November 1, 2004
A Diversion on Consulting
Nothing is more fucked up in a corporate environment than the return of the consultants. Although not quite an annual event, it is quite regular. As the beetle returns to his dunghill, the bat to his guano heap, they keep coming back. They have to. Companies pay like roofied sailors in a Tijuana donkey show, and the consultants love the smell of that rag.
I've been through five reengineerings/rightsizings/downsizings/rectum fingerings in 13 years in my own little world. Why so many? Because we fuck it up so badly each time. And it is not the consultants' fault. It is the Process. And I've seen the Process in a dozen organizations.
The Process starts when a gripless CEO finds his tit in a wringer due to his own fucking incompetence, and over-reliance on the Good Ole Boy party posse he's surrounded himself with. Only two things capture the attention of a CEO: Wall Street analysts, and his Board of Directors. The latter is generally bought off, anyway, because they are fellow Good Ole Boys, but the former can cause serious problems for an underperforming screwhead.
Enter the consultants. Because the CEO is panicking now, shitting his step-ins, worried his extravagant lifestyle and egregious perks are going down the crapper. The only thing that will save his ass now is change. And I mean Big Change! Outside the fucking coffin change. Para-fucking-digm shift Change. So he lays down his goblet of Merlot, pushs aside the grapebowls and nubile palm fanners, and cries for the consultants to save his perfidious ass.
So one of the Big Five (or however many are left: love you Arthur Andersen, you ignoble shitheels) are called in, and a $20 million check is dangled, and the Process continues. How does this happen? Because when Caligula cries "Change!" everyone, from senior executive vice presidents on down, lines up like the whores they are. Because the Inner Sanctum, the Good Ole Boys, know they will circle the wagons, and be protected, even though they are the decision makers who screwed the pooch in the first place. There are plenty of potential victims extant to still make this thing work.
The consultants: snot-nosers, fresh out of B-school, with no industry knowledge. Just a litany of buzzwords. Lots of skill sets, no meat on the bone. And they are given carte blanche. They mean well, and work their asses off, because they want to be one of the five or ten percent that will make partner at 28, because of the cut of their jib, and never work again. I've never seen a partner lift a finger. The associates do all the work, and are mentally lashed like a 24/7 burro who doesn't have a sufficient work ethic back there in Tijuana. But the sad fact is they don't have a clue. They're newbies. This is their first job, oftentimes.
So bizzaro themes gestate, and are birthed, and the GOB's smile and nod. What the fuck? Better than any idea they've come up with in the last ten years. Then the Process proceeds apace, and the next thing you know you have a wet-eared consultant standing beside you in the urinal, Sarbanes-Oxleying your lizard leakage. Too many shakes. The Process says only three.
The ultimate outcome is a subverted organization, embedded resentment, institutionalized sabotage and bumfuckery.
But hey. That's just my opinion, and I embedded myself in my particular organization, and I generally come up on the sweeter side of these deals. Always got a raise in the process of a massacre.
I'm just saying there has to be a better way to run an organization. I hate to see good old fashioned capitalism corrupted by venal fucks. And my stock options are totally upside down, godammit!
I've got a consultant up my ass meself. They "Ecommerce Crayola Fuckers" paid another consulting company to build the mother of all turds as a website. It literaly is 1000 dollars on a hundred dollar show, multiplied by 250 or so. Now that the original cornholio consulting company has gone tits up, they've brought in another space cadet to put a bandage on that piece of shit so that they can get the site off of NT4(WHICH will be relenquised to the dung heep) which will not be supported by Micro$oft after the end of the calendar year. Now, mind you, the fact that this web site goes down more then a 2$ whore, and I have to put up with the pages, and bitching about that site, do they fix it right. HELL NO. Bring in a consultant to see if he can get it to run on Win2K3. Oh, boy! He can. He's been buggin' the livin' shit out of me for about a month now. I'm trying to think of a decent analogy, but all I can come up with is this. He knows how to work the toilet. I know how to get the shit out of the house. I guess that's the best I can do right now. You strucka nerve there VelociGhandi. I've tried to tell the Crayola fucks that you just can't polish a turd, no matter how much, or who you bring in to do the rubbin'. Sooner or later, you gotta come up with some new shit. Thanks for pissin' me off Vman, as if I haven't had enough bullshit about the eleciton, now you gotta pour salt in the wound with gotdamned consultant posts.
My head is gonna esplode... BOOM.
As Glen Reynolds would say...indeed. You definitely touched a nerve with this one, Vman. I'm going through the same shit at my job. Personally, though, I think my company DESERVES the consultants and vice versa. The corporate philosophy is so screwed up that they've lost sight of basic business sense.
As for that mention of S0x...damn it! That thing is the most misinterpreted law I've ever seen. We had - no joke - auditors who were auditing auditors who were auditing auditors who were PREPARING us for the real Sarbanes-Oxley auditors. My former boss told us about that. The bastard even said it with a straight face. I nearly wept but, as I said, I finally decided that the company and the consultants deserve each other.
Damn. As I said, you hit a nerve with this post.
As always...beautiful metaphors. "Roofied sailors in a Tijuana donkey show", huh? Again with the Instaquote: Heh.
Posted by: zonker at November 1, 2004 9:22 PMYou make excellent points, Grasshopper. That's why we won't list them there here on the flip chart page marked "Parking Lot." Rather we will cascade them through the organization to serve as the basis for forming a cross-functional task force to brainstorm and mind map how we may all better think outside the box. After our breakout groups, we will go outdoors for a bit of team building, and then we can discuss metrics to devise a "dashboard" to help us assure that our short-term goals are properly alignned with our strategic objectives. Let's be clear here, people. There are no "sacred cows." Everything is open to change, provided that it adds value.
Then we can all take a week off work to draft our Mission Statement.
Assholes.
Posted by: Jim - PRS at November 1, 2004 10:43 PMOr draft our resume`s. After this, I could be workin' for Acidman.
Posted by: RedNeck at November 1, 2004 11:10 PMEasy there... I think you're about to start foaming at the mouth...
Not all consultants are bad... Most are, I couldn't begin to deny that...
I was one for a while... And I like to think one of the ones actually there for the right reasons... I certianly know I was there for a better reason than the rest of the team I was working with...(that's way too much for a comment... I'd have to write a whole bloody post on that...) Sadly, the company we tried to drag out of the stone ages to (at the very least) the bronze age of event production was staffed with people that refused to try... They were convinced they could compete today useing gear, and techniques from 20 years ago...
In the end, after banging my head against the brick wall for a year, I quit... They were wasting money on me since they simply couldn't change their corperate culture... I left haveing accomplished my first goal, which was physical infrastructure... I knocked that off in the first month... The other 11 months were more a waste of my time, because I was dependant on the people there to accept changes to the way they had always opperated...
The company is barely afloat these days...
Sometimes, regardless of how hard you may try, the company just needs to have the life support plug pulled...
As one of the midges flying around the smallest dungheap in a "top 3", allow me to note that your comment on $2 whores would apply to our own servers. God help those we work for because we can't even keep our own network up.
Of course, all the local CIO reps are democrats and it does take some time to vote. I expect to be able to do something relatively productive by, oh, 3p. But the entire day is billable, don't you doubt that.
Posted by: LauraN at November 2, 2004 8:39 AMThe only heartening thing in this post is that my government experience appears to be replicated in the private sector. So much for "private is more efficient".
Posted by: Jane at November 2, 2004 11:16 AMPlease reread the post, people. I actually have sympathy for the individual consultants. They're caught up in the system, too.
Posted by: Velociman at November 2, 2004 5:44 PMOk,
All consultants are not bad... people, or idiots. There I said it.
Having said it, I detest the "consulting business" Here's why.
They can come in, focus on their "task". Relentlessly pester the living "snot" out of the hired help, and after they've extracted the operational and business knowledge they need to require the task, while being paid 3 times as much, they can leave after having done their task in the way that is most "expedient" for their purposes, not for someone that's going to be left to maintain their "system", and leave never to be seen again.
The hired "help" gets the privelage of working on something they most likely didn't want, didn't have any say, or very little at most, in the way "it" was done.
Like I said, I've got nothing "personal" against consultants, but I swear, if you're ever on the side of the consultants fence that I am, you'll find it difficult at best to have an admiration for the job they do.
Apologies, if you are a consultant, and my comments pissed you off.
fotsex kino ^@^ praktfull mellomstor ^@^ porrstjarna porr ^@^ gulligast kortvarig ^@^ onani slyna djursex ^@^ organ habbo utlosning ^@^ OnlyDP ^@^ Anal Valley ^@^ Her First Anal Sex ^@^ Her First DP ^@^ On Demand Anal Movies ^@^
Posted by: loituma at July 13, 2006 8:26 AM