The price of advice
I HESITATE to define a management con- sultant as somebody who borrows your watch to tell you the time and then walks off with it, for that line comes from Robert Townsend's anarchic masterwork Up the Organisation, and consultants live within organisations as mites live in cheese or bats in belfries. Dangerous Company, by James O'Shea and Charles Madigan (Nicholas Brealey, £18), is an account of the big names in action. In this country, the boys from Bain did a great job for Guinness until Guinness's chairman, Ernest Saun- ders, went to prison. In America, a cantan- kerous father and a son with big ideas gleaned, I would guess, from the airport bookstall school of management theory combined with Deloitte & Touche to turn their dull old Figgie International into a world-class manufacturer. They stopped it being dull. The attempt proved fatal to the Figgies pere et fils, but as for Deloittes, they were paid to learn from experience. Ameri- can Telephone & Telegraph is a beached whale and likes to ask consultants where the sea has gone to. Over five years it ran up a $96 million bill with McKinsey. O'Shea and Madigan quote a refugee from AT&T: 'It is ass-covering. That is why these consultants are hired. We are just doing what McKinsey suggested. They are the world's best consultancy. No one has the sense to challenge that. How do you know if they are the world's best? What business- es have they managed? Look at the people they send, all under 30 and fresh out of business school.' Here, of course, they go straight on to lead the Conservative Party.
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