perpetrating gross breaches of ethics on unsuspecting clients. He uses shorthand to describe his employers using fictitious firm names like the Butchers or the Baby Butchers. It’s not clear if this entire book is a work of fiction.

If this is a non-fiction book, it seems a cowardly way for the author to make a pseudo-stand against the companies that feathered his nest for twenty years, and who was guilty over and over of the very sins he’s now revealing to the world.

Let me give you an example. The author asserts that the “real art of management consulting is taking a situation, where a client probably had no intention of buying any significant work, and emerging a few short weeks later with a multi-million dollar contract in your hands.”

Craig and his teams would “manipulate” the client to agree to purchase a large consulting assignment using a technique called “First Phase Studies.” The client was expecting a short-term and reasonably priced assessment of some aspect of the company’s business performance

But in the 100+ First Phase Studies Craig claims to have conducted, his role “was to ensure that around 90% of these studies led to major consulting assignments.”

Of course, consultants do offer clients diagnostic reviews to help uncover the root cause of business problems, and consultants would like those diagnostic activities to result in additional work. But Craig’s approach is clearly over the top, including detailed sales scripts for consultants to follow to improve their odds of landing the next piece of work, whether the work was needed or not.

The author can claim that he was carrying out the wishes of others, but that’s a cop-out. Ethical and honest consultants don’t behave in this manner.

But I wonder how the author lived with himself knowing that he breached multiple ethical boundaries for more than two decades.

Are you out there David? Can you shed some light on why you behaved this way for so long? I just don’t understand. 

Comments

[Alex]

I worked alongside David (not his real name) for a number of years. The main reason for the pseudo-anonymity of the consulting firms (although anyone familar with the industry should be able to spot them from a mile off) is that David was threatened with legal action. A few more points:

o David always tended to put on an ultra-cynical show - he has exaggerated some of his examples (for example by blurring the timelines) but there is a large element of truth in them.

o On the "how could he and others live with themselves using those sales techniques" - the reality (not really covered by David) is that most of the people using the sales techniques he mentions truly believed the projects they sold would have positive, transformative effects on their clients. They believed the end justified the means - and often it did. A great many of the projects David and others sold (certainly in the "family" firm he talks about) delivered truly staggering results for their clients.

o Also to be fair to David he was often an outspoken critic of what he believed were ethical transgressions - it didn't help his career prospects and was probably part of his reason for finally leaving the industry.

AX

[Doug]

I worked at both of these firms I believe and there was some truth to these stories. The firms still use similar techniques but certainly have improved.

[JSLogan]

I wonder how much he made on the book?

[Steve Shu]

I am surprised you made it through 300+ pages ...