Tuesday, October 23, 2007

The Consulting Biz: Trafficking in Intel


The year before [Mitt] Romney joined [Boston Consulting Group], William Bain, one of the company’s stars, had left to start his own firm, Bain & Company, which he promised would be a radical new consulting business. If B.C.G. was like an ivory tower, Bain was a trade school. The tradition best exemplified by McKinsey, one of the oldest firms, had consultants acting like pollinating bees, moving valuable information from one company to another, even within the same industry. Much of what you paid for as a C.E.O. was the expertise that McKinsey had lifted from your rivals. (Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker).

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