Engineer-MBA Deathmatch
In a recent post here in Medium, Aldric Chen lamented the quality of the consultants her firm had hired: they were young, arrogant, and, perhaps most importantly, did not see the need to work the problem put before them but to work the problem they preferred. Arguably, the latter problem was probably the only thing they were capable of seeing, let alone analyzing.
On the one hand, that is the nature of youth: you haven’t had enough experience to know you don’t know, well, almost everything but the tiny little pile of knowledge you have accumulated in your scant few decades on the planet. On the other hand, this is the nature of business consulting, which in my experience has not been about solving problems but rather giving management the cover. (Yes, part of what they are covering is a part of their anatomy.) It’s a shell game.
If you want to skip past the small digression about the nature of consulting, what I am calling The Shell Game, to the story from which I drew my perspective, scroll down to Engineers versus MBAs.
The Shell Game
The responsibility shell game works, or rather doesn’t work, like this: the consultants come in, gather information using a very limited set of protocols (because most of their operatives are young), and deliver some pretty cut-and-dried appraisals that, should you keep up with the business literature, you could probably write over a weekend, and which ChatGPT can probably generate for you right now. (Feel free to head over to one of the AI/LLMs and try it for yourself.) Management receives the report and cuts a check. Management can do whatever they want, and if it works, claim all the credit. If it doesn’t work, it’s the consultant’s fault: Don’t blame us! We did what they told us, and it didn’t work. On the other side of the consulting confidence game, the consultants can claim credit if things work, and if they don’t they can claim it was management’s fault: Don’t blame us. They didn’t do what we told them to do.
Everyone is happy, except the stakeholders who are always employees and sometimes investors. (How the business press doesn’t see employees as the single most important group of stakeholders is beyond me. It’s nice as an investor if you get a dividend, the old-fashioned way of making money off stocks, or if you see a rise in stock price that you can then sell off, the new-fashioned way of making money off stocks, but it’s hardly as important to most investors who are invested across broad swathes of companies in a variety of investment portfolios as it is to the employees who need their paychecks to pay their rent or mortgage, put food on the table, and get their kids to school.)
Engineers versus MBAs
I have seen that shell game play out across a number of organizations, some of which I had the misfortune to be a part of and some I have had the fortune of not. It’s a cynical game, but it keeps consultants in billable hours and managers with inflated paychecks.
I have also seen the shell game go sideways, and it was very entertaining. I was only indirectly involved, part of an executive education group that was brought in by the management team to up their skill level. (More on the management team on a moment — they were good people.) Because of my background as a field researcher, I like to spend time “on the ground,” and the organization, bemused by my impulse just to observe and ask a clarifying question or two, gave me leave to walk around some, which meant I could also watch the consultants interact with employees.
I won’t name names in this account, but it might be guess-able, given some of the details. It’s been a quarter of a century now, so almost everyone involved is probably long since retired. Goodness, it would be fun to interview them now about this moment. That history deserves to be written.
The organization in question was a manufacturer of turbine engines. They had split off from a large mega-corp at some point and become an independent concern. In going their own way, they found that their experience as engineers did not necessarily prepare them to run a complex business producing complex artifacts with incredibly small margins for error. They were lucky that they had a steady budget from the Department of Defense, but that wasn’t necessarily enough to keep all the lights on.
They were in fact turning off office lights and disconnecting phone lines when a large, international aerospace corporation decided to acquire them. The small manufacturer offered two things: first, they already had contracts for some of the regional commuter jets that were beginning to become popular, and, second, because of that they would allow the corporation to offer a complete line of turbines, something its competitors were able to do and its customers were increasingly calling for. Win-win, and from the point of view of the struggling manufacturer, win.
But rarely does winning happen happily in our modern corporate world.
Enter the consultants.
The big, now parent, corporation was not entirely sure how to fold its acquisition into its processes, which it was itself in the process of updating. So they hired a big three-lettered IT services firm which had itself recently acquired a management development wing. (That is, they had just done what they were now offering the corporation help to do. This was the trend in the late 90s and early 00s: omnibus consulting firms “for all your consulting needs!”)
And so the consultants showed up on the manufacturer’s door, all bright and shiny because most of them were fresh out of MBA school — that’s a dangerous thing we should talk about some time — and ready to put their all of two years of “expertise” to work. Needless to say, this did not go down well with a cadre of 40 and 50-year old engineers, people who had dedicated to making real things that worked in the world. Their expertise was proved every time an aircraft lifted off and landed safely. You could hear their years of training and experience in the exact pitch a turbine whined for a given RPM. In short, expertise and experience were visceral for them and making the finest engines was their passion. They cared. (Care is a dangerous commodity in the corporate world.)
It wasn’t hard to dislike the consultants: they were mostly young, white guys who had the best pedigrees and who were very sure of themselves. Each one I talked to planned on “burning it up,” putting in 50–60 hour weeks for 10–15 years and then opting out so that they could then “live a life.” Consulting was, for them, a means to an end. Everything between them and their pay out was just grist for the consulting mill.
What made all this really entertaining was the size of the contract: rumor had it that it was easily in the 9 figures, but, and here’s the twist, parts of it were performance dependent. When it became increasingly clear that the management consulting wing had determined in advance that they could meet the performance metric simply through attrition — that is, by getting the business to let people retire and not re-hire — the engineers were pissed. This was not what they had signed up for.
The engineers knew their organization had problems: they would tell you stories about their failures. The one that has stayed with me was the embarrassing moment when a major customer visited the plant because the manufacturer was behind on delivery of turbines which was affecting, in turn, the customer’s ability to push out product. The customer’s VP was on the floor, getting the shop tour as it were. When he asked which engines were slated for him, they had no answer. Embarrassing. So the engineers knew, and they wanted to make it right. They wanted their business processes to be as good as their manufacturing processes — they were very proud of their engines.
So when it became clear that the management consultants were not interested in actual improvements but only re-arranging the furniture in such a way that the performance marks were hit and they got their payout, the engineers sought some retribution. They did this through the cleverest of means.
You see, the manufacturer had a number of DoD contracts, which meant there were literally parts of the plant for which you had to have a security clearance to enter. In some cases, they were literal red doors, sometimes with guards, who checked your lanyard to see if you could go through the door.
In the same way that there were parts of the plant you couldn’t see without clearance, there were parts of their books you couldn’t see. So, what the engineers did was shift some of the pages from one part of the binder to another part, the part behind the security door. Which meant parts of the budget the management consultants were counting on to be “attritted” (a most dreadful word) were no longer up for consideration. Whoops!
The short lesson is don’t mess around with engineers. The longer lesson is the reason why I don’t trust business consultants.
