I had an Econ prof who described his consulting business as:
1. Coming into the company and gathering information from the low-level staff.
2. Presenting the information to management.
3. Collecting $1000/hr or more for his trouble.
Basically information washing to get execs to accept information that they would normally ignore. I wonder how much of this kind of thing goes on in industry.
Where I saw that work it was effectively routing around the middle layer: the guy bucking for a promotion based on some project isn’t going to let any report mention that the users hate it, but they’ll certainly tell the consultants that.
It worked but was a very expensive way to about fixing social problems.
This highly-paid factory efficiency expert was enthusiastically explaining how he works. "You just listen to the workers. They know where the inefficiencies are"
I've worked with senior managers who have zero regard for the knowledge of the people doing the work. It might be those workers don't have some over-arching conceptual framework for how the company works, but they do have intimate and sometimes deep knowledge of what they do all day. And not taking advantage of that is a huge blind spot.
1. Coming into the company and gathering information from the low-level staff.
2. Presenting the information to management.
3. Collecting $1000/hr or more for his trouble.
Basically information washing to get execs to accept information that they would normally ignore. I wonder how much of this kind of thing goes on in industry.