El gran engaño: Cómo la industria de la consultoría debilita las empresas, infantiliza a los gobiernos y pervierte la economía

by Mariana Mazzucato, Marta Valdivieso Rodríguez (Translator), Rosie Collington

A vital and timely investigation into the opaque and powerful consulting industry and what to do about it

There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today that must change.

Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies’ reliance on companies such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown.

The “Big Con” describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives, and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism, from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks as advisors, legitimators, and outsourcers and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. In the end, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments, and warps our economies.

In The Big Con, Mazzucato and Collington throw back the curtain on the consulting industry. They dive deep into important case studies of consultants taking the reins with disastrous results and the tragic failures of governments to respond adequately to the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is an important and exhilarating intellectual journey into the modern economy’s beating heart. With peerless scholarship, and a wealth of original research, Mazzucato and Collington argue brilliantly for building a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good.

8 hrs. 55 min.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics, Business, Politics, Society, Government, Management

392 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2023

About the author

Mariana Mazzucato (PhD) is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, where she directs the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Her best selling books include The Entrepreneurial State, The Value of Everything and Mission Economy. Her many prizes include the 2020 John von Neumann Award and the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. She is Chair of the World Health Organization’s Council on the Economics of Health for All and a member of the UN High Level Advisory Board for Economic and Social Affairs.

Reviews

[Robert Sale · Rating 2 out of 5]

I came to this book as a management consultant with a healthy dose of scepticism for management consulting.

Buried in the book is an important story about the rise of neoliberalism from the ideas of academics such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, the translation of these ideas into public policy under politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the emergence of 'New Public Management' and everything that entailed - including, most significantly in this context, the outsourcing of swathes of government activity to the private sector and the subsequent erosion of public sector capability. All the elements of this story are here - but this isn't quite the story the authors tell. Instead, they take one facet of the story (the rise of the 'consulting industry' over the past few decades) and concentrate their firepower on it.

I believe the widespread scepticism of consulting is warranted. Any industry in which so much government and other funding is invested should be the subject of of intense scrutiny. And the authors highlight numerous highly concerning examples of poor performance, conflicts of interest and other infractions on the part of consultants. Nonetheless, I found the book had major issues that weakened it's arguments.

First, it lacked a coherent definition of what consulting is. At the outset, the authors' say their focus is on the largest and best known consulting firms such as 'the big three' (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) and 'the big four' (EY, PwC, KPMG, Deloitte). Initially, that's true - although, with so much attention on the conflict of interest between the big four's consulting arms and their audit arms, I started to wonder if consulting in itself was really the issue. But then they rattle off example after example of what I wouldn't consider to be consulting; in particular, outsourcing of government services (e.g. prisons) to firms such as Serco and of IT (e.g. healthcare.gov) to firms such as CGI Group. Eventually, it becomes clear this book isn't about the 'consulting industry' so much as it's about government outsourcing (to consulting firms, yes, but also to many other companies) - a worthy subject for a book, just not the book I was expecting based on the title, the blurb and the reviews I'd read.

Second, in their attacks on these 'consulting firms', the authors are polemical to the point of coming across as one-sided. Rather than demonstrating to the reader that consulting firms are - I'm struggling to think of a better word - bad, they take it as their starting point. As a result, evidence that seems flimsy or neutral on its own is treated as damning. For example, "a survey that found 75 per cent of consultants ‘agreed that public servants do not have the required expertise that consultants have’" is taken not as possible evidence of the erosion of public sector capability (as is referenced elsewhere in the book) but as evidence that "graduate consulting programmes instil confidence in the practices of consultology". The use of that term "consultology" (their word for the charlatanism they accuse consultants of) only adds to the impression they are treating consulting less as an object of serious inquiry, as I would hope any author would approach the topic of a ~250 page book, than as the target for a take-down.

This one-sidedness also came through in the examples the authors provided. Their main example of consultants creating value for their clients was a British consultant creating a computer system to enable Chile's Allende government to centrally plan the national economy - a system that, due to the Pinochet coup, was never used. One of their main examples of consultants not creating value was CGI Group's botched rollout of healthcare.gov (a key part of the market-based healthcare reforms known as ObamaCare). While it was poorly implemented, healthcare.gov is now in use and has contributed to millions of additional Americans getting healthcare. This gave the impression the authors may have been defining 'value' based not on outcomes but on alignment with their political views.

Third, the authors don't adequately engage with the question of why public servants hire consultants. Given the entry requirements and competition for positions in the public service, you would expect public servants to be relatively well educated and intelligent, as they are in my experience. Consistent with this, the authors say we can't simply conclude public servants are "idiots" (so far, so good). They also point out that many public servants are sceptical of consultants (almost always true, in my experience). And yet ultimately they conclude public servants are the victims of consultants adept at creating "an impression of value" rather than creating actual value - which would seem to conflict with their earlier statements that public servants are not idiots and that they are sceptical of consultants. It may be true that some consultants make their living by creating only an impression of value - but couldn't we say the same about public servants themselves (not to mention politicians and academics)? And yet, a more convincing answer to why public servants hire consultants is right there, earlier in the book - it's because the ideas of neoliberal academics and the actions of politicians both right and left have changed the incentives public servants face (for example, by capping the number of employees government agencies can hire, thereby forcing them to outsource if they want to fulfil their responsibilities). This raises the questions of whether consultants are the main issue here or just one manifestation of a deeper issue (that being neoliberalism).

A good example of the authors not sufficiently engaging with the question of why public servants hire consultants is their repeated suggestion that public servants hire academics instead of consultants. Given public servants already can and do draw on academics, it would have been interesting to explore the question of why they don't do so more often.

In short, the authors take a complex story of neoliberal ideas filtering through government over many decades, and make it a black-and-white story of consultants being "a Big Con". Ultimately I was left wondering if the authors had felt the need to dumb down their arguments for a non-academic audience.

Interestingly, I found the authors' arguments more persuasive when I read them in short articles promoting the book (on the Guardian and the ABC, for example). And the final chapter of the book (the conclusion) was more compelling than the book as a whole. It's as though the authors have taken an article's worth of insights and stretched them out to book length. Rather than bolstering their arguments, this seems to have weakened them.

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked TBC far more than "Mission Economy".

Before I started reading, I was afraid Mazzucato may have picked an easy way (picking on cherry-picking f*ckups & play the emotions: "they are stealing money from children in need!"). Fortunately, she's much better than that.

Yes, there are plenty of anecdotes here, but they are well put in context, not anonymized, and aimed to illustrate a thesis. The analysis is calm, scientific, and to the point. The identified flaws (of consulting) very closely map onto my own personal judgment (acquired while working for & with consulting companies - for over 13 years).

What did I miss here? Mazzucato didn't dive very deep into the history: of why consulting has gained its position & what has changed (in practical terms) since then. For obvious reasons, she brings in more details from public service cases (where transparency is granted by law) than private ones.

In the end, this book (IMHO) gives a good, accurate depiction of today's "big name" consulting. The more people realize how it really works and how little value it brings, the better.

P.S. The sustainability chapter is pure gold.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book about the consulting industry might /sound/ dry, but this really isn't. Non-fiction of this kind (mostly pertaining to politics and economics) is at its best when it equips the reader with a vocabulary to discuss pertinent issues with the people around them in layman's terms. I had always been suspicious of consulting firms, but have never really been able to articulate what it is about them that seems so encroachingly insidious. Graduating university, many of the job adverts I saw were for consultancy positions, and I remember thinking "What could I possibly consult on? I have no expertise." Turns out, that doesn't particularly matter to consultancies either.

The Big Con is a thorough dressing down of consultancies and the governments that have become so reliant on them. Mazzucato and Collington go through a range of global examples, illustrating the ways in which consultancies have hollowed out the capabilities and expertise of public services, piloting them themselves like a parasite with the interests of its wealthiest clients at hearts. This has had impacts on healthcare systems in countries like Sweden and the UK, disaster recovery in Puerto Rico, and global responses to the pandemic. Notably, this ends with a distinct warning about how bringing in consultancies to do climate policy when they often serve the interests of our largest carbon emitters could be one of the greatest determiners in how we respond to the unfolding climate crisis. Truly scary stuff. Highly recommend!

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look at how the consulting industry affects governments, businesses, and economies in negative ways. It is very clear from the beginning how much research went into The Big Con. I’m definitely going to be thinking about this book when I’m reading “When McKinsey Comes to Town” for a book club next month!
Thank you to Penguin Press for sending me this ARC.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Big Con, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington argue that overreliance on consulting firms depletes institutional capacity in governments, businesses, and economies. The primary targets are the Big Four consultancies (Deloitte, PwC, Ernst & Young, KPMG) and the Big Three strategy houses (McKinsey, BCG, Bain). The book tracks the rise in the use of consultants from 1970s to present day. The result is that businesses have changed focus over time, with the main goal becoming to maximize value for shareholders, often resulting in short-term thinking.

The problem with the book lies in the execution. The case studies include Sweden, Puerto Rico, the US, the UK, Nigeria, South Africa, and beyond, but the selection feels cherry-picked for effect. It is ultimately not structured in a way that provides the proof it needs to be thoroughly convincing. The Enron-Arthur Andersen collapse gets invoked, but that story has been thoroughly covered in other books. The authors are doing the equivalent of throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks.

Some proposed solutions seem a bit naïve. The authors suggest developing a strong internal consulting capacity, and this logic is sound in theory. In practice, any government or corporate unit staffed with talented people faces a retention problem. Those people are likely to leave for consulting firms paying much higher salaries. The Big Con is a provocative book designed to make a splash. The phenomenon it describes is real and damaging but deserved a more rigorous treatment.

[Dorota · Rating 1 out of 5]

The ubiquity of consulting companies is a concern, as I know from my own experience, and it deserves a better book than this one: chaotic, repetitive, largely anecdotal, often failing to conviencingly prove causality in its argumentation. A wasted opportunity to address the topic.

[David Wineberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Consulting is an evil that is hollowing out government, dumbing down the civil service and profiting massively while enjoying corruption like conflict of interest and insider information. That is the essence of The Big Con, by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington. There is a clear way out, but the authors actually missed it.

First let me say I am a fan of Mariana Mazzucato. I am not going to repeat my praise of her work here, but readers are free to think I am prejudiced in favor of her writing. And that I will review anything of hers that comes my way. All true.

As for the consulting plague, it was hatched, as so many plagues have been, by the Thatcher-Reagan misunderstanding of how the world works. With government being the problem, anything it could do to outsource any research or new functionality, had automatically to be better than the civil service doing the work by itself. Between cutting back on civil servants and their budgets, and cutting them out of the very projects they’d been assigned, this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has resulted in terribly botched projects (Think healthcare.gov), conflicts of interest, and of course massive transfers of tax money into the accounts of consultancies. Outsourcing, which is meant to save money, has mutated into costing far more than the institution would have spent to do the same job on its own. Globally, $900 billion is spent on consultants, the authors say.

Setting the pace, consultant fees increased 40 times during Thatcher’s time in office, as she slashed government services. She turned the government of the UK in a “consultocracy”. The Labour governments that followed expanded it even more. The French government today is going through a scandal of how incredibly, massively and even arrogantly President Macron farms out work to consultants, possibly even for personal/party use in his capacity as president.

The authors traipse through history, showing how management consultants started small, often growing out of accounting contractors. It wasn’t long before the accounting side was being offered for little or nothing, just to get a foot in the door and feed off the fat consulting contracts that kept popping up. Using a little insider information never hurt anyone. Everything is relationships, and when civil servants need to call on someone, they call whom they know, of course. So consulting firms make sure they are known, spending lavishly.

The result has been four massive, global consultancies raking in hundreds of billions. They use the old bait-and-switch. A senior partner, with all kinds of expertise, promises the world in personal meetings. But when the contract is signed, twenty-somethings fresh out of college show up to run the show. The authors give horrifying examples of the proposals they specified to implement, based on incomplete research, premature assumptions, and lack of experience in the subject matter.

Then there’s good old, garden-variety conflict of interest. Consultancies will knowingly work for both the fossil fuel industry and environment departments of government at the same time, for example. This can mean giving bad advice to government in order to smooth out the bumps for industry. It got to the point where the twenty-year-olds got together and protested at McKinsey, leading to the resignation of a senior partner who had to admit, yes, that’s what we do here. Meanwhile, at EY (Ernst & Young), the new climate-sensitive efforts resulted in the appointment of a chief sustainability officer. Almost naturally, he had been managing partner of the energy division, which served the fossil fuels producers. Similarly, McKinsey is right in there battling for net-zero carbon contracts, while at the same time advising “at least forty-three of the hundred biggest polluters” in the world, the authors say.

If that weren’t enough, some consultancies have investment funds that buy and sell based on their intimate knowledge of what is about to happen in industries affected by their work for government.

It is so profitable than one British consultancy collected contracts far and wide, then hired other consultancies to actually do the work. This saved it labor that it did not have, and really, much of any effort at all. It eventually blew up and went bankrupt, but clearly, someone else will try the same model.

A favored strategy is to look totally confident and slash through the corporate structure. James McKinsey himself handled the Marshall Field (Department Store chain) case, where he slashed payrolls by 1200, stopped all vertical integration in favor of outsourcing, and was promptly offered the positions of board chairman and CEO. He accepted. Today, job interviews at McKinsey focus on the same confidence and self-esteem, the authors say. Any wavering or uncertainty would weaken the whole firm in the eyes of the client. Arrogance is bred right into the culture.

Another nice perk is the lack of responsibility. When a project fails, the blame goes to government, not the consultancy that created and implemented it. There is so much money sloshing around that the major consultancies can afford to take the knocks when they screw up, the authors say. They have the marketing, communication, public relations and outside services to ward off any attack and just look to the next series of contracts. If anything is too big in this scenario, it is not government; it is the consultancies leaching from it. Risk is minimal; rewards are huge, the authors say.

And government knows it. After a scam wherein consultancy KPMG used its influence in tax changes to help its corporate clients avoid taxes, a British Labour MP, Margaret Hodge, said it was “tantamount to a scam,” “a ridiculous conflict of interest,” and “poacher turned gamekeeper turned poacher syndrome.” Which held some weight, as Hodge herself came to Parliament from Price Waterhouse, another giant consultancy. In many countries, it is perfectly legal for politicians to be in the pay of consultancies, even while in office. In the UK, the Labour Party itself was found to be enjoying accounting services from KPMG at no cost. The corruption is just plain blatant.

Among the latest consulting fads is ESG, which purports to show how enthusiastic and successful firms are in things like sustainability, diversity and governance. It is so subjective and arbitrary as to be useless: “a giant societal placebo where we think we’re making progress, even though we’re not,” according to Tariq Fancy, Blackrock’s former chief sustainability officer. Based on ESG numbers, investors make totally ill-informed decisions on what to buy and sell.

The whole business of climate change is rife with consultocracy. The authors say it provides a “veil of commitment without the mandate for action,” as nations make more and more promises they have literally no way of keeping. One has only to look at carbon production. Despite all the pledges, it continues to rise into record territory. Holding temperatures to a 1.5° increase is a global joke,

In conclusion, the authors posit four changes to ameliorate the situation. Things like better contracts that aren’t so one-sided in favor of the consultants. There’s sharing the risk and so on, but they don’t go nearly far enough. They don’t take the (to me) obvious step that would stop this completely.

Government should have its own internal, freestanding consultancy. It should have teams of consultants that could come in to define and help set up a project, all while keeping it confidential. They could store their findings, research and reports in a central place, so that all government departments and agencies could see what has been tried already, and analysts and other consultants could leverage that experience for the job at hand. Just like the big four consultancies. Government could rebuild its former expertise, while avoiding the whole blame game and risking leaks.

This would dramatically lower the cost of such efforts, and as the knowledge base grew, make it even more powerful than the proprietary ones the consultancies use today. This government consultancy would be open to all departments and agencies, maybe even at the state level. It would strengthen the knowledge and skills of civil servants and lead directly to measurable improvements in efforts, services and project completions internally. Institutional knowledge would have meaning again. And it would cost billions less than what they spend today. It’s an: “Ok, where do I sign?” solution.

Why they didn’t suggest this (if only just to tear it down), I do not know. But as NASA explained, it would be unthinkable for consultancies to come away with all the discoveries and knowledge, leaving the space agency with nothing of its own. NASA would have been “captured by brochuremanship,” as so many others have. This whole book is a vivid demonstration of this syndrome – taking away from government and enfeebling it. If government can have internal accounting, it can have an internal consultancy that would save taxpayers hundreds of billions.

That would have made this thorough and careful book into a blockbuster.

David Wineberg

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[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite the title, the book focuses heavily on public sector, not businesses. The book lacks a coherent, analytical structure and builds its case mostly on cherry picked examples of consulting projects gone wrong. Blame is always laid on the consultants - clients, the ultimate decision-makers who made poor choices were never even mentioned. Politicians who chose to hollow out government expertise were not to blame either. The authors make completely tangential beelines on topics such as climate change, which is distracting and irritating.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is plenty I don’t like about consulting, and the authors make some good recommendations on rebuilding public sector capabilities and agency. I just wish they had told their story in a way that didn’t make me want to argue against them on every page.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Big Con" argues essentially three things. 1) That governments and businesses everywhere are losing (or maybe more often has lost) capacity and know-how by using consultancy firms to fill functions and perform work that they themselves could (and arguably should) have done, 2) that consultancy firms are complicit and deliberate in ensuring it stays this way, and 3) that it's weakening pretty much every aspect of society while driving up costs (money and other). There are of course further arguments, histories and explanations, but I think it fair to say that they slot in under these headings.

Honestly, there's a lot of common sense and "duh" to the book. I mean, of course expertise is leached from any kind of entity when things are farmed out, of course it costs more if you pay one or more intermediaries when you don't do your own work, and of course self preservation and self interest is inherent to the consultancy system and can sometimes (often even) override what's best for the client. It kinda doesn't matter what services we're talking about, it mostly applies across the board.

What the authors do in "The Big Con" is to highlight all this as well as explain both how it all came to pass, and why it continues to prevail. They also do a great job of showing how shady big parts of it is. We often talk about the danger of trusting Big Tech with so much of our information - rightly so - I think the authors are correct in worrying about how much of the core functions of society are entrusted to third parties more worried with their own continued profit and gains than anything else. And, as a result, how little of the capacity and competency of many government and business entities exist outside of those entities.

It's a fascinating read, but I missed a of things in the book. For example, I think it could have made it clearer that consultancy firms do have a place and illustrate how and why (some of this too is pretty common sense, of course, but it would have added a greater depth to the general arguments), and it could have done a better job of separating various kinds of consulting. This isn't a big issue though, it just would have been nice.

A bigger issue is that the lines between consulting and outsourcing aren't defined. Maybe this is a short-coming on my end, but there is a line there somewhere and it would have been nice to have it drawn for clarity. Now, I'm not exactly stoked by private schools or armies doing their own thing and getting paid more for it, but I'm truly not sure what's consulting and not on the huge spectrum of clusterfucks mentioned in the book.

Regardless, it's a book well worth reading, recommended.

[Marc Sabatier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well written, but more journalistic in style than academic. That makes it easy to read and engaging, but some of the simplifications where quite tiresome.

They argue that consultants succeed in pulling a "confidence trick" off, where they seem to competent, but in reality, its just a bunch of handwaiving. So business's aren't hiring consultants for functional reasons, but because they have been tricked by the consultant houses. This claim is backed by anecdotes citing that consultants are encouraged not to show uncertainty, but always showing confidence in there proposals. It would've been helpfull for the argument if actual studies systematically reviewing the effects of consultants were presented, but this is left to speculation.

The criticism of consulting methods are also hard to blame on consultants rather than the fact that ressources are scarce. They criticize "downsizing" methods for causing "emotional exhaustion" with employees. Naturally, it would be preferable that firms didn't have to downsize and could keep everyone on their team. But what is the counterfactual here? That, absent of consultants, the world would be free of hardships?

Naturally, they bring up valid points with potential conflicts of interest, and the negative effects on organisations when employee don't get the learning experience of solving a given problem. These are legitimate, but hardly unknown.

In the end, the authors offer some recommendations for governments, where one is to develop in-house consulting firms (citing Germany as an example, see page 244). If consultants offer no functional purpose, then why would governments be better off with in-house consulting branches? Perhaps because the methods and stake-holder function (giving an outside perspective) provided by consultants actually has value. Maybe there is still something to learn from "The Big Con".

[Nadirah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4.5

If anyone was asked what the consultancy management firms are all about and what their job actually entailed, they'd be hard-pressed to answer the question. After reading "The Big Con"by Mariana Mazzucato & Rosie Collington, however, I can say with honesty that what they do is basically con governments and businesses out of their money in exchange for dubious advice at best, and terrible advice at worst.

For a job that is hard to describe to outsiders of the consulting industry, it's baffling to read just how insidious these firms can be in terms of how they encroach into policy-making at the highest orders. Starting from the early 1980s, these consultancies have emerged 'in the wake of reforms by the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives', and they have been making our decisions for the general public without any of us realizing it ever since. This well-researched book chronicles how The Big Four companies (Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young (EY), and PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers)) and other consulting industry players such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company have swindled their way into convincing governments and businesses that they are the expert consultants in all levels of management.

These consultants' modus operandi can often look like this: They will work pro bono for the government or bid lower than the others in a conventional project contract in order to position themselves as the best choice when the next contract comes around, and these are basically just the consultants masquerading as competent people when in reality they're just like three penguins in a suit. When contracted by the government or a firm, the 'best' thing is that the top management will follow because it gives them an excuse to conduct a mass layoff in order to save some dollars in the short term in exchange for finding themselves in the position of needing to spend more due to the increasing need to use other consultants or 'experts' because they had gotten rid of their best people. (Meanwhile, the top-level management has already lined their pockets from the 'savings'.) The consultants will then take more profit for themselves without further consideration of the consequences of their advice, and they will move on to the next company to milk as much profit from THAT company; repeat ad nauseam.

"Expert" advice or just BS?
The authors highlighted that the consultants' advice is often short-sighted as they focused on cost savings & profit generation and do not take into account how their client's organization operates and functions other than at the very surface level, and as a result they will often resort to the same advice of austerity measures that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is so fond of. (Is it any wonder that the IMF often ties its loans to struggling countries by forcing these countries to hire consultants to 'help' the government run their own countries as a prerequisite to the loan offer?) Most of their advice would lead to downsizing on the client's side, and the clients themselves will legitimize their decision for the layoffs using the consultants' advice. Ultimately it's the client's responsibility to weather any consequences from this so-called advice, and more likely than not, there will be a lot of long-term consequences which are only now emerging to light. (Meanwhile, the consulting firms themselves have zero accountability and have run off with their profit.)

Conflict of interests
Oftentimes, these consulting firms also operate on both sides of the business and so there are conflicts of interests in the highest order. For example, McKinsey would take money to advise on the reformation of the island of Puerto Rico and then fail to deliver the project deliverables, and to date, Puerto Rico still suffers from the failed attempt at the privatization of government services. This also happened for several other high-profile government contracts, i.e. COVID-19 vaccine rollouts, the Medicare program rollout debacle, etc. Then there's the fact that the consultants would use the information they gained from government contracts in order to do some insider trading at the expense of the government and the public; little wonder that the richer are getting richer in this context.

More galling still when the authors expanded upon the fact that some of these consultants have been convicted in court and can still manage to survive afterward. The most infamous example of this is the Enron scandal", where the Arthur Andersen consulting firm was forced to shut down its business when they lost all their customers due to the scandal. While the blame may not have completely lie in the firm's court, their actions of ignoring the red flags while they audited Enron's accounts are nevertheless unethical at best and criminal at worst. But never fear! The firm has returned to the market and is now calling itself Accenture.

Speaking of the Enron scandal, McKinsey is one of its biggest consultants. Extracted from this Guardian article:

'Skilling brought in a lot of McKinsey employees and the cream of the Harvard Business School,' says Julian Birkinshaw, associate professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School. 'The processes and principles he allowed were very McKinsey. The consultants used Enron as their sandbox.'

McKinsey declined to talk about its relationship with Enron other than to confirm it was a client. However it is known that McKinsey used the firm on 20 different projects. In addition, one senior McKinsey partner, Richard Foster, author of yet another Enron bible, Creative Destruction, is reported to have attended six Enron board meetings between October 2000 and October 2001.

[...] But the loose-tight culture McKinsey and Skilling engendered carried the seeds of its own destruction. The pressure to continue the Enron transformation success story created new tensions. Says Birkinshaw: 'It ratcheted up the risk-reward potential. People could get phenomenally rich, but they didn't see the by-product. If you give people a lot of money, they will break the rules. They will bend the margins where nobody is going to look.'

From Wiki: [Once indicted] Enron employees and shareholders received limited returns in lawsuits, despite losing billions in pensions and stock prices.

Obviously everything eventually blew up in their face as Enron had to file for bankruptcy after everything came to a head in the aftermath of the Enron Scandal exposé and inquiries. Can there be any more conflict of interest for McKinsey and its ilks?

There are other scandals when it comes to the pharma industry as well which are talked about loosely in the book. Do look up Martin Shkreli's market drug price gouging and massive price hike (up to 5000% in some cases). When it comes to these consultant firms' bros, the short-term profit always wins despite the cost of such actions to the company's long-term sustainability, the employees, and the public, i.e. higher drug prices resulting in people not being able to afford basic items such as insulin. And the law is almost always too late to catch up with the consultants' finessing way. The rage I felt while I was reading this book cannot be described except by: FLAMES. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE.

The chapter on climate change was probably the most damning of them all. The authors highlighted how the consulting firms have benefited from both sides of the fight against climate change. The governments have awarded their contracts to these firms in the hopes they could steer the way to ensure that the climate issue can be contained via these deliverance projects and the firms make a good show of apparently keeping to their end of the bargain. However, the firms did not disclose that they are also consultants for companies that have high stakes in the government's decision (e.g. O&G and manufacturing sectors which produce a lot of CO2 as a byproduct), and oftentimes these companies will influence the outcome of the regulations and legislations that will result in ineffective management of climate change. The consultants will do their bare minimum to give the impression that something is being done even though it clearly isn't (the climate continues to worsen). The misleading impression is highly dangerous because it gives us a false sense of complacency when it comes to the question of 'what can be done', and now everyone will be paying for this lapse of judgment & the consultants' decisions to play both fields without disclosing their conflict of interest in the matter.

Of course, not every consulting firm is guilty of short-changing their clients and governments in this way. There are firms with genuine experts with skills advising their clients, especially when it comes to the more technical aspects of engineering and the like. But when it comes to the bad players, the stakes they played in their gamble are higher than most, so the impact they inflicted on the unsuspecting public is even worse when things start to unravel. The most galling thing of all is that these consultants will almost always be able to dust off any blame at the end of the day because they are never held accountable for anything and they do not report to anyone so it is harder to prove their culpability (unlike other businesses which have to answer to laws and regulations). At the end of the day, it's always the clients and/or the government that will be held accountable for their failure -- and frankly yeah, if you had the bad judgment of trusting these people who oftentimes have no real-life or hands-on skills in the industry they're advising in, then you are responsible for such carelessness of due diligence. Sadly, most of the time it's the public who will have to pay the high price of these failures in judgment and policies.

At the end of the day, this book seeks to enhance how 'the consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments, and warps our economies', and for me, it has succeeded in doing so. While the consulting industry might not take the full blame for the current position it found itself in (since it's the government and the businesses themselves that have decided to divest their power to the consultants for some dubious reason), they certainly have taken advantage of the current capitalist and political landscape to ensure it continues to be able to reap profit from others.

The authors took the pain of explaining that the various decisions and policies from the government & other businesses have made themselves ever more reliant upon the consulting industry, and this has weakened the government and the public's powers in terms of decision-making, especially when it comes to important subjects such as climate change and regulations of major industries. The book then brought up a lot of educating points that governments and businesses may need to keep in mind for their future endeavors. The authors' recommendations are highlighted as follows:
- Invest in its own in-house knowledge management system as well as the necessary skilled experts that will be able to advise the company/government branch on their business strategy and technical matters (IT, technology, and R&D are the most oft-cited examples, but obviously different industries will need other kinds of expertise, e.g. experts in oil & gas, pharma, engineering, aviation, etc).
- Embed knowledge transfer clause in all its contracts with these so-called consultants so they can use the information for their own database in the future instead of relying on others for expert opinions and technical knowledge
- Mandate transparency and conflicting interests disclosure (self-explanatory)

Lastly, the authors stressed that 'the less a government rows, the less it learns, the less productive it becomes: the less it can steer. This is an especially important message because we are at the turning point where the government and other businesses can either rectify the issue now or risk paying for it later in the near future. No one will know which ending we'll end up with until then.

For anyone who thinks this will be a dry read, fear not, as this is written in the investigative journalistic style with all the maddening exposé that comes with that, and thus it's less academic than you would think (think "Empire of Pain" rather than "Thinking, Fast and Slow"). In conclusion, this is a highly recommended read for me, and thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Thank you to Times Reads for the review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

PS: For further reading on some of the topics discussed here, I'd recommend The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, which talks about how IMF's recommended austerity measure almost always backfires on the country and its citizen (while stimulus packages works better in terms of economic recovery, following worldwide recession).

[Anthony Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who did not know a whole lot about consulting, this book gave me a crash course about the whats and whys of consulting. It answered the subconscious question I had of consulting "How would a business person know more than the employees in-house? "I learned about the origins of consulting and the "value" or "non-value" added by consultants. The beginning to middle of the book was spectacular as the idea of consultants actually solving business problems was being discussed. It made me reflect on my own aspirations in the business field to hopefully select a career that lets me create a real impact hopefully.

The book discusses the overarching influences of the Big Four firms on virtually every aspect of modern society. I learned about the circularity of the Big Four with clients such as governments and other companies where an ex-Big Four partner joins these organizations to secure contracts with their former consultancy. It began to blow my mind just how many governments around the world contract the help of these consulting firms for many of their issues.

I like how the author kept the tone of the book objective despite the statistics included implying that consulting firms have harmed innocent citizens. I give props to the authors for the amount of research they put in because over 70 pages are the bibliography. Eventually, the book got redundant around 180 pages and I began to skim since the header gave me a great summary of the chapter anyway.

Recommendation: Only Grab it when its on Sale or Rent it from the library

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rambling and lacks any sort of coherent analytical framework. For what’s basically an extended gossip sesh, it was surprisingly tedious.

As a (non profit development) consultant, I have a healthy skepticism of the industry and most organizations. I’ve grappled endlessly with my teams regarding the problem of how to deliver (on time) while truly embedding the know-how in our partner org (tldr; the whole industry model is screwed). But my critique is personal and largely anecdotal… I picked up this book in the hopes I would gain a more structured analysis of how things go right, how they go wrong, gain an analytical framework, and disabuse myself of misconceptions picked up only working with my personal data points.
Instead, I got a confused series of “spill all” damning tales of the consulting industry. I mean, it’s terrible, I agree. But where is the analysis? Where is the labour of trying to draw patterns and inferences from the mess of data? I would have happily read the conclusion and recommendations (the final 20 pages of 250+) as an opinion piece. The gleefully condemning tone, without sufficient analytical rigour, felt a bit cheap.

If you’re already familiar with the absurdity (and moral bankruptcy) of the consulting industry, skip this one. It could be of interest to people who aren’t familiar - but probably you’d get more out of their interviews.

[Ahmed · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF the writer started spewing facts and statistics with no obvious point, to be made except the one point that is hammered in.

[Marley · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book could be half as long. The sustainability chapter was a bit weak. But some good points

[Arne-Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hoe de consultancy industrie onze bedrijven verzwakt, onze overheden infantiliseert en onze economie vervormt. Niet óf, maar hóe. Dat is toch even slikken als je zelf al honderd jaar als consultant werkt (ook al is dat dan de laatste paar jaar binnen het bedrijf). The big con heeft verdacht veel raakvlakken met de Shockdoctrine waar Naomi Klein zo schitterend over heeft geschreven. Daar bleef de rol van de consultancies onderbelicht, dus deze twee boeken vullen elkaar perfect aan.

Het uitbesteden van kerntaken aan een externe is een al te makkelijke managementuitweg. Je kunt je perfect verschuilen achter een mooi rapport / gelikte PPT-presentatie. Dat tegelijkertijd de kennis binnen de eigen organisatie wordt uitgehold, dat eigen medewerkers weglopen omdat zij vooral consultants begeleiden in plaats van zelf verantwoordelijkheid te krijgen, dat er niemand meer accountable wordt gehouden, dat er vreselijk gegraaid wordt, van dat alles voelt de gemiddelde manager binnen de overheid of binnen een grote onderneming zelf niets. Laat staan in zijn eigen portemonnee. Het is ook allemaal logisch hoor: vaak is er paniek, de buitenwacht staat te roepen dat er wat gedaan moet worden. Dan moet je wel heel sterk in je schoenen staan om een helpende hand van buiten (van échte experts natuurlijk, al zijn ze soms nog zo jong) te weigeren. Een rapport laten opmaken of een veranderproces starten in tijden van crisis is één van de meest geliefde (zij het vaak ook slechtste) duikmanoeuvres.

Ondertussen ruikt de consultant zijn kans. Hij vergeet nooit te benadrukken dat je een goede crisis nooit moet wasten. En ja, dan is het gewoon dom van de betreffende manager dat hij in de verkooppraatjes trapt. Echt vervelend wordt het vooral bij de (uiteraard onbestrafte) voorbeelden van belangenverstrengeling, bijvoorbeeld wanneer accountancy en advisory in één hand liggen. Al met al niets nieuws onder de zon dit boek, maar wel oh zo belangrijk om het allemaal eens op een rijtje gezet te krijgen. Grappig is trouwens dat ik nog nooit had gehoord van Mariana Mazzucato, maar sinds ik dit boek heb geopend haar voortdurend lijk tegen te komen. Let maar eens op.

Al met al was het een leerzaam boek. Ik ga maar weer eens verder met mijn adviesrapport met bijbehorende powerpoint. Dan kan de factuur er deze maand nog uit.

[Lilli]

This was a pretty horrifying account of the consultancy industry and its impact on government structures and civil society. I always used to think that as a consultant you could maybe at least partially have a positive impact on decarbonisation or supporting government - turns out this very widely held belief is completely misguided. Consultancies not only have built our governmental systems in a way that only really benefits them and made our governments completely reliant on them (they were largely involved in designing state capacities in the post war and Thatcher era) - they have also actively exacerbated inaction on climate change and worsened conditions in vulnerable and poor nations (Puerto Rico, Angola etc). They are not only neo colonial entities that profiteer from “black swan” events (like Brexit or climate change) but actively make our world a worse place (advising Pharma clients to abandon medicine innovation and instead focus on raising drug prices) while managing to market themselves as THE problem solvers. The fact that they manage to recruit most countries top tier talent should terrify all of us. A good complementary read to Moral Ambition by Rutger Bergmann. Honestly a must read!

PS - the statistics on climate change were as always horrifying. “This generation is the last to experience biodiversity on earth”

[Tristan Eagling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depending on your frame of reference, consultants fall somewhere on a spectrum between a vital source of expertise, filling in gaps, and allowing net benefit through 'economies of knowledge'. To parasitic bullsh*t merchants, leeching off the public purse, and diverting money (that could be spent on R&D, nurses, or social protection) to overpaid charlatans, whose only real skill is creating the illusion of expertise and well-formatted slide decks. It's fair to say Mariana Mazzucato veers to the latter camp more than the former and provides a compelling argument for why more people should.

The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies is not a page-turner full of dinner party-friendly anecdotes, but given the authors' academic backgrounds, it was never going to be. It is, however, an important well-researched book that examines the often non altruistic incentives of consultants and those who hire them, why the current system is flawed and crucially why that matters.

Even the biggest advocates of the consultant industry will often question the mismatch between the value they generate and the fees they charge. The Big Con tackles the excessive fees, but goes far beyond just this, and also examines how the overuse of consultants may be gutting our institutions of expertise and experience. Most worrying, we are shown that consultants not only benefit from our current neoliberal order, but have in no small part, helped perpetuate and shape the very system they now thrive in.

The Big con is a must-read for anyone interested in the industry, whether you believe Mckinsey's claim to be 'the greatest private sector catalyst for decarbonization', or you think that is just rhetoric, and you have become increasingly wary of the well-presented reports, presented by young and enthusiastic, well-presented consultants.

[Pavel Rahman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more than a list of big consultancies peddling opioids and worth a read

[Jim Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading this investigation into the global consulting industry and its insidious impact on democracy just as the PwC scandal erupted in Australia, so much of what its authors Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington describe reads as if it were ripped directly from the headlines.

The sub-title of the book aptly describes the problem: ‘How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantalizes our Governments and Warps Our Economies’. How it has happened is plain enough - starting with the ideology of neoliberalism that assumes the private sector inherently does everything better and more efficiently than the government sector.

The result of this ideology has been an ever-growing tendency by governments, particularly in democratic western economies, to outsource everything to consultancies - mainly the ‘Big Four’ old accounting firms (Deloitte, EY, PwC and KPMG), plus McKinsey, Bain and Company, BCG, CapGemini and others.

The way Mazzucato and Collington describe it, the consultancies and their ideological boosters, have performed a multi-billion dollar confidence trick on our democracies, exploiting hollowed-out and risk averse governments as well as shareholder value-maximising firms.

The results are plain to see in the scandals mushrooming across the world - a loss of accountability and transparency, a suppression of innovation, an erosion of institutional memory and governance capacity, multiplying conflicts of interest and, most dangerous of all, a loss of confidence in our collective capacity to solve global problems such as climate change.

The PwC scandal in Australia is a textbook example. The global consulting firm, contracted by the federal government to consult on legislation to make tax avoidance by multinationals harder, then used that inside information to help its international corporate clients find a way around the tougher regime it had helped design.

Neoliberalism has not resulted in greater efficiency and better governance, but an orgy of rent-seeking by international companies that suck up all the talent and resources of democratic states for their own benefit. In the meantime, our governments’ capacity to deal effectively with collective problems gradually withers and dies. Into that vacuum, in turn, arise people like Trump and other populists exploiting the people’s disenchantment and cynicism for the benefit of other bad actors.

One wonders what will swing the pendulum back the other way. Perhaps the pandemic is a turning point in making populations realise what we are giving away by outsourcing to consultants. Certainly, the Big Con, in its final chapter, argues persuasively for change. The old neoliberal shibboleth of the 90s was that governments should spend less time and on rowing and more on steering. But Mazzucato and Collington make the point that governments cannot steer if they have forgotten how to row.

[Ivana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kapitola 10 - a must read pre každého zamestnaného vo verejnej sfére, od úradov cez analytické jednotky a verejnoprávne inštitúcie až po univerzity.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very tough book to read through, in part because it addresses yet another big structural issue for our modern democracies that I as an individual can do quite little about, and in part because the authors use quite advanced language related to how governments, policy, public procurement, and businesses work. However, what they address is absolutely important to raise more awareness about, and I hope more people will read it so we can start doing something about this together

[Erik Nygren · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important (but slightly unsexy) problem worth shedding some light on. Some of the case studies in this book are great, see the Karolinska University Hospital construction scandal, or the UK track and trace program.

[Leonie Vanstappen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rather depressing read as a consultant (my former employer is mentioned in this book, and not in a good light 🥲), but truly important to make you question the “consultant mindset” and really put into perspective how that way of working affects the client long-term.

[Ted Jeursen · Rating 2 out of 5]

As with most popular science books nowadays, the introduction and conclusion would have sufficed and together they would have been a very compelling blog post / article. The rest of the book is simply a collection of anecdotes to present a rather one-sided view of things.

[Rhiannon Mackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed and agreed with a lot of it. Made me question my career choices …

[Tristan Gines Wozniak]

Very well researched story about the rise of modern capitalism and the relationship between the government and the private sector, with a specific focus on the consulting industry. Includes a variety of examples from all over the world, and not just the usual examples of the US, UK and the EU.

Goes a bit in circles repeating the points of the previous chapters a bit, but maybe that’s the genre’s disease :)

[Henry · Rating 0.25 out of 5]

I started reading The Big Con expecting a blistering, forensic takedown of modern corporate consulting, and at first glance, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington deliver an entertaining indictment. Their thesis hits hard: the global management consulting giants - the McKinseys, Deloittes, and PwCs of the world - are running an immense confidence trick on modern society. The authors argue that these private firms create an illusion of value while extracting astronomical economic rents, systematically hollowing out the internal brain of the state, engineering client addiction, and quietly walking away with zero liability whenever their advice blows up. The book is pitched in the most righteous, high-minded moral register imaginable: a selfless defense of democracy and the public good against predatory corporate parasites.

Yet early in the book, an odd, glaring passage stops you dead in your tracks and sounds an immediate alarm bell. In Chapter 2, as the authors attempt to define the borders of this extractive industry, they suddenly build an extraordinary, unprompted perimeter fence around themselves:

There are many individuals, companies and other organizations that provide expert advice or services that we do not include in our definition of the consulting industry, because they do not have the resources to extract rents through the Big Con. Most of them are also not structurally dependent on these contracts, even though they may charge a fee for their services... Examples include... retired teachers who sit on school boards and academics in universities who share insights from research with public, private or civic sector organizations.

Reading that, you do a double take. Why on earth did the authors just lump university academics who charge fees for state advisory work into the same category as retired teachers on local school boards? Given that the author is clearly not a retired teacher on local school boards, this paragraph essentially is the author's way of removing herself from the subject of inquiry of this book. You wonder - that's weird, why would she do that? Think about what is actually being slipped past the reader here. The authors are arguing that if a corporate adviser takes public money to tell a cabinet minister how to organize an economy, that adviser is an extractive parasite running a confidence trick. But if an academic adviser takes public money to tell that exact same minister how to organize the exact same economy, that academic is magically exempted from being labeled a consultant at all. What magical biological transformation happens when someone steps onto a university campus? Does holding a professorship automatically cleanse a human being of vanity, institutional greed, careerist ambition, and the hunger for advisory influence? The moment you see that arbitrary, self-serving carve-out, a massive red flag goes up. You realize this is not a detached sociological classification; it is an active market player drawing a moat around her own operation so nobody audits her books.

With that suspicion awakened, you keep reading, and the book quickly begins to read like an uncanny, page-by-page confession. Consider their analysis of how the consulting racket hooks its clients. In Chapter 1, the authors argue that private firms thrive by manufacturing existential panic, telling us that "the history of modern consulting is, in the end, the history of modern capitalism: every trend has been surfed by the Big Con". They attack corporate consultancies for exploiting moments of public distress, pointing out how firms immediately monetized climate change and the pandemic to sell expensive restructuring packages. Yet look at the opening lines of the authors' own introduction:

To overcome the great challenges of our time-from pandemics to the climate crisis-requires ambition and prowess... Bad governance in both business and the state has over the last half century caused short-termism to overshadow investments needed for progress. These trends have depleted organizations of knowledge, skills and vision.

Notice the exact replication of the tactic. The authors use the identical fear-based sales pitch: modern capitalism is broken, our civil servants are paralyzed, civilization is on the brink of climate catastrophe, and our only salvation is adopting a radically new, grand governance framework. They lambaste corporate firms for surfing capitalist crises, yet their entire career relies on riding the exact same wave of climate anxiety and pandemic disruption to sell their own policy roadmaps. They manufacture the panic, declare the existing system brain-dead, and then present their own intellectual shop as the only remaining cure.

The parallel becomes even more blatant when the authors explain how advisers sneak inside government ministries. In Chapter 1, they expose the trick of lowballing:

Sometimes this is because the consulting firm offers to do the work pro bono or at a fee far below market rates. This is tempting for civil servants in risk-averse departments that lack resources after years of budget cuts. By charging nothing or very little in the initial contract-lowballing-the consultancy can not only shape important decisions, but also gather important knowledge about the client and gain a first mover advantage for future contracts.

They quote a KPMG executive admitting that working for free allows the firm to get into the big programs early so they can stay there when the real money starts flowing. But how do high-profile academic policy entrepreneurs operate? They use the exact same Trojan horse. They offer their time to sit on presidential councils, advise international committees pro bono, or run small pilot workshops for cash-strapped local councils. It sounds entirely charitable, but the operational result is identical: it gives the academic institute deep inside access to government machinery, builds relationships with senior officials, and creates a dominant first-mover advantage. Once embedded, that initial pro bono foot in the door is translated into lucrative executive training programs, multi-million-dollar research partnerships, and long-term policy design retainers. When a commercial firm uses low fees to get inside the room, the authors call it predatory infiltration; when an academic institute does the exact same thing, they call it public service.

Then examine what the authors say about why politicians hire advisers in the first place. In Chapter 5, they describe the sleazy art of political rubber-stamping:

Often, c-suiters-the people making the decisions at the top of organizations-have already made up their mind, but they really need an external independent arbiter to validate their position or make the case on their behalf. They can then go to the board and say, "Oh, Deloitte or McKinsey or EY said we should do this." It's the consultancy credibility stamp of approval.

The authors treat this as proof of corporate complicity, but they never ask why elected officials fly academic superstars into their capitals. When a government wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on speculative industrial subsidies, reward favored corporate sectors, and expand its public debt without being branded fiscally reckless, what do they need? They need a credibility stamp of approval. An academic celebrity provides the ultimate political cover. A minister can stand before a skeptical public and announce that their massive corporate subsidies are not wasteful spending, but bold, Kennedy-style moonshots validated by an award-winning economics professor. The academic framework provides the exact same service as a McKinsey slide deck: it sells external moral legitimacy to politicians so they can bypass democratic scrutiny and avoid personal accountability for the outcome.

The comedy reaches its peak in Chapter 5, where the authors attack the physical camouflage of consulting firms, mocking what they call "quasi-academia":

In their struggle to gain popular legitimacy in the twentieth century, several management consultancies established what looked on the outside to be academic institutions... In 2007, Deloitte followed suit with the launch of Deloitte Review, now Deloitte Insights. Many companies also set up research centers, led by individuals who had had a successful career in academia, and staffed by others with PhDs in economics and other impressive academic credentials. The best-known of these is the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), established in 1990, which is described on McKinsey's website as "the business and economics research arm of McKinsey" and a "private think tank".

The authors sneer at private firms for masquerading as scholars, hiring PhDs, and publishing non-peer-reviewed thought leadership reports to fabricate an impression of intellectual authority. Now flip to the acknowledgments page of this very book:

Mariana founded the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) at University College London five years ago with an ambition to strengthen the public sector's remit and capacity. Rosie joined IIPP as Mariana's PhD student in 2020... Our colleagues working across economics and public policy and IIPP's partners in governments, businesses and communities have been a constant source of inspiration.

The hypocrisy here is breathtaking. The authors spend whole pages ridiculing McKinsey for establishing the McKinsey Global Institute, yet the lead author literally founded and runs the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. The structural anatomy is an identical clone. IIPP is a branded policy center that hires credentialed economists, publishes non-peer-reviewed policy briefs, hosts flashy public panels, and leverages university branding to market its advisory frameworks to world leaders. The authors ridicule McKinsey for acting like an academic institute, while operating an academic institute that functions exactly like a management consultancy.

The linguistic machinery matches just as seamlessly. In Chapter 5, the authors attack consultants for inventing a dizzying linguistic fog to disguise simple concepts and justify their invoices:

Consultancies choose to adopt terms and language usually found in academia to describe these businesses and promote what John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge described as a "quasi-academic" image... Reports produced by consultancies are no different.

They mock corporate consultants for talking about "synergy," "agile transformation," and "optimization". Yet look at the proprietary glossary the authors sell to prime ministers and civil services: "mission-oriented dynamic capabilities," "market-shaping public value," and "symbiotic innovation ecosystems". It is the identical grift. They take basic, centuries-old state activities - such as funding a laboratory, paving a road, or procuring medical supplies - and wrap them in impenetrable, polysyllabic jargon. The objective is completely transparent: convince civil servants that their ordinary vocabulary is hopelessly obsolete, leaving them terrified of making decisions without hiring an academic institute to decode the instructions.

This brings us to the book's core moral drama: the claim that consulting permanently infantilizes the civil service. In Chapter 1, the authors deliver their most devastating analogy:

The more governments and businesses outsource, the less they know how to do, causing organizations to become hollowed out, stuck in time and unable to evolve. With consultants involved at every turn, there is often very little "learning-by-doing." Consultancies' clients become "infantilised"... It would be like a psychotherapist having no interest in her clients becoming independent with strong mental health, but rather using that ill health to create a dependency and an ever greater flow of fees.

That therapist metaphor is brilliant, but look closely at what the authors actually prescribe to cure this sickness. Do they tell the civil service to trust its own frontline staff, rely on localized experience, and kick all outside gurus out of the building? Not for a single second. Instead, their solution is to demand that governments enroll their bureaucrats in specialized academic training programs, adopt their institute's bespoke policy toolkits, and embed university researchers directly inside public ministries. In the acknowledgments, they openly boast about shaping civil servants globally through their work at IIPP. The authors do not cure the government's addiction; they simply offer themselves as the new dealer. The civil service is kept completely dependent and completely infantilized, only now the therapist wears an academic gown instead of a corporate suit.

All those contradictions shattered my initial romantic notion that academia is an uncorrupted sanctuary of pure public goods, making it fundamentally different from the private sector. Once I dig further, I realized that that belief ignores the brutal economic reality of modern university institutes. Modern academic policy centers are hyper-commercial enterprises fighting for institutional survival. They have massive payrolls to cover, large research teams to sustain, university overhead taxes to pay, and an endless appetite for institutional prestige. How do they fund this enterprise? In their acknowledgments, the authors openly thank funding directors from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Omidyar Foundation. They pull in tens of millions of dollars from mega-foundations, supranational framework programs, and direct public contracts. But because their work is classified as research and education, they get to operate behind a bulletproof moral shield. They monetize the exact same ministerial access, executive workshops, and keynote circuits as McKinsey, but they do it while enjoying tax-exempt status and total freedom from the commercial auditing that private contractors endure.

The ultimate proof of this structural double standard arrives in Chapter 6, where the authors diagnose the problem of risk evasion:

And crucially, across all these contracts-in both the public and private sectors-the rewards that consultancies have reaped in no way reflected the risks of their advice being flawed or otherwise harming the economy... This difference between the rewards reaped (large) and the actual risks taken (little) makes the rents earned even greater... The absence of an incentive to guard against risk because an individual or organization will not be affected by its consequences is known in economics as a "moral hazard".

Ask yourself: who on this planet enjoys a greater moral hazard than a tenured professor advising a government? When a private consultancy prescribes a disastrous operational restructuring, it can face canceled retainers, public parliamentary hearings, and catastrophic commercial lawsuits. The academic policy designer operates with absolute, pristine immunity. When an academic-designed national industrial mission crashes, burns billions in taxpayer funds, and leaves behind a graveyard of failed technologies, the academic author suffers zero downside. She loses no tenure, risks no bankruptcy, and faces no legal liability. Instead, she writes another bestseller explaining that the theory was flawless, but the politicians simply lacked sufficient courage or failed to deploy enough patient capital.

When you step back and assemble all these pieces, the entire book snaps into sharp, undeniable focus. The Big Con is not a brave, objective defense of the public realm. It is an aggressive, calculated smear campaign waged by an academic competitor - The Small Con - against her private sector rivals. The modern academic-technocratic complex is simply another consulting industry in disguise, driven by the same institutional greed for public money, influence, and market share. Unable to beat the McKinseys and Deloittes in open competitive procurement tenders, the author uses moral outrage as a weapon to clear the market. By framing commercial firms as inherently evil parasites, she tries to shame governments into cutting ties with private consultants, ensuring that those multi-billion-dollar advisory budgets are funneled straight into university institutes like her own. Every single vice detailed in this book - manufacturing crises, exploiting lowball entries, offering rubber-stamping cover, inventing proprietary jargon, breeding administrative dependency, extracting public rents, and evading all risk - is the exact business model the author operates every day. She didn't write an expose to protect the public from the con; she wrote an attack ad against her rivals to take over the contract.

[Rob Kramer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The consulting industry has perplexed me since college when I first had friends get recruited and eventually join consulting firms. I myself am technically a consultant engineer but still the Big 4 and Big 3 consultancies always loomed large and yet still hidden. Yes I knew of the large salaries they offered to coincide with many days of work travel and hotel night stays. There is the promise to meet with big head office types while working hard on slide decks. I generally formed the same opinion passed down to me that it was all a ruse to use big name college degrees to say we need to downsize. This led me to want an actual better critique and inspection of the industry which is what I got from Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington’s collaboration, The Big Con.

The title promised to explain how the consulting industry weakens our business, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies which is about as doomsday as it gets in the academic world. This is to be expected given Mazzucato and Collington’s backgrounds as the former is a professor of economics at University College London and the other is her PhD Candidate. While They have hefty resumes, complete with awards and chairmanships, I did think academics’ perspectives carried less weight than that of a consultant whistleblower as so often only they know what they are doing if they know at all. However, their promise of interviewing many past and current consultants as well as government officials and business types probably gave a general oversight and framed their argument well enough.

I especially appreciated the start of the book which laid out the “taxonomy” of consultancies. There are the strategy consultancies with the longest history ala McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain and Company who are both the main focus of the book and the general bad guys you hear while not knowing what deeds they do. They are governed as partnerships where a junior team will do most of the work and be led by someone who manages the team and hopes to lead a division as a partner. They were born from the end of the industrial era when Frederick Taylor published “The Principles of Scientific Management” to evangelize the use of streamlining production. There are then also the accounting consultancies, aka “ The Big 4”, Ernest Young, Deloitte, PwC and KPMG, that are also partnerships and have been the big players in the auditing client networks industry since the 1960s and 1970s. They have rose to fame as the government’s de facto watch dogs for businesses to report accurate earnings to the government and their shareholders so as to mitigate risk. IT consultancies such as Cisco, IBM, Oracle and Capgemini are publicly traded and help with computerization and the need for connectivity through firm growth. Outsourcing Consultancies such as Serco, Sodexo and Atos that are the general contractors of public sector contracts of all sorts. Finally there are boutique consultancies that started at the beginning of this century from consultants providing off shoots from the main strategy firms and specializing in unique fields like ESG with hopes to either be acquired by a bigger firm as if they were a startup or work their niche to reap large yields for a smaller more expert staff. The explanations and history behind the firms then gives way to how they gained influence and grew in business.

What started as accounting consultancies, quickly veered into business consultancies as their consulting business was able to secure contracts for accounting and promise of better management ideas learned from other clients. A confidence trick was used to extort greater rents as none of the risk was known for the contracts they acquired from firms or governments but the consultants could in theory assume the risk of blame when in actuality it was the general public they were at loss of money and product such as a new healthcare website or hospital. Outsourcing to consultancies became popular with the neoliberal movement of the 1990s and David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s Reinventing Government that advocated for governments to row less and steer more. Soon IT capabilities, technical expertise to build rockets and even contracting itself was outsourced to limit costs and burdens. This had unintended consequences for government and most likely intended consequences for consulting as the agencies that contracted out to consultancies lost intellectual know how on their original and new missions. Any curveball like a pandemic then led to a scramble to hire the consultancies again at a higher cost to teach the client what to do. Conflicting interests were and are hidden ranging from the a consultancy directing the governance of Puerto Rico while on the side its retirement fund being heavily invested in its bonds to consultancies advocating for and against carbon emission with its contracts to governments and energy producers. In total, consultancies are able to charge small fees at first or work pro bono before acquiring enough information to be invaluable and uncuttable assets while assuming less and less risk besides reputation to both row and steer businesses and governments with no defined end of relationship or tracking of where and when institutional knowledge was left.

The authors recognize the issue with consulting and proposed four general solutions to bring together governments, businesses, the general public, stakeholders and even the consultants themselves to operate a more open and productive system. They advocated for a new vision, narrative and mission for the civil service where they are not vilified and made to seem inadequate. Instead, they have the capacity to govern data and digital infrastructure, coordinate inter and intra governmental learning and adapt and learn in the face of incomplete and possible conflicting information. They must be value creators and risk takers. They must invest in internal capacity and capability creation so that young bright graduates stop seeing consultancies as bigger pay days but also see governments as places with greater impact. They hope that governments lean into the realizations from the pandemic where governments like Vietnam and Kerala India’s used past experiences with SARS and floods to redirect resources to meet the problem and demands. Learning needs to be embedded as well as end points to contract evaluations so consultancies can stop extracting information as ransom and devaluing their initial work. Finally, transparency and conflict interest disclosure must be mandated much like financial quarterly reports are to tell constituents who consultancies really are working for or even just who else they must consider. In this way, consulting can still be a productive conduit of business and governance ideas for the world while not profiting off their own creation and destruction of markets for unknowing governments.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would say The Big Con falls squarely in the "This book could have been a podcast" genre.
It does provide some really important documentation and collation of a trend that is worrying - the overreliance on consulting firms and outsourcing firms as a stand-in for government. As someone who works in the field and lives in DC (a town overrun with consultants), this is very obvious and easy to see, but I imagine this is illuminating (albeit not particularly interesting) for someone who does not know the industry well. My hope is that a government leader will read this and think "can we try to do more in-house and what might that mean?"

I do think the authors lose their way a bit for a couple key reasons:
1. There is a *lot* of data about contract values and money and contracts. While that is important to document, it starts to feel tedious and obfuscates the more important points.
2. The case would have been stronger if the authors entirely focused on governments. The throughline from the economic conditions that made this possible and the assumptions that enable these consulting firms to act as they do was made in the final chapter well, but I feel it would have been a stronger argument to lean in more.
3. More evidence and time should have been spent on "how do we fix this?"