Why do people keep hiring consulting firms?

Seriously, these guys suck.

It’s been a bad few weeks for KPMG – one of the big four consulting groups.

Frankly, this whole industry is hard to explain. On paper they do lots of things: auditing, tax, business strategy and the like. They’re supposed to be an independent group of professionals giving unbiased and credible advice.

In order for this work to be done, the company must hand over tomes of sensitive documents to consultants.

Which, as it turns out, is a really bad idea.

Without rehashing all the gritty details, KPMG has been accused of using confidential client information to drum up new business. Which, in non-consulting terms, is a bit like a dentist selling toothpaste made out of sherbert.

Luckily, one of KPMG’s own employees saw what was happening, and became a whistleblower. They went right up the chain of management to sound the alarm. As you’d expect, this individual was praised for their outstanding behaviour, promoted, and the whole issue was resolved quickly.

Hahaha!

What a silly jape. I’m just joking of course.

The whistleblower actually alleges there was a large-scale coverup by KPMG, and that they personally faced retaliatory behaviour.

But it’s not just KPMG who’s up to this fuckery. Another quarter of the consulting turd pie – PwC – was caught doing something similar a few years back. But in their case, they were advising big multinationals on how to dodge upcoming tax avoidance laws.

Yes, the very same multinational tax avoidance laws the Australian Government had paid them to design.

Then there’s Deloitte who took $440,000 of Government money for a report filled with ‘AI hallucinations’. Or, as we used to call it, ‘false information’. Almost half a million dollars doesn’t even get you a fact check.

So where do you go if you want a battalion of smarmy business graduates to gently cup your balls? Seemingly your only option left is EY. Or at least it was. Earlier this month, a couple of their employees allegedly accessed the Prime Minister’s personal accounts while on secondment at the Commonwealth Bank. They’re now facing charges.

If it’s true, this is comically unethical behaviour. But what bothers me even more is the sheer stupidity. I wouldn’t trust any of these buffoons to order my lunch without taking a bite. I certainly wouldn’t give them unfettered access to classified corporate information.

So there are two big questions here. Firstly, what the hell’s going on with consulting firms in Australia? Secondly, why do people keep giving them money?

Frankly, I’m not equipped to answer either of these questions. If I was, I would open my own consulting firm where I’d advise people to stop hiring consulting firms.

But there are clues, I think, to be found in other parts of corporate Australia.

A while ago I used to be part of a team that would pitch for advertising work. The process went like this: a brief would come through, a meeting would be called, and the creative people would throw around some ideas. Eventually, we would come up with something the sales people agreed would work.

It was at this point a ‘strategist’ would be brought in. Their job was to dig around on the internet and find some plausible-sounding studies which broadly supported whatever we’d already decided.

Everything would then be rolled into one big “slide deck” (calling them PowerPoint presentations was taboo for some reason) that would be presented to the client.

The client then usually went with whoever was the cheapest. Or the company with the best freebies.

I thought the weirdest thing about the whole process was when the strategy person came in. By the time they were involved, the idea was fully formed. If I said the client should put a bin on their head and cluck like a chicken, they’d have cited a study on the importance of play. If I’d told everyone to eat shit, they’d discuss the rise of faecal implants for gut health.

The strategy didn’t so much inform the decisions, as add a veneer of credibility to them. I thought that defeated the point.

I’ve bumped up against this many times in different forms throughout my career. In some cases, ‘research’ or ‘experts’ are used to artificially cram some science into art. That way people won’t have to feel like they’re trusting a creative vision (even though that’s exactly the case, but with a few more steps). Other times, it’s used as a shield. If the research looked rigorous, it didn’t matter that the idea was shit.

In all instances, it’s a way of offloading the consequences onto a nebulous third party which can’t be punished.

This is great, of course, if you don’t want to be responsible for your actions. Terrible if you want to live in a world where things get done quickly by the people who are proven to be the best. In my experience, most people in the corporate world prefer the former.

I think KPMG is going to be fine.