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Onuryn's avatar

As a management consultant myself, I see how my profession often takes very basic theories from other firms and fields and repackages them in a way as to sell on the illusion that it is a "unique product provided by our firm". So Bain "invented" their ROS/RMS matrix as to not have to present the "BCG matrix" to their clients... McKinsey recommends "five big strategic moves", Strategy& talks about "Capabilities-Driven Strategy with How to Play and Right to Win" as if Roger Martin didn't exist... etc etc

So how could we make it better? There is no incentive to attribute credit for the underlying ideas, as no one else does it and clients are more interested in the final recommendation than in the whole idea genealogy anyway.

One idea I had was to make a consultancy that trawled and used ideas from any competitor, and entirely avoided this "thought leadership" arms race. Since ideas can be good or bad no matter where they come from, in this model being well-informed might make a difference... And economists with access to cutting edge ideas could be great partners.

The main impediment, however, is that consulting is mostly based on preexisting relationships. Really difficult to start a new firm unless you're an established partner with lots of connections, and if you're one of those there's not much incentive to change the business model and rock the boat.

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Berder's avatar

US real GDP per capita has increased by about a factor of 4 since 1950. Then, why don't typical workers in the US have 4x the income? If we are producing 4x as much stuff per capita, who is getting all the stuff?

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