By Avner Pariat
The big management consultancy firms like Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Boston Consulting Group make billions of dollars every year by telling corporate executives and government leaders how to do their own jobs. Consultants can be a very valuable resource if they are giving advice in an area that they have a lot of experience in. They are supposed to be brought into a role for a short time to help the administration fix a problem, streamline operations or enable the staff to acquire new skillsets. These “technical” Consultants are not the ones we should be concerned about because they are usually temporary and often benefit the community. The ones we must be wary of are the Management Consultants (MCs) who have in effect come to dominate governance throughout the country and the world itself!
Management Consulting not only costs governments crores of rupees every year in direct fees it could be costing us crores more through misdirected fund allocations and unnecessary expenditures. In the short-run, MCs make it seem that the state is saving money but over the long-run (as many studies in other places have pointed it) that might not be the case at all. We actually lose more. But because the Management Consultants have convinced governments everywhere that they can do a better job, their high pay packages and extravagant demands seem justified. Additionally, MCs have further convinced governments that everything they recommend is “innovative”. So convoluted solutions are given to basic problems such as having aerial surveillance to curb traffic or getting drones to carry medicines to places with bad connectivity. The easier solution would have been to support Public Transportation and make sure road connectivity is established but even the sky’s not the limit for our beloved Management Consultants!
There are three reasons we must be careful regarding the grand claims made by these MC firms:
1. Specialist/technical Consultants typically give advice coming out of years of experience in their lines of work. They are generally looking forward to retirement. This means that the pool of people that can potentially give experience-based advice is small and expensive but Management Consultants are the exact opposite. They are hired almost exclusively out of prestigious colleges under the supervision of a managing director. They are actually very inexperienced and have no working knowledge of ground realities. It doesn’t help that they are almost exclusively locked up inside the Secretariat, MBMA or similar offices. They are supposed to be out in the field researching the local cultures and local contexts in order to create better plans and policies but sadly this is rarely the case. Additionally in India, caste in addition to class backgrounds play a big role among the consultant set. I’ve met a number of consultants in Meghalaya who just smack of class arrogance and caste privilege. All of this is in spite of the fact that these MCs are forced to work themselves to death for their firms with very little chance of going up the corporate ladder. With an average retention of 2-3 years, vertical ascension is not going to be an achievable goal. But they forego this for big salaries with nothing much else at the end of the day.
2. The second problem with MC firms is that they will take on any and all assignments no matter how ill-prepared they are to deliver good results. In “The Big Con”, Mariana Mazzucato (my personal fav) and Rosie Collington discuss how much damage this strategy can do especially on government contracts. In 2019 and 2020 the British government spent roughly 1.3 billion dollars on a “Brexit strategy”. The authors argue that it was difficult to understand what these MCs were really doing because nobody had any experience in a situation like that. They didn’t add anything that couldn’t or shouldn’t have been done by elected public servants. MCs have in effect “infantalised government” as Theodore Agnew, a UK Cabinet minister said before he resigned over the very issue mentioned above. I believe it is very much the same here.
3.The third problem with these Consultants is that there is no transference of their skillsets to the local community/society. After all, why would they want to make themselves irrelevant over time? If other people can do what they do then what would set them apart from the rest? How would they justify their large bills, if local solution makers can do it cheaper and more effectively?
Remember that hiring MCs is the single most effective cover-up tool that a government can deploy. There is a saying: “Nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey” so if an official is faced with a tough decision, hiring a consulting firm to confirm that the decision is a good idea, based on “independent research”, can cover the official in the scenario. And just in case the decision goes badly, nobody could blame them for not doing enough due diligence. They will just blame the MCs that are paid to agree with them, who in turn will suffer no long-lasting reputational damage and will then move on to the next lot over. Additionally, many government people end up joining the very same consulting firms themselves for large renumeration and precious perks.
Finally, going on the topic of “independent research” which MCs engage in, it is clear that given their privileged backgrounds, MCs will not create reports that oppose the vision of the government responsible for hiring them even if that vision is problematic and unfair to the vast majority of the population. Research findings are subjective often enough but the political leanings of the MCs themselves come to the fore with what they suggest to a government or company. Most MC firms claim to help the masses but in reality, they enable inequality and the continuation of oligarchy. The single biggest danger that MCs pose is perhaps the least obvious – their politics. Though they might claim that they are apolitical, MCs generally prescribe Conservative Demand Side Economic measures. They are least bothered with Fairness and Equality and are super-obsessed with Growth at all costs. This obviously creates many social problems down the line and MCs never acknowledge that it is their advocacy for Conservative Demand Side Economic measures that create these issues.
(Avner Medon Pariat is a writer and researcher based in Shillong. He contested the 2023 Meghalaya Assembly elections from East Shillong constituency as a candidate for the Voice of the People Party (VPP). He can be reached at [email protected])