| | If you thought that
consultant-baiting was a
peculiarly British
pastime, spare a thought
for the Germans.
Germany – currently
promoting itself as the
“Land of Ideas” in the
run up to the World Cup
– is rapidly becoming
one of the most
consultant-unfriendly
countries in the world.
Whatever stereotypes we
Brits hold of Germans
(largely, I suspect, to
draw attention away from
our own incompetence at
football and car
manufacturing), this is
a country which is
deeply resistant to
change and highly
suspicious of modern
capitalism.
Consequently,
consultants get it in
the neck twice over, as
meddlers with cherished
ways and stormtroopers
for the Anglo-American
world order. The latest
assault on the
consultancy industry
comes from Thomas Leif,
with the grandly titled
Advised and sold:
McKinsey & Co, the big
bluff of the management
consultants, which
claims that consultancy
culture is undermining
German life.
Unfortunately, my German
is never going to be up
to reviewing this tome
properly, but the blurb
on Amazon gives a | |
| |
| | the real life prayer
group, which – if it is
to be judged by its
best-known local
representative, New
Labour minister Ruth
Kelly – couldn’t
conspire its way out of
a paper bag.
In the interview,
Leif’s main charge
against McKinsey is that
it refused to co-operate
with him in a TV
documentary. Anyone who
remembers McKinsey’s
disastrous involvement
in the Roger Graef
documentary, Masters of
the Universe, where they
were made to look like
idiots, would find that
completely
understandable.
Leif also accuses
McKinsey of pursuing
efficiency as “an end in
itself” and “casually
and one-dimensionally”
putting forward job-cut
recommendations (anyone
reeling at a German
attacking efficiency is
redirected to my remarks
on stereotypes at the
foot of the page).
This is the crux of
the matter – almost any
discussion of
consultancies in Germany
almost always gets down
to job cuts. Only a
couple of years ago , a
play by professional
controversialist* (and,
bizarrely, David Irving
apologist) Rolf
Hochhuth, painted | |
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| | consultants in even
starker terms as the
destroyers of
livelihoods (it also
appeared to advocate the
assassination of the
head of Deutsche Bank).
Most of the political
divides in Germany
centre round how to
reform the country’s
labour and welfare
systems. From a UK
perspective, we might
see Germany as wedded to
the idea that companies
and public sector bodies
are there primarily to
provide employment and
benefit to their
workers, rather than the
creation of shareholder
value or the provision
of services. From a
German perspective,
countries like the UK
and the US have ripped
up their social cohesion
in the pursuit of
profit, creating a
deeply unequal labour
market polarised between
an overcompensated elite
and a permanent
underclass.
This puts advocates
of reform in a tough
position, and
consultants have found
themselves sucked into
the political fray.
Roland Berger, founder
of the eponymous
strategy firm, number
two in the German market
to McKinsey, has long
been a behind-the-scenes
advisor to the German | |
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| | establishment, but in
recent years became too
closely associated with
the SPD and its
chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder. Given that
the SPD’s opponents -
Angela Merkel’s CDU -
tend to favour McKinsey,
the last German election
could have been
characterised as the
battle of the strategy
consultants.
But even before the
results were in, Berger
himself was calling for
a grand national
coalition to tackle the
country’s welfare and
labour system on a
united front. Whether
this will happen is
harder to say—the
coalition’s only
significant move so far
has been to jack up VAT
and we have yet to see
the structural reforms
to the labour market
that might affect
Germany’s 11.9%
unemployment rate.
Meanwhile, German
companies are voting
with their feet,
shipping jobs down the
road to Poland and the
Czech Republic as fast
as they can. Consultants
will get blamed for that
too, I expect.
| |
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| | flavour:
“Consultants
restructure thousands of
jobs away. Their
function is obscure,
their success disputed.
Thomas Leif’s book lifts
the veil over a much too
expensive, technically
overrated, industry
which is as influential
as it is disturbing.
With their PowerPoint
presentations,
consultancies...offer
extremely simplified
solutions for complex
processes. They destroy
enormous public and
private means and
undermine the work of
administrations.”
In an interview with
Bloomberg, Leif also
compared McKinsey and
Roland Berger to the
Roman Catholic movement
Opus Dei, accusing them
of being secret
societies wielding
“power without
responsibility''.
I have to assume here
that Leif is referring
to the
albino-assassin-employing
Opus Dei from The Da
Vinci Code, rather than | |
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