ALMOST all big companies have used management consultants at one time or another. Only this summer, the supermarket giant J Sainsbury was said to be working with McKinsey & Company on “a review of operations and strategy”.

But can suited saviours step in and supply the inspiration you lack on strategy? Unfortunately not. Business brains are agreed that unless you want to be paying for consultants for the rest of your career you shouldn’t give them an open invitation. Nor are they a panacea; excessive use of consultants does not a good manager make — just look at Guinness in the late Eighties and Enron for proof.

Don Sull, a professor of strategic and international management at London Business School and a former consultant, says firms that gain the most from consultancy have learnt to use consultants well and do not slip into the four most common pitfalls:


Outsourcing management (relying on the consultants to do the managers’ jobs).

Accepting consultants’ one-size-fits-all solution. “You cannot pull a strategy off the shelf. What works in one industry will not necessarily work in another,” he says.

Asking consultants to decide where your company should go. “It’s like getting into a taxi in a foreign city and asking, ‘Where should I go?’ Instead, decide where you want to go, then get the taxi and ask them to help you get there.”

Suffering from “consultant creep”. Once in the office, consultants can be reluctant to leave. So, when the job’s done, show them the door.

In short, Sull advises managers to have a clear, well-defined brief for management consultants, to remain sceptical and to work collaboratively.

This is echoed by the Institute of Directors. The first piece of advice on its action list for how to use consultants is: “Define the project and the result you are aiming for.”

Charles Roxburgh, a director at McKinsey in London, says that management consultants are just one of many external advisers, including lawyers and accountants, that successful companies employ. “Calling the consultants says nothing about your current level of performance,” he says.

Roxburgh believes that consultants can bring four things to the table: expertise (both in the client’s own industry and from other industries); rigour (a high standard of analysis); a fresh perspective, and professional strategic thinking. But no company should hand over strategy development to consultants, he says.

A spokesman for a top FTSE firm agrees: “A company that ‘buys in strategy’ isn’t long for this world. Consultants may help compare tactics or devise a plan for implementation, but a company that doesn’t know what its strategy is isn’t going to be able to create a meaningful brief or manage and measure the consulting process.”

As Margaret Thatcher almost said, advisers advise and managers decide.

DATA FILE

STRATEGY is a word that has been hijacked by academics and profiteers. It sounds important and it promises to give us a leg up in corporate life, if only we knew what it meant. In this ten-week series Career is translating some of the gobbledegook.

This week we talked to McKinsey & Company (www.mckinsey.com) and London Business School (www.london.edu), and we read the Institute of Directors’ employment factsheet on Using a Consultant (www.iod.com)

For an insider’s view of management consultancy and the companies that use their services you could read Rip Off! by David Craig (The Original Book Company, £11.99)

Next week: we summarise our findings and publish a full resource guide for those who want to know yet more.

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