In Defense of Management Consulting: A Critique of Matthew Stewart’s “The Management Myth”
I recently tweeted this Wall Street Journal book review titled, “Bogus Theories, Bad for Business,” a review of Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth. I’ve not read the book nor do I know much about consulting, but found the article rather provocative. Sure enough, a friend who is much more knowledgeable about this space than I am penned the response below, which I found too insightful to not share. Adam B. Hopkins, Princeton ’05, is a former Mercer Oliver Wyman consultant and currently a PhD student in physics at Princeton.
Evan: Coming from a former consultant - and one who left consulting because he didn't believe that in the long run he wanted his life to revolve around increasing the "shareholder value" or profits of businesses that already make plenty of money - the article/book you tweeted is really off-base, and you might not want to support such a clearly biased "piece of work.”
Perhaps Matthew Stewart has some interesting things to say about management philosophy (or management science, as it is sometimes called) and its moral (or amoral) implications. I don't know, I haven't read his book. But his bombastic statements about the uselessness of consultants are quite overblown. He writes that management consultants are "intelligent nut-jobs devoted to corporate in-fighting, client-gouging, psychological humiliation and sexual harassment", according to the article.