IS YOUR LIGHTHOUSE PROJECT AGILE?
MOST PUBLIC SERVANTS ENCOUNTER their consultancy overlords via PowerPoint presentations. In a not uncommon scenario, staff are called into a meeting room or lecture theatre, a manager introduces a senior associate – likely from the “Big Four” of EY, KPMG, PwC or Deloittes – who delivers a speech accompanied by colourful slides about “greenfields” and “the technological singularity”, revealing at the end that the organisation is restructuring and everyone has to reapply for their job.
The presentations are generally dense with jargon: the consultants are “moving forward then circling back”; they are “peeling the onion”, “mapping the white space” using “bluesky thinking”, co-ordinating “sprints” on core business. They warn against “boiling the ocean”.
For Mariana Mazzucato’s collaborator Rosie Collington, this jargon is an essential component in consultology – the suite of marketing techniques the industry employs to sell itself. The most elaborate of these is quasi-academia: the establishment of in-house universities, research institutes and journals. Deloitte University has sites in Dallas, Brussels, Hyderabad, Mexico City, Singapore and Toronto. McKinsey publishes McKinsey Quarterly, a magazine “conspicuously like that of a peer-reviewed academic journal” but without peer review.
“These create the impression that the companies are hubs of knowledge development,” says Collington. But she and Mazzucato argue that consultancies are primarily “rent-seeking” entities. Instead of creating knowledge or delivering value to their customers, they present the illusion of specialist knowledge while hollowing out the organisation. Mazzucato: “It’s like a therapist who makes their client sicker so they can keep charging them.”