Having worked in the field for a few years after graduation myself, I've come to think of "strategy consulting" as mostly bureaucratic arbitrage.
8 times out of 10, the organization knows exactly what needs to be done. However, big organizations have thousands of stakeholders with competing desires. Steering the ship in a different direction can have negative consequences for thousands of people.
Due to this problem...even the people in charge struggle to do what needs to be done without being pitchforked out of the place.
BCG, McKinsey, etc. provide the perfect cover. Their mythical brand image and powerpoint sales abilities allow management to do what needs to be done, while offloading the risk onto a 3rd party. If the changes don't work out, you can fire the consultants! The management was just following the advice of the outside experts.
So what then is the actual role management plays? They're paid the big bucks (absurdly so in the typical large US corporation), and yet largely they hardly make clear decisions, frequently "didn't know" about decisions that go catastrophically wrong and get golden handcuffs and parachutes to sweeten the do nothing but create anodyne PowerPoint decks with vapid goals. And when real decisions need to be made, yet more big bucks are paid to outside contractors to tell them what most everyone in the company already knows needs to be done.
Sigh ... the incentives and consequences for the top "decision makers" in a modern corporation are corrupt to the core.
I'm not sure how it is in other countries, but at least here in the US there's this cultural tendency to want to crush anyone who's made any kind of mistake, or even made the right decision but happened by chance to have had something go wrong in a way that could have been avoided with a different decision, if they can be blamed for it, but also to accept paper-thin excuses for why a person who might be held responsible can't, in fact, be blamed for it, and once blame has been so laundered enough times we just forget about the whole thing. It's completely weird, really expensive, and ethically gross. And it's present at every level of our society, just about everywhere.
8 times out of 10, the organization knows exactly what needs to be done. However, big organizations have thousands of stakeholders with competing desires. Steering the ship in a different direction can have negative consequences for thousands of people.
Due to this problem...even the people in charge struggle to do what needs to be done without being pitchforked out of the place.
BCG, McKinsey, etc. provide the perfect cover. Their mythical brand image and powerpoint sales abilities allow management to do what needs to be done, while offloading the risk onto a 3rd party. If the changes don't work out, you can fire the consultants! The management was just following the advice of the outside experts.