I think their integration work and consulting is second to none. Companies don’t always know how to stack rank growth opps or M&A
When you say [insert firm] is [good/bad] at [thing], what you're actually saying is:
"The team of kids at the firm's Minneapolis office did a good job on this specific project."
There is no special sauce or "process" that could consistently deliver that outcome given consulting firms are just hourly billing body shops with high turnover that rarely hire true subject matter experts (they don't pay well enough). They have no equity in the advice they hand out, they don't suffer consequences if they're wrong absent doing something illegal, so nothing is ever learned other than how to extract more projects from the next lazy corporate bureaucracy.
It's wholly dependent on the kids who were staffed on the project and how insecure/eager they were for approval at the time.
Average tenure at all professional services firms (doesn't matter if its consulting, advertising or accounting) isn't very long, and there's almost zero knowledge sharing between individual offices of the same firm since they are competing for billable hours. So generally it's a crapshoot every time.
What you can consistently be sure of when hiring McKinsey, is that you are offloading responsibility for decision-making to a 3rd party fictional mirage of 'competence' that everyone pretends is real, so you can claim its not your fault if something goes wrong or is unpopular...and keep your cushy big company executive job.
We used to have a very experienced systems engineer that we'd contract whenever a chief engineer had an idea that gained traction with directors. The systems engineer would help layout the structure and timeline of the project, basically identifying how much money and the types of people we'd need. He'd stick around long enough to get the project to the final design review and then go do something else when we started building stuff. By that point, the PM is deeply involved and the team is cohesive and productive. Maybe it's just a coincidence but every big project we've tried to stand up without his help would struggle tremendously in the early stages.
That said, I would be highly skeptical of any 'very experienced systems engineer' who took a job at a glorified post-collegiate body shop like McKinsey. At least in the US, given all the opportunities available, it means something has gone horribly wrong (EU/ex-US might be different given it's a dead zone for tech).
This may hold in the USA, but clearly not in Germany. If, as a subject matter expert, you do have the choice and can tolerate the high stress and high workload, big consulting firms typically pay much better.
The reasons why true subject matter experts nevertheless often work somewhere else are different:
- As I already mentioned: the consulting environment is very stressful and the workload is huge. This environment is rather not suitable if you have or plan to have a family.
- Consulting companies typically want to hire employees who are smooth salesmen first and subject matter experts second. Many real experts on some topic often rather tend to be more opinionated and "rough around the edges". So they very often don't get hired.
- Very often the daily job working at a consulting company is very different from the topics one is an expert in. Many subject matter experts prefer an environment where they can apply their skills better.
- For many subject matter experts, the topic where they really excel in is very narrow and specialized and very different from the topics where a consulting companies can easily sell "experts" to the customer. So, many subject matter experts don't get hired because their topic of expertise is not easy to sell to customers and/or is too niche.
Is it smart for individuals to have conversations with others about their problems? This is that for CEOs and senior executives.
But in reality, you're paying for AI-written powerpoint slides slapped together by a 23 yr old kid fresh out of college (for another client, with your logo slapped on it), that the senior partner looked at 2 times in a meeting and gave a few nitpicks about.
And the senior partner hasn't ever done anything real either, since again, their whole career has been selling powerpoints and never facing any consequences (upsides or downsides) for the outcomes of their recommendations where they could learn anything.
But of course, the buyer of consulting services, usually an in-house executive at a giant company who had nothing to do with building the company (since that happened 100 years ago), usually also knows nothing.
So what you have is an arrangement where glorified children sell google/chatgpt sourced generic powerpoint 'Expertise' to faceless managerial class members who either:
a) have been promoted beyond their level of expertise and are afraid of taking responsibility for anything for fear of getting fired
or
b) are cynical and experienced and want to launder their actions through an external 3rd party as a reputation-covering mechanism
or
c) the largest cohort: the lazy, do-nothing managerial class who don't want to do work their own teams actually should be taking on so they outsource it
Source: I have worked in consulting for 10 years.