After 10 years in consulting, my conclusion is that we haven‘t really figured out how to run a large company properly. Its Kafkaesque and causes so much suffering.
The thing is that any sufficiently large company is, by definition, full of average people. And average people are, well, kinda average.
The large consultancies think that they’re the ones who’ve managed to crack this code. “We only hire The Best!”, they say. But once you get past a certain size, that’s just not possible.
You might have The Best front-line customer-facing champs, but Bob down in Payments Processing still lives with his mom and he’s dragging the whole lot down with him.
I am now convinced it's some kind of money laundering scheme to move money from big customer companies into the pockets of the top brass/owners of the consulting companies while making it look like value was created. Money the managers of the customer company can not siphon out by themselves without having a project to pay for.
Your assumption is that avoiding personal suffering or miserable beuracracy is the goal, that isn’t the point. Maximizing return on investment is the point, of course these other goals won’t be met.
With the huge numbers of companies that tried giving employees autonomy and responsibility over their own domain then collapsed, what else are we supposed to do? Oh wait, no one has ever tried that? Not even since we transitioned from rote repetitive manufacturing tasks to mental work? Wow. How stupid are we?
