Management Consultants
I think the joke is 'They borrow your watch, then charge you to tell you what the time is'.

If only they were that competent...

I work in advertising. Specifically, I'm a media planner. I plan ad campaigns for clients.

Several years back, I worked on a big corporate client who had decided to add to their already massive marketing team by hiring an MBA-equipped Consultant to 'drive media efficiencies'. I was asked to be the liason for the agency and help her with any questions she had. Being fairly new to the whole thing at the time, I was kind of nervous about this.

Anyway, she came in for an initial meeting and quizzed us on what we contributed to their company. We explained, talked her through current campaigns, etc. All very straightforward and efficiently conducted. She thanked us and said 'I need to go away and have a look at this stuff in more depth... expect a lot of questions from me in the next week or so. Appreciate your help!'

A week went by. Nothing happened. Then on a Friday, I came back from lunch and saw I had a missed call from her.

Shit.. panic stations. I'm now no doubt going to be working all weekend to answer some robust and mind-boggling tough challenges. With a looming sense of despair, I rang her back...

Consultant: 'Hi Snowy. I've been thinking about what we discussed last week. I think the best way for us to drive media efficiency is for us to buy things cheaper.'
Me: 'Well, yeah...'
Consultant: 'OK, so how do you think we can do that.'
Me: 'Erm... I thought that would be what you were advising us on.'
Consultant: 'OK. Well, I did hope you'd have come up with some stuff yourself after our meeting, but never mind!'
Me: 'Er... no, sorry.'
Consultant: 'Alright, well I've got a couple of ideas, luckily, that I'm thinking of taking to the Marketing Director, and I would like you to sense-check them.'
Me: 'OK, go for it'
Consultant: 'I've noticed we buy an awful lot of newspaper advertising, and the colour press advertising is more expensive than the black and white press advertising. Why do we have to pay more for colour?'
Me: 'Colour advertising works better, but there are fewer colour pages. There's lower availability, so there's more of a premium.'
Consultant: 'But just because there's less of it, why should we pay more?'
Me: 'Well...supply and demand?'
Consultant: 'Hmmph... well... seems odd. Surely they've got technology to print more colour now, so why can't they drop their prices?'
Me: 'Because the technology to print more pages in colour costs more money and if they dropped their prices they wouldn't redeem their costs. Plus everybody accepts its worth more, as I say'
Consultant: 'Hmm.. OK, let me have a think... thanks.'

At this point, there was a bit of a pause as she rustled through her notes

Consultant: 'OK. Second idea: we spend lots of money targeting upmarket people. It seems that on the top 10% of the income bracket, we spend about 25% of our budget. Is that sensible?'
Me: 'They contribute 40% of your revenue, because they have more money to spend, so yes.'
Consultant: 'Oh, OK, yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for your help. I might ring you back with more stuff next week.'

She didn't.

She worked for the company on a 2 month contract. Her brief was exclusively to sort out media stuff. She was being paid probably 5 times what I was. These were her two questions in the whole time she was there and her report was handed in at the end of her time and then completely ignored and never, ever mentioned again or shared with us.

I can laugh when people are phenomenally ignorant but don't really do any harm, but it does upset me a bit when they're feted for their specialist knowledge and paid dearly, but clearly haven't a clue.

Also, bonus advertising ignoramus pearoast: www.b3ta.com/questions/gambling/post416385

Apologies for length by the way, Still makes my blood boil...
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Thu 18 Mar 2010, 23:37, 3 replies)

Very good
Sounds a complete dullard that woman.

Enjoyed the bonus gambling story too!
(Lieut. Fuddy-Duddy Wie gehts, meine Shazi?, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 0:13, closed)

I recently read that every CEO in the car industry in Britain is a German and an engineer.
Not surprising really.

These service sector idiots, like the banks, will harm us all, and get paid a fortune to do it. ...Damn it's tempting.
(stuntsmile, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 1:39, closed)

Doesn't surprise me
In my experience of MBA-holders, they are mostly rather mediocre talents with such over-inflated belief in their talents that they can't work their way up the greasy pole, but have to leap-frog to realise their True Earning Potential by getting themselves £30k in the hole in return for a TLA after their name and some very blinkered ideas about what business is and what it is for (purely for profit, and purely to pass that profit on to shareholders).

Ambitious bright folk tend to either get recognised and promoted within an organisation, or leave and set up their own organisation. Ambitious thickies never work out how to get rich and spend their lives grumbling about why they never get promoted. (I suspect I might fit all too easily into this bracket).

But the special kind of thickie that thinks MBAs are a good idea have just enough self awareness to realise they'll never get anywhere on recognised merit, but are too ambitious to accept that and get a hobby, so they go off to business school, whence they can go back into business at a £20k premium to what they earned before, still come up with half-arsed ideas about how to improve things themselves, and not have to stick around to deal with the consequences of their fuckwitude.

Management consultancy is the ideal solution for such people - you can go in and ask colossally stupid questions and implement solutions that come from inside the company, and then pat yourself on the back for "facilitating the business change" while the consultancy is perfectly happy because, well, billable hours are billable hours and all the senior managers in the client company who signed off on the whole thing are either ex-management consultants themselves, or hope to be one day, or are MBA graduates who have been indoctrinated into thinking that only MBA-graduate management consultants can ever fix anything anywhere.

As you can probably guess, I sympathise. Grrr...
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 16:24, closed)